Still later, I read Ira Katznelson's history of discrimination, When Affirmative Action Was White, which argued that similar exclusions applied to other "color-blind" New Deal programs, such as the beloved GI Bill, social security, and unemployment insurance. I was slowly apprehending that a rising tide, too, could be made to discriminate. A raft of well-researched books and articles pointed me this way. From historians, I learned that the New Deal's exclusion of blacks was the price FDR paid to the southern senators for its passage. The price black people paid was being forced out of the greatest government-backed wealth-building opportunity in the twentieth century. The price of discrimination had more dimensions than those that were immediately observable. Since the country's wealth was distributed along the lines of race and because black families were cordoned off, resources accrued and compounded for whites while relative poverty accrued for blacks. And so it was not simply that black people were more likely to be poor but that black people-of all classes-were more likely to live in poor neighborhoods. So thick was the barrier of segregation that upper-class blacks were more likely to live in poor neighborhoods than poor whites.
( Ta-Nehisi Coates )
[ We Were Eight Years in Power: ]
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