I'm glad this study is getting some visibility, because people seem to be largely unaware of the explicitly white supremacist history of the fight against entitlements.

Welfare programs created under the New Deal were intensely prejudiced toward African Americans and immigrants. They contained many mechanism for states to segregate and deny access to these programs for minority groups.

What killed the welfare programs in the US was the civil rights movement which guranteed somewhat equal access to public services, including welfare programs, to non white people. Welfare reform and entitlement reform has always been first and foremost anoit perpetuating white supremacy.

https://academic.udayton.edu/race/04needs/welfare01b.htm

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Americans-Hate-Welfare-Communication/dp/0226293645

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393328511/

For sure, the text we read was When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson

This was definitely true of the socdem policy in James Baldwin's lifetime. This is a good overview of how New and Fair Deal policy was deliberately constructed, as the NAACP said of the Social Security Act at the time, "like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." This on top of practices like redlining that seriously limited black people's ability to build a robust middle class with the GI Bill. While I agree with Leslie's thread and I think even the most mythical BernieBro wouldn't exclude PoC the way southern Democrats did, you can't completely dismiss that skepticism out of hand.

I would say that understanding the necessity of AA is more of a matter of understanding the history of the socio-economics of our society and remember that these events were still happening up until just a few decades ago, which means that it affects cultural acceptance of people who grew up under institutionalized racism.

Here is a great book for putting things in perspective, especially for understanding the difficulties of changing a suspicious culture that is wary of any programs that are designed to help minorities.

http://www.amazon.com/When-Affirmative-Action-White-Twentieth-Century/dp/0393328511

When Affirmative Action was White

yes i totally agree. and to piggy back on the bootstrap ideology, when you really look at the past 60 years the majority of white America has gotten to where they are today because of government programs like the GI bill, getting special privileges with FHA loans, and better funding for schools. they didn't pull themselves up by their boot straps they benefited from white affirmative action

a lot of those types who claim the only thing holding black americans back are black americans like to point out how they worked so hard for what they have, but in reality it was passed down to them by their parents whom largely benefited from gov assistance.

> If they are in the same situation, that's the same situation. But until I get it, I'm ignoring anything about her parents or grandparents when it's HER situation.

Thats the thing they weren't the same. I'm 30. My parents grew up at the end of Jim crow when you could pay black people a 1/10th of what you could pay white people. They didn't have the same opportunities because of racist laws and systems.

> "And Systems"??? From what I can tell the only systems in America about race actually BENEFIT black people. What systems are you talking about?

What are you talking about? Affirmative action? The thing that has benefited white women the most? Here's a book about it:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393328511/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_AaHWCbMP2ZEM8

The justice system will unfairly give black people harsher sentences to black people than their white counter parts.

Or judges litterally selling black youth to jails.

Or the wells Fargo using predatory loans on Black and Latinos.

Those systems.


> Doesn't seem like being white is a huge advantage for white trans Denise.

Yes. Yes she does. She doesn't have to deal with a school to prison pipeline. She doesn't have predatory loans based off of her skin tone. She is still likely to have had a better education than her black peers.

> . really don't get your point here. Or really how the issues are different. Please explain.

There is no way you're a trans person. Trans people have different issues than black people. And black people can also be trans and have to deal with both issues of being black and trans.

To break it down:

A black person can be shot and killed by the police and receive an unfair sentence.

A trans person can be detained in jail for the wrong gender, and lack the medical care needed while incarcerated.

A trans black person has all of the above.

Trans people and black people face different issues, and it is pointless, unless discussing intersectionality, to compare the two.

> Because my point is that being white isn't automatically a privilege.

Yes. Yes it is. Other aspects of your identity do not erase the benefits you receive. IE a white woman still benefits from the oppressive systems of minorities, while still facing the oppressive systems of sexism. A cis latino man still benefits from being cisgendered and male, while still dealing with racism. Whether they turn into a sum benefit or negative, is not the point anyone is making. Only that whitness has a benefit.

> But we shouldn't just blame everything on white people's existence for being white.

No one has said this. Stop saying this. White people benefit from a system of oppression that makes it much harder for people of color to succeed and play on an even playing ground.

> 1000% bullshit, I see it on here literally every day.

Show me please. Because what I see is people going, "Man white people gotta do better." Which to translates to, "white people are devils!"

> Disagree, help yourself don't expect others to do everything for you.

Please tell me how black people correct the racist justice system in each state with only 13% of the national voting pool.

> Black people, believe it or not, do have rights now. This isn't the civil war era.

No one is saying this. Only you are because you're not listening.

> Also, who the hell would purposely make thier own life harder to help strangers? Almost no one. I mean I doubt you have homeless people living with you to help them out.

How do you get from, we have societal issues against racial minorities to, "I bet you wouldn't let a homeless person live with you!"

I constantly vote to make my life harder to make stranger's lives easier. I want universal health care, better schools, better roads. All of that has to come out of my paycheck, and I'm fine with it. Better society means better life for me.

And don't be silly. Inviting a stranger into your home to live with you doesn't even begin to help homeless problems. I vote for additonal low income/homeless housing, as well as make monthly donations to food banks and homeless shelters. Thats way better of an impact than opening my home up to what one stranger?

> Black people aren't our slaves, they can do thier own shit if it's apparently this divided. I'll make sure my black friends know they actually can't do anything to help themselves, I have to do it for them

Again no one but you is saying this. I'm saying there are systems that make it difficult for black people to succeed in America. Its not impossible but its harder than it should be, and white people need to help fix it so we don't have to struggle as much, because the white people are the majority and majority in power.

Stop being obtuse.

Not saying FDR didn’t work to improve the lives of the working class, but it’s important to note that he didn’t really challenge the position of white supremacism in American politics, and so the New Deal disproportionately benefited white people while ignoring many black communities.

I highly recommend everyone read When Affirmation Action was White, by Ira Katznelson.

Man I just want to say that this is an incredibly white-washed view of modern racism. Throughout the course of American history, Black people have suffered from institutional racism that has barred their access to the voting process, property, land access, economic opportunity, social security access, veteran's rights, personal freedom, you name it. This continues into the modern day. These modern issues will not be fixed by colorblindness; instead, they can only be fixed through race conscious affirmative action.

Here are some great books if you want to get more informed on historical and modern racism, proper reactions to it, and why "colorblindness" is not an acceptable form of dealing with it:

• Fredrickson, George M. 2002, Racism: A Short History
  
• Higginbotham, A.Leon, Jr. 1996, Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of....
  
• Foner, Eric. 1990, A Short History of Reconstruction
  
• Packard, Gerald M. 2003, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow
  
• Katznelson, Ira. 2005, When Affirmative Acton Was White: An Untold History of...
  
• Massey, Douglas S. 1993, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underc

https://www.amazon.com/When-Affirmative-Action-White-Twentieth-Century/dp/0393328511

In political science there are two great books about this:

• When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America - In the book the author argues that while white ethnics from eastern and southern Europe experienced a revolutionary transformation in their status as American citizens because of their participation in World War II, blacks experienced segregation in the armed forces. In the years that followed the war this exclusion resulted in a cruel catch-22, as most African Americans were denied access to the resources of the Selective Service Readjustment Act (1944) because they had not served in the military. The federal government stepped in to pay mortgages for white veterans and upgrade educational institutions throughout the country, but most African Americans watched these developments from the sidelines. The cumulative effect of these policies was the widening of the economic gap along racial lines.
  
• Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation - The author argues that although African Americans were excluded from the housing and higher education components of the GI bill black veterans still received vocational job training which boosted their incomes and participation in civic life. Thus leading to greater equality by mobilizing black veterans for the Civil Rights movement.
  
  I would highly recommend reviewing the two books so you can see what sections are useful for your lesson plans.

I literally read an entire book on the subject earlier this year.

OK, first of all, colleges do a ton of affirmative action based on students' wealth and first-generation college attendance in the status quo. Even still, all of the correlations to race that you point out are results of the racial laws that may be off the books, but left a lasting impact on minorities today.


Let's start with economics. The implementation of New Deal/WW2 veteran benefits that created the middle class in America discriminated against blacks in America, particularly in the south. We know poverty is transmitted intergenerationally, meaning that those racial laws impacted not only blacks living in America in the '40s, but generations afterward. This is particularly true with the transmission of housing wealth between generations, as the home is the central asset in most American families with any sort of wealth.


As to living in a bad area of town, residential segregation, housing covenants, white flight after Brown v. Board of Ed. (made possible by the GI bill, and other wealth benefits afforded mainly to whites), mean that there is a direct correlation between race and housing. Race is still the cause. See, for example, the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation, which ultimately re-segregated schools (in my post about Milliken v. Bradley above). A study of the five largest cities in the US found that 68% of poor whites live in areas where the majority of their neighbors are not poor. The same is true for only 15% of poor blacks and 20% of poor Hispanics. We can trace exactly how racial discrimination in laws and practice caused the poverty we see reflected in the statistics (Cite is from Racial Domination, Racial Progress by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer, p. 166).


Have bad parents. This is again pretty directly correlated to the issues above, like poverty. If we're talking about absent parents, things like the overcriminalization of black and Hispanic students and the Rockefeller Laws don't exactly help.


And all of this is moot, because as I mentioned, I agree that affirmative action is imperfect. The thing is, no alternatives mentioned here have yet addressed the root cause of the problem. I would love it if someone had an idea that could undo the effect of hundreds of years of explicitly and/or implicitly discriminatory policies that created a disparity in the statistics. I think opponents of affirmative action haven't put out alternative that addresses the root causes of affirmative action that is better than affirmative action. Getting rid of racial laws isn't enough to do that--it doesn't create a level playing field by itself, but instead makes an unlevel playing field appear colorblind.

Edit: formatting

This is how America works.

Once affirmative action started being applied to black people, somehow all the courts magically found it illegal or curbed it heavily. Affirmative action was implemented for and majorly benefited by white women. I know you guys are almost all far rightwing psychopaths, but this book is a great historical overview on affirmative action.

Speaking of melanin merit, whites were in favor of affirmative action programs when they were the prime beneficiaries.

whitevictimhood

A good book along similar topic lines I would suggest reading is, *When Affirmative Action was White"

https://www.amazon.com/When-Affirmative-Action-White-Twentieth-Century/dp/0393328511

> So you're telling this human being, that he should not base his view of people based on his own experience?

I don't think that personal experience should, on its own, dictate how people see the world. Hell, that's what OP was saying before he started deleting all of his downvoted comments.

> Now, based on "evidence" in the US, black people commit 6 times more crime than white people. This indicates that they are, generally, lower educated, disregard the law, lack respect for authorities, and in general match what OP is saying.

Crime statistics are surprisingly flawed. They don't really measure how many people are committing crimes, but rather who got caught. Drug busts are a great example. Black people tend to get busted much more often for drug possession even though white people use drugs just as much (if not more). That's because it's much easier for police to bust people in poor black neighborhoods than in affluent white suburbs. Poor black people tend not to be well-connected.

Here's the thing: ghettos are not mistakes. West Baltimore, North Philadelphia, the South Bronx, Watts, Compton, and so forth all exist because of public policy decisions made years ago. African-Americans didn't choose to live in these places - they were basically forced to live there because banks wouldn't lend them money to live anywhere else. If you look at how the New Deal was constructed, you can see black people being written out of it. It was essentially affirmative action for white people. The New Deal is generally credited for building the American middle class - is it any wonder that black people might wind up behind the eight ball if they weren't able to take advantage? This is just one example - there are plenty more.

EDIT: And now I see that OP has not only deleted his downvoted comments, but also his account. Good.

here's a few that would absolutely blow the mind of anyone who thinks the civil war mostly ended our oppression of black americans and afforded them anything remotely resembling equality.

for starters...

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

> Douglas A. Blackmon exposes the horrific aftermath of the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, when thousands of black people were unfairly arrested and then illegally “sold” into forced labor as punishment.

> “When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our ‘fault.’ But it is undeniably our inheritance.”

there's tons of awfulness in more modern times as well...

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

or...

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

and if you really don't want to recognize your old self...

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

anyways

i'd be shocked if you're actually interested in reading about this and not just posturing over it but good on you if so.