First, I think you'd be interested in "When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America", historian Ira Katznelson's book exploring how a number of government programs that helped move poor whites into the middle class systematically excluded blacks. For instance, the portion of the GI Bill on education was written by a Southern representative explicitly to keep school certification out of federal hands; as a result, Southern black veterans had very few academic choices open to them besides the historic black colleges, because the other Southern universities did not have to integrate.
Second, while there's certainly long-term damage to the black community, we should also remember that the larger society also lost out through this exclusion. Again, to use an educational example, Southern states were some of the last in the country to implement universal public schooling, precisely because they did not want to have to educate black children; this means that they were slower to develop as many major colleges (fewer qualified students), and this may have contributed to their slower economic growth. Also, only once non-WASP historians made it into academia (mainly on the GI Bill) did we start to see more accurate American histories that focused on social groups besides the elites; even so, the history that Ta-Nehisi Coates tells is only now coming to light (i.e. to mainstream/academic consciousness).
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Date: 2009-11-20 04:03 pm (UTC)Second, while there's certainly long-term damage to the black community, we should also remember that the larger society also lost out through this exclusion. Again, to use an educational example, Southern states were some of the last in the country to implement universal public schooling, precisely because they did not want to have to educate black children; this means that they were slower to develop as many major colleges (fewer qualified students), and this may have contributed to their slower economic growth. Also, only once non-WASP historians made it into academia (mainly on the GI Bill) did we start to see more accurate American histories that focused on social groups besides the elites; even so, the history that Ta-Nehisi Coates tells is only now coming to light (i.e. to mainstream/academic consciousness).
Thanks for the post!