Quillete reports:
If events in the period between World War II and the 1960s were responsible for recurring racial disparities today, we would expect black Americans to be doing measurably worse over that period than either before or after. Indeed, this is the foundation of Katznelson’s argument in When Affirmative Action Was White. “Why did the disparity between black and white Americans widen after the Second World War,” he asks, “despite the country’s prosperity?” Citing a study by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Assistant Secretary of Labor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson (and later author of the controversial Moynihan Report on the disintegration of the black family), Katznelson catalogues the decline of black American well-being over that period both on their own terms and relative to whites.
There's more:
But other data point in a different direction. In their magnum opus, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, Abigail and Stephan Thermstrom show that, between 1940 and 1960, the percentage of black families with income below the poverty level was almost cut in half, from 87 percent to 47 percent. In key skilled trades, the income of blacks relative to whites more than doubled between 1936 and 1959,1 while black income rose absolutely and relative to white income across the board from 1939 to 1960.2 The rise of blacks into professional and other high-level occupations was greater during the years preceding the civil rights movement than in the years afterwards,3 and blacks began closing the gap between themselves and whites in years of schooling over the same period.4
How could this be?
Another crucial link in the progressive account of disparity is the discriminatory manner in which New Deal programs were rolled out. Coates, quoting the NAACP at the time, argues that the New Deal, by excluding agricultural and domestic workers, was effectively a “sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” While there is little doubt that the Southern “Dixiecrats” held disproportionate influence in the Democratic Party, it’s tough to argue that racism was the central force animating the New Deal. As the social democrat Dr. Toure Reed recounts in his book, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism, “The most obvious problem with the claim is that it ignores the fact that the majority of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, mixed farm laborers and domestic workers in the early 1930s were white.”5
There's even more:
According to the 1933 Labor Census, about 11 million such workers were white—a full 27 percent of the total number of white workers—while 2.4 million were black. Moreover, white Americans made up 74 percent of all those excluded from Social Security Administration coverage. How likely is it that a set of policies engineered by white supremacy would have such a negative effect on white people? The idea that New Deal policies set the stage for current racial disparities doesn’t align with the impact of those policies.
If you are going to read one article today: this is the one.
