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1. Affirmative Action for White People
Part One
No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-
paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of its own history. – Cornell West
Question: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?
Answer: I don’t know, and I don’t care!
From the very beginning, the essential core of the white American psyche was formed in opposition to
the imagined Others of the world: those who threatened the innocent community from the outside
(Native Americans) and those whose presence on the inside (African slaves) who, by their very
existence, constantly called that sense of innocence into question.
Because of its innate contradictions, white identity was and always has been highly unstable, and it
required the construction of an entire mythology to hold it together. Very early on, the notion of
privilege became one of the prime ways in which this was accomplished.
One of the most fundamental aspects of privilege – the privilege to ignore, the privilege to remain
innocent in the mind – still retains its durability among far too many, perhaps especially among
liberals. Although it is constant and obvious to almost all people of color, privilege is utterly invisible to
most whites. It provides them with a place in the social hierarchy, a belief in the possibilities of
upward mobility and, most importantly, a sense of identity – they can know who they are because
they are not “the Other.”
America established that privilege – in law – from the very beginning, indeed, from before the
beginning. In other words, I’m talking about America’s long history of Affirmative Action for white
people. In another article on privilege, I write:
Privilege allows whites to patronize minorities, to disagree with perspectives that challenge
their worldviews, when in fact they don’t understand those perspectives. Since half of all whites
believe that blacks enjoy economic parity with them, 61% say that blacks and whites have
equal access to health care, and 85% say that blacks have equal chances to get any housing
they can afford – despite the contrary views held by the great majority of black people, they are
privileged to say to blacks, in effect, “I know your reality better than you do.”
If whites need an example of this particular kind of privilege, consider a survey from 2005, when
Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Three months afterwards, 20% of whites agreed that the
federal government’s failure to respond had anything to do with race, while 90% of blacks, 200,000 of
whom had lost their homes, did. Fifteen years later, as Mike Ludwig writes, “Right-Wing austerity set
New Orleans up to be a coronavirus disaster zone.”
The privilege to remain innocent shows up strikingly in the idea of affirmative action. Other than
abortion and gay rights, no domestic issue has been as controversial and divisive over the past fifty
years. Opportunistic politicians have used it to create a wedge between working class whites and
blacks. Well versed in the imagery of American myth, they have repeatedly posed the question (in
soft terms, careful to not appear overtly racist) of whether it is right for hardworking people to be taxed
so as to support people who are too lazy and irresponsible to better themselves. As I write in Chapter
Seven of my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence,

2. Reactionaries invoke (the myth of) equality by claiming that legal equality is sufficient and
calling affirmative action “reverse discrimination” and ethnic liberals “reverse racists.” Some
even argue that since prejudice no longer exists, minorities should require no assistance
(which only encourages the sin of laziness). This false argument has potency because it
contains some truth; since individuals have occasionally “pulled themselves up by their own
bootstraps,” then conservatives claim that everyone should. If they can’t, says the myth,
Puritan at its core, then failure is their own fault.
In doing so, these politicians, and many religious leaders, have duped three generations of
misinformed whites into perceiving themselves as victims of people whom they once regarded as
natural allies. And (when we discuss the New Deal and the G.I. Bill) we should note that the
demographic most opposed to taxes for welfare – those over the age of 65 – are themselves the
beneficiaries of the greatest welfare programs in world history.
But this is hardly the first time this has happened. In Chapter Ten I write:
The narrative veils the issues of corporate welfare, financial corruption and deindustrialization
and the fact that most white males vote Republican, partially because they fear affirmative
action. Few admit the racial dimensions of the issue and the degree to which even poor whites
have privilege. Actually, the generosity of state welfare reform varies according to
demography: those with overwhelmingly white populations have stronger safety nets and
impose softer sanctions.
So, whites need to learn how the federal government has instituted affirmative action for them many
times, and that this reality is a fundamental aspect of the Myth of American Innocence. Indeed, it
began long before the creation of the federal government itself. For a much more detailed version of
this timeline, see my essay “Who Is An American?”
We have to begin with the foundational factor, that a series of American Presidents and Supreme
Court Justices, most of whom were themselves slaveholders, as well as over 1,700 slaveholding
congressmen (some of them serving into the twentieth century), did nothing to change the condition
of millions of black people (four million in 1860) who were legally enslaved and deprived of almost
any possibility of economic or personal improvement for 245 years. These were the people whose
unpaid labor, brutal treatment and family separation were the foundations for the creation not only of
most personal American fortunes (in 1860, half of America’s millionaires lived in Mississippi), but as
many academics argue, of the world-wide industrial revolution itself.
A just society would at least begin the conversation of how to compensate their descendants for the
condition of entering civil society as free people, but with none of the accumulated equity that
generations of whites were already enjoying, or into a social environment of extreme terrorism.
Estimates of those murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists run into the tens of
thousands. At least 4,000 of these deaths occurred as lynchings. And, as Orlando Patterson has
written in Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries, a significant
number of these murders happened as large, public spectacles – rituals – that served to re-confirm
white identity in times of social change.
Perhaps one day we will quantify such reparation payments in economic terms. But it will be even
harder to understand the accumulated emotional scars on those 25 generations of people, or of the
five generations who then endured institutionalized Jim Crow segregation. The result is what Dr. Joy
DeGruy has termed Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, with its multi-generational patterns of low self-

3. esteem, internalized abuse, depression, propensities for anger and violence and physical symptoms
such as heart disease and diabetes.
So we have to begin nearly a century before the American Revolution.
1620-1710: Although African slaves first arrived in Virginia in 1619, and the colonists did attempt to
enslave Native Americans, we have little evidence of a white/black racial hierarchy until around 1675.
Large numbers of Irish and Scots had arrived as indentured servants and worked alongside blacks
under terrible conditions. But neither “blackness” nor “whiteness” firmly established themselves in the
American mind until the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, when the oppressed challenged the
oppressors, attempting to overthrow the system of indentured servitude. This was a watershed
moment. Historian Theodore Allen writes:
...laboring-class African-Americans and European-Americans fought side by side for the
abolition of slavery...If the plan had succeeded, the history of...America might have taken a
much different path.
The state of Virginia eventually suppressed the rebellion, but its implications of class warfare were
terrifying to the propertied classes. To make certain that nothing like it could ever occur again, they
resorted to the ancient technique of “divide-and-conquer.” Virginia began by pardoning only the white
rebels and severely punishing the blacks. It soon went on to codify its bondage and legal systems. It
replaced the terms “Christian” or “free” with “white,” gave new privileges to Caucasians, removed
certain rights from free blacks and banned interracial marriage. Other laws contributed to what Allen
calls the “absolutely unique American form of male supremacism” – the right of any Euro-American to
rape any African-American without fear of reprisal. As most of the colonies soon copied his system, it
became more or less universal for decades.
This early white privilege – the privilege to hunt down and punish another human being – became the
genesis of policing throughout America. In 1704 South Carolina, responding both to the fear of
insurrection as well as to concern for lost property, established the first slave patrols, which soon
spread throughout all thirteen colonies. The patrols discouraged any large gathering of blacks and
generally perpetuated the atmosphere of fear that kept the slaves in line. In some areas, killing a
slave was not considered a crime by the courts, although property considerations limited extreme
violence.
Some states required every white man to arrest any slave found away from their home without proper
verification and return them to their masters. Many were happy to serve on the patrols, since the
benefits included exemption from taxes. Others who may have been reluctant on moral grounds
faced severe taxes for not participating, so universal white participation became institutionalized. By
1860, few Southerners could remember times when such conditions had not applied.
All white Americans subscribed to a narrative that rejected old European class hierarchies. Instead of
social class, however, their model of group conflict became relations between white planters and
black slaves, rather than between rich and poor. The new system, writes Allen, insisted on “the social
distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however
propertied, of the oppressed group.”
Three and a half centuries after Bacon’s Rebellion, scholars still wonder why a strong socialist
movement never developed in America, as it did almost everywhere else. Characteristically, they
rarely consider the overwhelming presence of the Other -- no other nation combined irresistible myths
of opportunity with rigid legal systems deliberately intended to divide natural allies. Whiteness implies

4. both purity (which demands removal of impurities) and privilege. For decades, no matter how
impoverished a white, male American felt, he heard subtle messages every day that divided him from
the impure. And now, of course, social media algorithms absolutely guarantee that these messages
are all he hears.
Without racial privilege the concept of whiteness is meaningless. Often, Americans have had nothing
to call their own except white privilege, yet they cling to it and support those whose coded rhetoric
promises to maintain it.
Slavery, of course, had much more than a psychological wage. Tim Wise estimates that as much as a
trillion dollars of unpaid labor was provided to whites.
So the first examples of affirmative action for white people were well established by the end of
the 17th
century, well before the westward migration began. It meant that every single white person
was indoctrinated to believe that their condition, no matter how limited, was by nature better than that
of practically any black person and that they were privileged to enjoy a range of opportunities (in
theory, at least) that even a well-educated black or Native American could never aspire to. The
poorest of whites, home-grown or immigrant, started life assuming the most fundamental American
value – this was the land of opportunity – and even if they failed utterly, their children started out with
the same assumption. It would take some 330 years before blacks could also say Yes We Can. And
for those few whites who were able to rise above the level of bare working class, slavery stood as one
of the positive qualities of a free man. Some writers claimed, writes Barry Alan Shain, that “…one of
the characteristics of the free man was to have slaves in his control.”
1790s: In the second example of affirmative action for white people, the “Three-fifths
Compromise” in the new Constitution counted three out of every five slaves as people. Its effect was
to give the Southern states a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if
slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free people had been counted equally. As a
result, Southern states had disproportionate influence on the presidency, the speakership of the
House, and the Supreme Court all the way up to the Civil War. The clause remained in force until the
post-war 13th Amendment freed all enslaved people. However, as Louis Menand writes,
...one of the reasons the South was able to exercise a stranglehold on race relations in
national politics was the supervention of the famous three-fifths clause, once the focus of
abolitionist attacks on the Constitution. When the former slaves were counted as full persons,
the former slave states gained twenty congressional seats, a twenty-five-per-cent bump. They
also gained votes in the Electoral College. They suppressed the votes of their African-
American residents, then got full representational credit for them.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 was one of the first foreign policy measures of the fledgling
government, and its racist implications set the tone for 200 years of restrictive definitions of what it
means to be an American and who is allowed to enjoy the benefits of citizenship. This was the third
case of affirmative action for whites, since it allowed virtually any European immigrant to become a
citizen, while expressly denying that privilege to Asians. Over the next 120 years, Congress would
pass many other definitions of who was “us” and who wasn’t – especially concerning black people –
which served as models for the almost entirely invisible white privilege that would bolster the Reagan
and Trump “revolutions” many decades later. By then, structures of oppression would be so effective
precisely because they seemed so natural.
Part Two

5. The white race consists of those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society.
Its most wretched members share, in certain respects, a status higher than that of the most
exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to the system that
degrades them. -- W.E.B. Du Bois
1830s: Historians use the term “Jacksonian Democracy” to denote the period when the
government increased political freedoms and expanded the franchise. But it did so for only for white
men, while removing those freedoms from Native Americans. Race, rather than civilized behavior or
Christian belief (both held in abundance by the Cherokees, one of the so-called “Five Civilized
Tribes”), now determined citizenship. The tribes lost their land and were forced to endure the
murderous Trail of Tears. As thousands of Native Americans died, thousands of whites bought up
their already developed land, including entire towns, for pennies on the dollar. This was the fourth
example of affirmative action for white people.
1850-1890: Prior to the Civil War, in the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court affirmed that no
person of African ancestry, including free blacks, could claim citizenship. Therefore, they had no legal
standing to bring suit in a federal court and were powerless against whites who were exploiting them.
After the war, the definition of who was an American was turned on its head. For 175 years, with few
exceptions, the notion of "freedom" had been synonymous with whiteness. Emancipation of the
slaves ended this consensus and contributed to a great anxiety about identity among whites, as well
as a financial crisis among capitalists. This same uneasiness would reoccur after each of America’s
major wars (see below) and would result in significant violence each time.
Only months after the war, whites initiated 75 years of terrorizing blacks with the threat and reality of
lynching. They did not choose their targets at random; nor were accusations of rape as common as
we might suppose. Eric Foner writes that they were often quite specific:
…the most “offensive” blacks of all seemed to be those who achieved a modicum of economic
success, for as a white Mississippi farmer commented, the Klan “do not like to see the Negro
go ahead.”
The postwar Southern economy quickly evolved a legal system that kept blacks under de facto slave
conditions. It required compliant white working-class people who knew who they were – downtrodden,
but superior to blacks and confidant that their relative status and prosperity (even if minimal) would
endure. For another 150 years they would be privileged to engage in all kinds of marginal behaviors
without fearing the police. On the other hand, writes Nadra Kareem Nittle, “It’s hard to understand
why African Americans are incarcerated at higher rates than other groups without knowing what the
black codes were.”
In 1864 the 13th Amendment to the Constitution formally abolished slavery, but with this extraordinary
qualification: “except as a punishment for crime.” In response, all the Southern states passed the
Black Codes to restrict blacks’ labor and activity. The codes were enforced by all-white police and
state militia forces which had descended from the earlier slave patrols and the more recent Confed-
erate Army. This business of arresting Blacks was very lucrative for the hundreds of White men who
were hired to participate. Their primary responsibility was to search out and arrest Blacks who were in
violation of the Codes. Once arrested, these people would be leased to plantations to harvest cotton,
tobacco or sugar cane, or to the coal mines and railroads. The owners of these businesses would pay
minimal taxes to the state for every prisoner who worked for them.

6. The codes included strict laws on vagrancy (a term that included “misspending what one earned”)
and labor contracts, as well as so-called “anti-enticement” measures that punished anyone who
offered higher wages to black laborers already under contract. Mississippi required blacks to have
written evidence of employment for the coming year; if they left before the end of the contract, they
would be forced to forfeit earlier wages and were subject to arrest. South Carolina prohibited blacks
from holding any occupation other than farmer or servant unless they paid an annual tax.
Violation required offenders to pay fines. Inability to pay meant that county courts could hire them out
to employers until they worked off their balances in slavery-like environments with high fatality rates.
Because licenses were required for offenders to perform skilled labor, few did. With these restrictions,
blacks had little chance to learn a trade and improve economically once their fines were settled. And
they could not simply refuse to work off their debts, as that would lead to vagrancy charges, resulting
in more fees and forced labor. Meanwhile, whites who violated work contracts were subject only to
civil lawsuits.
All African Americans, leased convicts or not, were subject to curfews set by their local governments,
and their day-to-day movements were heavily restricted. Black farm workers were required to carry
passes from their employers, and local officials oversaw all meetings blacks took part in, even in
church. Any blacks who wanted to live in town required white sponsors.
Several states determined that there were certain crimes for which only blacks could be “duly
convicted.” Therefore, the argument that the criminal justice system works differently for whites and
blacks can be traced back to the 1860s, if not all the way back to the introduction of slave patrols.
Most of the codes were repealed during Reconstruction and then re-instated with different language
after it ended. From 1874 to 1877, Alabama’s prison population tripled. Ninety percent of new
convicts were black. It has been estimated that over 800,000 blacks were part of the system of
peonage, or re-enslavement through the prison system. And this peonage didn’t end until after World
War II began.
(Decades later, a researcher studied Southern counties that had large numbers of slaves (such as
Washington County, Mississippi, where slaves had constituted nearly 90% of the population) and
compared them with low-slave counties. He correlated places with larger local slave populations in
1860 with lower percentages of uninsured white people, higher white median incomes, lower white
poverty rates, higher white homeownership rates, and lower percentages of white people on food
stamps in 2020. These correlations remained even when he accounted for eighteen other factors,
including characteristics of the local economy, demographics, and geography).
Foner writes of these post-war conditions:
“There are today as many houseless, homeless, poor wandering, idle white men in the South
as there are Negroes”, noted Mississippi (Freedman’s) Bureau head Samuel Thomas in 1865.
But “idle white men” were never required to sign labor contracts or ordered to leave Southern
cities for the countryside -- a fact that made a mockery of the Bureau’s professed goal of equal
treatment for the freedmen.
Even those blacks with the means to escape this repression found their options limited. By passing
laws that prevented most blacks from acquiring western land, Southern states kept them as de facto
slaves. In the fifth example of affirmative action for white people, homesteading – the ability to
acquire free land – became a privilege of whiteness. In the Southwest, similar systems targeted
Latinos. No wonder our stereotypical picture of the hardy “pioneers” is lily-white. White immigrants
and landless southerners received up to 160 acres -- essentially free equity, a tremendous starting

7. point for accumulating wealth. Some 45 million white Americans today are descendants of the
recipients of these federal actions.
During this period (1882) Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which would not be fully
repealed until 1965. Although anti-Asian sentiment had little direct impact on black people, I note it
here to remind us that in the zero-sum world of capitalism, limitation of the rights or freedoms of any
ethnic or sexual minorities always implied a corresponding expansion of white privileges and
freedoms.
1890s: The phrase “Separate but Equal” had been a customary way to reject complaints about
segregation for decades, even though in the 1857 Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney
had said that black people were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings,” with “no rights which the
white man was bound to respect.” Now, in the sixth example of affirmative action for white
people, the Supreme Court asserted that segregation was not per se discrimination. If the statute did
not prescribe unequal conditions, then, legally, conditions were not unequal. In reality, of course, this
ruling institutionalized segregation in housing and transportation and poor schooling for Blacks and
residential privilege for whites.
During that decade, Southern mobs lynched at least a thousand black men and terrorized the rest of
the black population into submission. By the end of the century, the work of disenfranchisement was
complete. In 1896 Louisiana had 130,000 blacks registered to vote; in 1904, there were 1,342. In
Virginia that year, the black turnout in the presidential election was zero. Soon, almost all Southern
blacks lost their right to vote and were unable to prevent the establishment of the legal foundation for
a public education system that, for the next 65 years, would discriminate against blacks and provide
educational access and jobs for whites.
And even after that, white flight and de facto segregation would perpetuate those conditions. A
significant contemporary version of this unequal world is the fact that the United States, practically
unique among nations, still funds its schools primarily through property taxes, giving wealthy suburbs
massive advantages over inner city neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, a private education system modeled on that of Britain’s used legacy admissions to
channel the sons of the upper classes (such as George W. Bush), regardless of intelligence or effort,
through the prep school system, on to elite universities and graduate schools and eventually to
management positions in industry, politics, finance, diplomacy and espionage.
1910s: President Woodrow Wilson, in our seventh example of affirmative action for white people,
segregated federal jobs, once again giving whites privileged access to well-paid government work.
Guo Xu and Abhay Aneja write:
…one goal of the Wilson administration was to limit the access of Black civil servants to the
highest positions within government. This outcome was achieved through both demotions and
reductions…For example, photos became required to apply for government jobs in order to
screen out Black candidates. Black Americans already employed in the federal civil service
were transferred from relatively high-status posts to low-paying ones. This overall policy of Jim
Crow-style segregation served to shut out Black Americans from working in one of the few
places where they could find opportunities for economic mobility and success…Wilson’s policy
of segregating the federal workforce exacted an enormous cost from Black civil servants…
(who) earned about 7% less than their white counterparts during Wilson’s two terms as
president.

8. …the damage caused by working under discriminatory conditions persisted well beyond
Wilson’s presidency. The same Black civil servants victimized by discrimination in federal
employment were also less likely to own a home in 1920, 1930 and 1940, almost three
decades after Wilson was elected. Moreover, the school-age children of Black civil servants
who served in the Wilson administration went on to have poorer-quality lives than their young
white counterparts in terms of their overall earnings and quality of employment in adulthood.
Throughout these years, every time a person of color (in government or not) was denied a decent-
paying job or educational position – and the long-term opportunities they might have provided – a
white person received it. We have to emphasize this point. Liberals are familiar with the history of
discrimination. But it takes a further leap of logic to realize something that is patently obvious to
people of color. Discrimination is not a single-lane road. Each time a black or brown person is pushed
to the back of the line, a white person steps to the front. This is the essence of privilege.
It’s a particularly outrageous irony of American history that, as Michael Kazin writes,
...every major piece of legislation that...Wilson signed to regulate big business -- from a major
anti-trust act to an eight-hour day for railroad workers -- was crafted by a Democrat from one of
the states that barred most African Americans from voting.
World War One and the 1920s: We should also acknowledge at this point the vast but un-
quantifiable loss of equity sustained by every generation of black Americans due to white-on-black
race riots, 25 of which occurred during after the “Red Summer” of 1919. The terror continued for
several years in places such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, Elaine, Arkansas and Rosewood, Florida.
There can be no more obvious or gruesome example of how very significant numbers of black
families that had struggled to acquire property and create middle-class businesses were thrown back
in a single day into utter poverty – and how what was left of their assets was confiscated by the state
and redistributed to whites. This also includes communal property, such as the hundreds of black
churches burned down by racists. All these events contributed to the enrichment of whites relative to
blacks, and they constitute the eighth example of affirmative action for white people.
The same situation has persisted in education. Wherever they lived, North or South, throughout the
entire twentieth century and beyond, black children were channeled into substandard and segregated
schools that prepared them only for agricultural or domestic work, and later, for the military and the
factories. Isabel Wilkerson, in Caste, writes:
From Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era, southern school boards spent as little as one-tenth
the money on black schools as for white schools, openly starving them of resources that might
afford them a chance to compete on level ground. School terms for black students were made
shorter by months, giving them less time in class and more time in the field…In hiring black
teachers for segregated schools during Jim Crow, a leading southern official, Hoke Smith,
made a deliberate decision, “When two Negro teachers applied to a school to take the less
competent”…elevating the mediocre in a purposeful distortion of meritocracy…worked to crush
the ambitions of those with the most talent.
Meanwhile, a minority of white children received educations that gave them the opportunity to rise
into the middle class and thus to manage the millions who could not.
Indeed, large numbers of whites-only American colleges had been built and serviced for generations
by slaves and later by poor blacks. For a more detailed discussion of the intentions of the American

9. education system, see Chapter Five of my book, or read Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum
of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto.
Part Three
No one in favored circumstances wants to admit the chanciness of privilege. – Max Weber
There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long. –
Howard Zinn
1930s: Franklin Roosevelt prohibited hiring discrimination in the Public Works Administration and the
defense industry. And, as the Founding Fathers had done in 1776, it united northern liberals and
southern conservatives. However, like them, Roosevelt had to maintain silence on the question of
race, fearing that his coalition would disintegrate. Southern politicians, who defeated over 200 anti-
lynching bills, supported Social Security only if it excluded agricultural laborers and domestic
servants. This compromise deliberately kept some 65% of blacks outside of the protections of the
welfare state, including minimum wages. In certain states, that number approached 80%. Because of
this exclusion from the safety net, black people were regularly forced to work well into their seventies.
This constituted the ninth example of affirmative action for white people.
In a decade when large numbers faced starvation, people of color received far less assistance from
government than did whites. Far more white farmers than black were able to keep their farms. In
addition, Black industrial workers in the North eventually discovered that Social Security itself was
unfair, because it used money they contributed to pay benefits disproportionately to whites, who lived
longer than most blacks. Ira Katznelson writes, “...each of the old age, social assistance, and
unemployment provisions advanced by the Social Security Act was shaped to racist contours.” His
book When Affirmative Action Was White is an insightful treatment of this topic. For much of the
twentieth century,
The federal government, though seemingly race-neutral, functioned as a commanding
instrument of white privilege…The Democratic Party that fashioned and superintended the
New Deal and Fair Deal combined two different political systems: one that was incorporating
new groups and voters, who had arrived from overseas or had migrated from the South; the
other still an authoritarian one-party system, still beholden to racial separation.
Southern seniority was exaggerated by not having to compete in a two-party system. Congressmen
from the region thus secured a disproportionate number of committee chairmanships, giving them
special gatekeeping powers.
They used three mechanisms. First, whenever the nature of the legislation permitted, they
sought to leave out as many African Americans as they could…Second, they successfully
insisted that the administration of these and other laws, including assistance to the poor and
support for veterans, be placed in the hands of local officials who were deeply hostile to black
aspirations. Third, they prevented Congress from attaching any sort of anti-discrimination
provisions to aide an array of social welfare programs such as community health services,
school lunches, and hospital construction grants…
Since blacks counted in the numbers reported by the census, their large presence combined with
their frequent inability to vote allowed whites to gain representation in higher proportions than their

10. population in the House of Representatives. The Senate, with two seats for each state, conferred on
its seventeen racially segregated states a veto on all legislative enactments they did not like.
When this power was deployed, as it was in matters of relief and social insurance, it seriously
widened the racial gap. Federal social welfare policy operated, in short, not just as an
instrument of racial discrimination but as a perverse formula for affirmative action.
Blacks who had migrated northward to take advantage of job prospects often found themselves
victimized by the “last hired, first fired” principle. For more, read my essay Did The South Win the Civil
War?
And they were funneled into segregated housing, caused not only by racist landlords, unscrupulous
realtors or paranoid white communities, but also, in the tenth example of affirmative action for
white people, by redlining practices specifically encouraged by the federal government and the
widespread use of racially restrictive housing covenants (such as those in Washington, DC and
Seattle). In 1934 the Federal Housing Administration and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board
created “residential security maps” to determine the safety of real estate investments in selected
areas. Jamelle Bouie writes:
Existing black neighborhoods were lined as unsafe, and thus ineligible for financing. For
prospective property owners, this was terrible. Absent cash on hand, there was no way to
afford a home or a business in your area. What’s more, blacks were all but barred from
entering white neighborhoods, if not by restrictive racial covenants (which forbid property sales
to African Americans and other minorities) then by violence and intimidation. In Chicago, for
instance, anti-black riots were a regular part of public life. Here’s Arnold Hirsch, author
of Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960:
“On July 28, 1957, a crowd of 6,000 to 7,000 whites attacked 100 black picnickers who
occupied a portion of the park that had previously been “reserved” for whites. Though blacks
had used the park in the past, they were customarily restricted to certain portions of it. More
than 500 police were needed to calm the area after two days of disturbances. On the first day
alone at least forty-seven persons were injured…Rioters spilled out of the park, attacked police
officers attempting arrests, and, eventually, placed the entire area between the nearby
Trumbull Park Homes and Calumet Park in turmoil. Police squadrons had to form a “flying
wedge” to break through the crowd to rescue blacks besieged in the park.” In the late 1940s,
he writes, there was “one racially motivated bombing or arson” every twenty days.
In 1937 the government began to build public housing, but It was designed primarily for working-class
white families. Housing built for black people was segregated. In large cities like Chicago and Detroit,
public housing became a black program – those horrible concrete high rises that came to be called
“the projects” – and the FHA created a different program for whites: single-family suburban homes.
Terrel Starr writes:
The Federal Housing Administration financed the construction of new single-family homes in
suburban developments (and government money plotted and paved the roads to get there).
The FHA and the Veteran's Administration also guaranteed cheap mortgages for the families
who moved there, making this new kind of owner-occupied housing often just as affordable as
rents had been in public housing projects in the city. Like many of those original projects,
though, the new homes were explicitly unavailable to blacks. The FHA required developers
to use restrictive covenants barring blacks, and it denied black families the mortgages that
allowed working-class whites to leave public housing.

11. As whites moved out -- and as the strict criteria for who could live in public housing faded -- the
median incomes of the families who remained plummeted. In 1950, the median household in public
housing earned 57% of the national median income. That number fell to 41% by 1960, then 29% in
1970. By the 1990s, the median family in public housing made only about 17 % what the median
family in America made. Relatively speaking, that means public-housing residents by the 1990s
would be about three times as poor as they had been in the 1950s.
Government assistance helped increase the white homeownership rate from 46% in 1940 to 64% in
1960. Blacks, who received only 2% of all federally insured FHA loans issued in those years, still
managed to increase their rate of homeownership from 23% in 1940 to 38% in 1960.
World War Two: Participation in imperial wars is a dubious and difficult moral question. Should we
be proud that women can now serve in combat? But it is true that the military – and, eventually, an
integrated military – has long offered opportunities for working class Americans to enter the middle
class. Kaznelson, however, insists that blacks were inducted at much lower rates than whites,
received discriminatory treatment (including health care and training for higher status positions), and
served in legally segregated units. This was the eleventh example of affirmative action for white
people. He concludes:
…for most African American individuals, and certainly for the group as a whole, war service
ended with a wider gap between whites and blacks, as white access to training and
occupational advancement moved ahead at a much more vigorous rate.
In America, the fear and uncertainty of wartime always contributes to increased racial tension, and
this period was no exception. Just as during the previous war, there were dozens of race riots, almost
all of them white-on-black (or brown) events that primarily destroyed minority lives and property, such
as the Zoot Suit riots of 1943.
A related form of white affirmative action took place at this time, when 120,000 Japanese Americans
had only weeks to leave for the internment camps and were forced to sell farms, homes and
businesses for pennies on the dollar to whites.
Post-World War Two: The G.I. Bill created the American middle class, but almost exclusively for
whites. First of all, far lower percentages of blacks than whites had been allowed to serve, and thus to
qualify for its benefits. Secondly, writes Kaznelson, Southern politicians made sure that “it was
deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow,” and that it placed nearly impassible boundaries in
front of black veterans. Because implementation, including unemployment insurance, loans and
funding for college-level education, was left to all-white local officials, “the playing field was never
level.” Only one in twelve job training programs in the South admitted blacks, while the white working
class received the training that opened further opportunities.
The G.I. Bill financed 90% of the 13 million houses constructed in the 1950s. However, those same
Southern politicians made sure that 98% of those homes went to whites, even in the North. Of
350,000 federally subsidized homes built in Northern California between 1946 and 1960, fewer than
100 went to blacks, as did none of the 82,000 homes built in Levittown, New York. People of color
remained locked in the inner cities, their dwellings and businesses often torn down to make room for
the interstates that would shuttle whites to the suburbs where only they could live. It was the twelfth
example of affirmative action for white people.

12. This was the period when Southern Democratic congressman, many of whom had supported New
Deal programs that improved labor rights, began to shift their allegiance to anti-union Republicans,
eventually reversing the Democratic hold on the South. In the Southwest, Mexicans and Mexican
Americans were enduring the effects of the Bracero Program and its aftermath, which I write
about here.
When blacks relocated to friendlier areas, they still had to confront the reality of redlining and racially
restrictive housing “covenants”. After the war, it was still common practice for developers and realtors
– even in the liberal San Francisco Bay area – to bar non-whites from moving into their newly built
homes, and to have such covenants enforced by law. Although they are no longer legal, as recently
as 2019, the University of Washington found over 20,000 properties in the Seattle area with racial
covenants in their deeds.
That same year, lenders were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to whites with
similar financial characteristics -- even when researchers controlled for financial factors that the
mortgage industry for years has said would explain racial disparities in lending. Nationally, loan
officers are 40% more likely to turn down Latino applicants, 50% for Asian/Pacific Islanders, 70% for
Native Americans and 80% more likely to reject blacks than similar white applicants. In every case,
the prospective borrowers of color looked almost exactly the same on paper as the white applicants,
except for their race. Lenders gave fewer loans to black applicants than whites even when they had
high incomes and similar debt ratios. In fact, high-earning black applicants with less debt were
rejected more often than high-earning white applicants with more debt.
Part Four
There goes the neighborhood – Old joke (or not).
The 1960s and 1970s: At the very moment when the civil rights movement secured voting rights and
the desegregation of public and private spaces, the federal government unleashed a program that
enabled local officials to simply clear out entire Black neighborhoods. At its peak in the mid-1960s,
urban renewal displaced a minimum of 50,000 families annually. Over half of the 1.2 million persons
displaced from their homes by the Interstate Highway Program were black. A fifth of all African
American housing in the nation was destroyed for highways. The government was reducing the
housing stock for blacks at the same time it was expanding it for whites. In fact, since the highway
program made “white flight” easier, we can even say that white, middle-class, suburban housing
access – the thirteenth example of affirmative action for whites – was made possible because of
the destruction of housing for African American and Latino communities. Tim Wise writes:
The so-called ghetto was created and not accidentally. It was designed as a virtual holding pen
-- a concentration camp were we to insist upon honest language -- within which impoverished
persons of color would be contained. It was created by generations of housing discrimination,
which limited where its residents could live. It was created by decade after decade of white
riots against black people whenever they would move into white neighborhoods. It was created
by deindustrialization and the flight of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.
New housing was not the only thing that the highways made possible. In making purely economic
decisions to build plants or office parks in the suburbs, corporations also provided jobs that minorities
(if hired at all) would have to travel great distances to and often could not if they lacked cars. Those
who remained concentrated in cities -- first because of blatant discrimination and now by a combi-
nation of discrimination and cost -- faced diminishing job markets just as whites were finding new

13. opportunities in the suburbs. Additionally, new schools were being built in the suburbs, financed
mostly by property taxes, which benefited the new and more affluent communities. Meanwhile, writes
Wise,
…in urban spaces, Black and brown students labored in unequal facilities with unequal
resources only to be given the same standardized tests given to more advantaged white
students. Performance on these tests would then be used not merely to track how students
were doing relative to some desired standard, but as a gatekeeping mechanism for college
and the future opportunities that flow from it. This, in turn, would then influence the next
generation of job and housing opportunities for whites as opposed to Black folks.
White flight remains a reality to this day, as a recent study points out:
White flight eventually becomes more likely in middle-class neighborhoods when the presence
of Hispanics and Asians exceeds 25 percent and 21 percent, respectively...This continuing
trend has a number of consequences for an increasingly multicultural America, none of them
positive...(as racial segregation has been) a key predictor of reduced life chances, across
health, academic, and economic outcomes.
Even when minorities can afford to buy homes, the structure of the property tax system operates
against them. In nearly every state, tax assessments are higher in areas with higher black and
Hispanic populations relative to their sale price than they are for whites. Black families pay 13% more
in property taxes than white families in the same financial situation.
Similar inequities exist in the income tax system. When lawmakers craft tax law, they bring both
conscious and unconscious biases. Indeed, our most foundational tax laws were created at a time
when racial bias wasn’t just common -- it was the norm and quite legal. Dorothy Brown writes:
Income and circumstances are not the same: A married couple with one working spouse, an
investment banker, who makes $100,000 is not in the same circumstances as a nurse and a
plumber who each earn $50,000. When viewed through a racial lens, we see that the latter
situation is more likely for black taxpayers than white ones -- and worse, the tax break goes to
the single-earner couple, not the dual-earner couple.
…it became clear why so many tax policies have drastically different impacts on black and
white families: They were created during a time when black families paid into the system
without having the same legal rights to live, work, marry, vote, or receive an education as their
white peers…It was not until 1964 that the Civil Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate
against black Americans in schools and in the workplace, and it took another year for the
Voting Rights Act to guarantee black Americans the right to vote. The right for men and women
to marry regardless of race wasn’t the law of the land until the Supreme Court decided Loving
v. Virginia in 1967. The following year, Congress made it illegal to discriminate against black
Americans in providing housing opportunities. The law told black Americans that we could go
to college, apply for jobs, get married, and buy homes without being denied access solely
because of our race. That’s a little more than 50 years to take advantage of the same rights
that had been granted to white Americans for more than two centuries.
As the federal government finally acknowledged the elephant in the living room – the farcical
“separate but equal” system – and mandated desegregation in the schools, Southern leaders (soon to
be uniformly Republican) faced the fear of race-mixing and solved the dilemma with a stroke of
malevolent genius. If they couldn’t prevent black children from entering the best public schools, they

14. could simply transfer their own children to private schools, de-fund the public ones, which were now
primarily black, and find ways to subsidize the private ones with public money. This was the
fourteenth example of affirmative action for whites. The Southern Education Foundation reports:
From the mid-1960s to 1980, as public schools in the Deep South began to slowly
desegregate through federal court orders, private school enrollment increased by more than
200,000 students across the region – with about two-thirds of that growth occurring in six
states...What was once the South’s 11% share of the nation’s private school enrollment had
reached 24% in 1980...The eleven Southern states of the old Confederacy enrolled between
675,000 and 750,000 white students in the early 1980s, and it is estimated that 65 to 75% of
these students attended schools in which 90% or more of the student body was white.
Northerners have long criticized this situation in the South – and their hypocricy seems to be matched
only by their apparent ignorance. The anger of working class whites whose wages were stagnating
and who perceived that blacks were getting ahead of them would eventually elect con men like
Reagan, the Bushes and Trump. But, following the popularity of George Wallace, it erupted in
Northern cities such as Boston, which produced one of the most iconic images of the 20th
century:
Now, the American school system (especially in Northern cities) is nearly as segregated as it was in
1960, with predictable implications for funding, testing, dropout rates, college placement and job
preparation. Eighty percent of Latino students and 74% of black students attend schools that are
majority nonwhite. The percentage of black students attending majority white schools has been in
decline since 1988, and it is now at its lowest point in almost half a century. In 2003, 1/6 of all black
students were educated in “apartheid schools” in which students of color make up 99% of the
population. The achievement gap between minority and white students continues to widen. Minority
high schoolers are performing at academic levels equal to or below those of three decades ago.
1985-present: The War on Drugs has disenfranchised over six million people, two million of whom
are black. This simple fact has utterly determined the course of recent history, and it is the fifteenth
example of affirmative action for whites.
Let me say that again: This simple fact has utterly determined the course of history.
The more African Americans a state contains, the more likely it is to ban felons from voting. The
average state disenfranchises 2.4 % of its voting-age population but 8.4 % of its blacks. In fourteen
states, the share of blacks stripped of the vote exceeds 10%, and in five states it exceeds 20%. While
75% of whites register, only 60% of blacks can. In any given Senate, over a dozen Republican
senators owe their election to these laws.

15. Had felons been allowed to vote in 2000, Al Gore’s popular vote margin would have doubled to a
million. If Florida had allowed just ex-felons to vote, he still would have carried the state by 30,000
votes and with it the presidency. Would Gore have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan? Would we all have
had to endure a bogus war on terror that has cost trillions of dollars and killed several million people?
Would the Supreme Court be banning abortion? Would the government be leading the world in a race
toward a petrochemically-induced climate disaster? We can’t answer these questions, but we should
continue to ask them. Indeed, to not ask them would be yet another example of white privilege.
In 2020 we also have to acknowledge the ongoing voter suppression, gerrymandering and computer
fraud in over twenty states, all of which have contributed to Republican control of Congress, the
Presidency and the Supreme Court. And these conditions existed before the Court disemboweled the
Voting Rights Act in 2013. After that decision, the 2016 election became the first in fifty years without
the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. Again: it’s absolutely certain that without that Court
decision, there would have been no Trump presidency.
And let’s take note of another fact: These numbers do not include Americans residing in Puerto Rico,
American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all of whom are
considered U.S. nationals, who are allowed to vote in primaries. But since they are not considered
citizens, they cannot vote in general elections. This is an aggregate population of nearly four million
people – nearly all of them people of color. Imagine the results if they could vote for President and
compare that to the privileges retained by the white supremacist governments from the Carolinas to
Arkansas. It’s the sixteenth example of affirmative action for whites.
But those numbers are dwarfed by an even larger group, those citizens who are ineligible to vote,
including most prisoners as well as college students on campuses not in their home districts. The
adult population is 245 million, and 220 million are eligible to vote (about half of whom actually do).
This results in a staggering number: some fifteen to twenty million American adults – at least half of
them people of color – cannot vote.
Of course, due to the effort and sacrifices of the Civil Rights movement, most of the older patterns
have disappeared, at least legally. But the long-term consequences of 275 years of discrimination
remain as a cruel reality. Due to home equity inflation and resulting family inheritance, as well as the
exclusion from Social Security and unequal access to capital, an average black family still has one
tenth of the wealth of a white family, even when they make the same income. Tim Wise writes:
This process of asset accumulation, on the one hand, and exclusion on the other, explains, in
no small measure, the current racial wealth gaps between whites and Blacks. Depending
on which numbers you consult, these range from 10:1 favoring whites to over 400:1, if only
examining financial assets…Even Black families headed by college graduates have less
wealth than white families headed by high school dropouts…
As I write in Chapters Six and Ten of my book, a striking aspect of our de-mythologized world is our
literalization of the ancient myths of the sacrifice of the children. And one of the prices America pays
for its obsession with innocence is the perpetuation of a particularly ironic form of generational
cruelty.
It bears repeating that people over 80 years of age, widely celebrated as the “greatest generation,”
themselves formerly the recipients of massive government welfare support, are now the demographic
most resistant to the extension of those supports to young people and people of color.

16. In 1996 Bill Clinton replaced Welfare (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF),
ending individual entitlement for poor families and signifying that no one can make a claim for
assistance just because they are poor. “Work first” programs impacted Black women in racialized and
gendered ways by emphasizing the need to place employment above all else to qualify for support.
Women of color were disproportionately affected by the dismantling of welfare. Since TANF allowed
states to spend funds as they chose rather than on direct aid to those in need, Southern states took
the opportunity to limit support for Black people and use multiple strategies to deter the needy from
applying for aid, casting thousands more into poverty.
Since 1996 nine states have banned affirmative action. These bans have led to a 23% drop in the
chance of college admission for minority students, compared with a 1% drop in other states, relative
to nonminority students.
2008: Long-term patterns of government and private sector discrimination and outright fraud came to
a head in the subprime mortgage crisis. During the period preceding the housing boom, 6.2 % of
whites with good credit scores received high-interest mortgages, but 21.4% of blacks with similar
scores received these same loans. It turned out that several of the major banks had been purposely
giving people of color subprime mortgages, including borrowers who would have qualified for prime
loans. Wells Fargo had even provided a cash incentive for loan officers to aggressively market
subprime mortgages in minority neighborhoods. Women of color were the most likely to receive
subprime loans while white men were the least likely.
The results were predictable. Black homeowners were disproportionately affected by the foreclosure
crisis, with more than 240,000 blacks losing homes they had owned. Black homeowners in the D.C.
region were 20% more likely to lose their homes than whites with similar incomes. From 2005 to
2009, the net worth of black households declined by 53% while the net worth of white households
declined by 16%.
Both conscious and unconscious biases remain, leading to findings that job-seekers with black-
sounding names are 50% less likely to get a callback than those with white-sounding names, as proof
that affirmative action is not obsolete.
Racial profiling is the seventeenth example of affirmative action for whites. Police stop and
search black and Latino drivers on less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are
searched less often even though they are more likely to be found with illegal items. The resultant
fines, arrests, legal fees and time spent in court mean that people of color have even less disposable
income relative to whites. In New York City alone, the stop-and-frisk program made over 100,000
stops per year between 2003 and 2013, with 686,000 stops at its height in 2011. Ninety percent of
those stopped in 2017 were African American or Latino. Even as recently as 2016, the NYPD made
over 12,000 stops.
From the annoying to the most critical: police in the U.S. kill over a thousand people per year.
Blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. For black women, the rate is 1.4
times more likely. It is still true that every 28 hours, an African American or Latino is shot dead by a
police officer, a security guard or a self-appointed vigilante. 80% of the victims are unarmed.
Here is the ultimate in affirmative action for whites: long-term evidence that their lives are worth more
to the state than the lives of people of color. “Policing in this country” writes Salim Muwakkil, “has
always had the dual purpose of maintaining social order and enforcing the racial hierarchy.” For my
thoughts on the massive inequalities in sentencing and prison populations, read here and here.

17. The final indignity is that most of this vast accumulation of affirmative action for white people is not
common knowledge, either in the news media, in politics or at any level of the educational system,
including universities. This means that whites have been given free rein to wallow in their ignorance,
and thus in their unacknowledged privilege. It means that, most whites have been able to live out their
lives completely unaware of the long term, institutional factors that have kept people of color down –
and themselves up. James Baldwin said it fifty years ago:
…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor
time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds
of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible
that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes
the crime.
In American theological terms, this means that large numbers of whites are still able to perceive their
own relatively happy status as deserved, and the impoverished conditions of millions of black people
as their own fault. And when whites feel that they are falling backwards in the rat race, the politicians
have provided them with a ready-to-order scapegoat: affirmative action – “discrimination” in favor of
those same undeserving, lazy minorities. And the growing realization that whites themselves will soon
be actual minorities (as they are already in California) is another source of terror.
It means that a majority of white people are privileged to believe that they are more often the victims
of racism than black people.
Conclusion
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss – The Who
I first posted this essay in 2015, finishing with these words:
This has been a brief outline of our history of affirmative action for whites. Keep it in mind the
next time some fool starts to rant about how minorities get all the breaks. You need to know
the facts, and you need to know how they express the myth of American Innocence.
In my book I had already suggested that major power brokers had assigned Barack Obama the task
of shoring up holes in the myth of American Innocence. Still, it was a time when I (and probably you)
still labored under the misconception that learning the facts about our history and the themes of our
mythic narratives would naturally lead people to more progressive politics, and that the power brokers
would respond.
How naïve I was.
In the spring of 2023, we’ve since had eight more years of evidence that logic and reason will not
penetrate the hard shell of denial. What I didn’t fully understand when I published my book in 2010 is
that the sum total of racist, misogynist, nationalist, materialist, celebrity-worshipping – and for millions,
religious – beliefs that fill the regions of the conservative mind compose a solid but extremely fragile
identity that has been built up over many generations. Calling any one of its assumptions into
question is to open up the possibility that the entire edifice will collapse. We are talking about
identity. The Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi wrote:

18. The question “Who am I?” is not really meant to get an answer. The question “Who am I?” is
meant to dissolve the questioner.
And now, after three years of plague, in a time when circumstances have been offering everyone yet
another initiatory moment, it’s clear that the response to the questioning of one’s identity is a terror so
deep that most of us will follow any old white con man, some of whom promise to put the sheets back
over our eyes, and others who promise a return to “normalcy.”
Who can blame the Republican faithful for being skeptical about Medicare for all, real tax reform or
the dangers of the coronavirus when, as Caitlin Johnstone writes, they’ve been subject to
“…mainstream outlets who’ve sold the public lies about war after war, election after election, status
quo-supporting narrative after status quo-supporting narrative?”
And who can blame the Democratic faithful for absorbing the Russiagate narrative and the “CIA and
the FBI are our friends” narrative and the “defend Israel at all costs” narrative and the “electability”
narrative when they’ve been subject for decades to that same media discourse? Looking in from
outside the myth of American Innocence, now I can see that the only fundamental difference between
reactionaries and conventional liberals is that the first group is angrier and the second is more naïve.
Still, as mythologists, our work is to offer up historical fact, put it into the context of mythological truth,
and use that truth to try to imagine ways to approach a new history of the future. We are better than
who we think we are. May this plague finally open our eyes to what true progressives have been
arguing for well over a century – We’re all in this together. May it be so.
Questioner: How should we treat others?
Ramana Maharshi: There are no others.