Blacks were blocked from employment in quite a few occupations in the north, even in liberal cities like New York. That's why there were “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycott campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s of retailers such as department stores.
Excellent essay....an impressive assembling of nuanced evidence on an aspect of American racial history that has been omerta'd off the table in polite discourse. I would just add some nuanced remarks from an essay I wrote in the wake of the monstrous, racist-anti-racist George Floyd blamefest.
"....wind the clock back seventy years or so and the narrative would have been a substantially correct one. It is probably fair to say that, until the 1960s, a majority of white Europeans and Americans would – and without feeling any need to give it much thought – think of black African ethnicity as inherently inferior..... And within American society in those days, a much, much smaller subset seethed with a racial vitriol that would make of this supposed inferiority a justification for their malignant desire to persecute and subdue. A less often told story though - given the inbuilt conflict dramatising tendencies of media narratives - is the racial harmony and goodwill that also existed in pre-civil rights America alongside - and in contrast to - the Jim Crow mentality. One has only to look at footage of adoring white fans of the Swing bands of the 1930s to get a glimpse of this now air-brushed counter-narrative." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/back-in-the-summer-of-2020
An interesting take on a very complicated subject. However, as a born and bred white Southerner (Mississippi) I think Blacks got the shitty end of the stick, but non-elite (poor) whites got the other end of that same stick.
No question. Elites in the old South used racial hatred to placate the legions of poor whites. They said essentially, "You may be dirt poor, but at least you can look down on blacks, so that should make you feel better" (of course they used a different word for "blacks"). They were all getting screwed over; it's just that the blacks were getting screwed a bit harder.
No punches pulled... love it. I predicted a perceptible opening up of discussion around these topics (feminism and psychopathology, the Jews and history, race science and trans and mental illness, etc.). Is it possible that 50% of what we "know" about public policy are really platitudes, authored by progressive academics and writers and researchers, and then rubber-stamped by dominant institutions? I'm beginning to believe that this is the case.
"But dose this position as the romanticized other actually benefit the black folk? As regards to welfare and lowering standards for partitions will yes. Many black folk like Al Sharpton and others own their very careers as being the romanticized, grifting off the good well of none black folks. Black graveness is a multi-billon dollar industry, BlackLivesMatter the organization have rank in billions during the wave of “peaceful” protests during 2020AD, even though the black homicide rate actually increase. That’s the thing, all that grifting from black graveness seem to have little positive impact on the Hamburgerian populace itself. #BlackLivesMatter’s stance on de-policing seem to have only the increase the killing and inter-killing of black folk, and soft on crime have only led to black own businesses being closed because of the cost of retail theft, the monopolization of companies like Amazon, and the increase of food deserts."
With respect to the contention that racial discrimination is economically undesirable because it costs money to turn away productive black workers, what about the possibility that some discrimination is economically (not morally) rational, in this sense: Suppose an employer notices over time that workers from certain demographics work out better, on average, than those from other demographics. Suppose Chinese-Americans on the whole tend to work out noticeably better than white Americans. Where there is no other information available to the employer to differentiate candidates (i.e., one went to community college and the other went to Harvard), the employer might rationally use race as a cheap (though imperfect) signifier of ability, and prefer Chinese-Americans over white Americans. You can substitute any other set of racial or ethnic groups into this hypothetical (I intentionally avoided comparing whites and blacks because doing so is emotionally evocative). But I hope you can see my point: Discrimination that is actually rational poses a particularly thorny problem. To be clear, to say that discrimination is economically rational is not to say that it is morally acceptable. In fact, that's the whole problem I'm getting at: It is conceivable that at least some kinds of racial or ethnic discrimination make sense economically while being morally objectionable.
"The post-war economic boom excluded Black Americans from the GI Bill, from FHA home loans, from the suburbanization that built White wealth. These weren’t minor administrative oversights. They were policies."
No doubt the first sentence is true, but it is unclear that these were actually policies in the sense that those who crafted such government benefits, on the whole, consciously sought to exclude black people. It seems more likely that the main problem was that discrimination at the community level made full use of these benefits impossible, such as discrimination that kept black people out of vocational programs that could have been stepping stones to well-paying skilled labor jobs, or from buying homes in desirable new suburbs. The fact that such discrimination was permitted is a moral blight on our country, especially given the sacrifices of black servicemen in the war. But it doesn't seem to have been engineered top-down.
Blacks were blocked from employment in quite a few occupations in the north, even in liberal cities like New York. That's why there were “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycott campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s of retailers such as department stores.
Excellent essay....an impressive assembling of nuanced evidence on an aspect of American racial history that has been omerta'd off the table in polite discourse. I would just add some nuanced remarks from an essay I wrote in the wake of the monstrous, racist-anti-racist George Floyd blamefest.
"....wind the clock back seventy years or so and the narrative would have been a substantially correct one. It is probably fair to say that, until the 1960s, a majority of white Europeans and Americans would – and without feeling any need to give it much thought – think of black African ethnicity as inherently inferior..... And within American society in those days, a much, much smaller subset seethed with a racial vitriol that would make of this supposed inferiority a justification for their malignant desire to persecute and subdue. A less often told story though - given the inbuilt conflict dramatising tendencies of media narratives - is the racial harmony and goodwill that also existed in pre-civil rights America alongside - and in contrast to - the Jim Crow mentality. One has only to look at footage of adoring white fans of the Swing bands of the 1930s to get a glimpse of this now air-brushed counter-narrative." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/back-in-the-summer-of-2020
You're basically correct
An interesting take on a very complicated subject. However, as a born and bred white Southerner (Mississippi) I think Blacks got the shitty end of the stick, but non-elite (poor) whites got the other end of that same stick.
No question. Elites in the old South used racial hatred to placate the legions of poor whites. They said essentially, "You may be dirt poor, but at least you can look down on blacks, so that should make you feel better" (of course they used a different word for "blacks"). They were all getting screwed over; it's just that the blacks were getting screwed a bit harder.
An interesting take. Thanks.
No punches pulled... love it. I predicted a perceptible opening up of discussion around these topics (feminism and psychopathology, the Jews and history, race science and trans and mental illness, etc.). Is it possible that 50% of what we "know" about public policy are really platitudes, authored by progressive academics and writers and researchers, and then rubber-stamped by dominant institutions? I'm beginning to believe that this is the case.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/horizontal-information-flow
https://birbantum.substack.com/p/the-black-fetish
"But dose this position as the romanticized other actually benefit the black folk? As regards to welfare and lowering standards for partitions will yes. Many black folk like Al Sharpton and others own their very careers as being the romanticized, grifting off the good well of none black folks. Black graveness is a multi-billon dollar industry, BlackLivesMatter the organization have rank in billions during the wave of “peaceful” protests during 2020AD, even though the black homicide rate actually increase. That’s the thing, all that grifting from black graveness seem to have little positive impact on the Hamburgerian populace itself. #BlackLivesMatter’s stance on de-policing seem to have only the increase the killing and inter-killing of black folk, and soft on crime have only led to black own businesses being closed because of the cost of retail theft, the monopolization of companies like Amazon, and the increase of food deserts."
With respect to the contention that racial discrimination is economically undesirable because it costs money to turn away productive black workers, what about the possibility that some discrimination is economically (not morally) rational, in this sense: Suppose an employer notices over time that workers from certain demographics work out better, on average, than those from other demographics. Suppose Chinese-Americans on the whole tend to work out noticeably better than white Americans. Where there is no other information available to the employer to differentiate candidates (i.e., one went to community college and the other went to Harvard), the employer might rationally use race as a cheap (though imperfect) signifier of ability, and prefer Chinese-Americans over white Americans. You can substitute any other set of racial or ethnic groups into this hypothetical (I intentionally avoided comparing whites and blacks because doing so is emotionally evocative). But I hope you can see my point: Discrimination that is actually rational poses a particularly thorny problem. To be clear, to say that discrimination is economically rational is not to say that it is morally acceptable. In fact, that's the whole problem I'm getting at: It is conceivable that at least some kinds of racial or ethnic discrimination make sense economically while being morally objectionable.
I avoid blacks as much as possible.
"The post-war economic boom excluded Black Americans from the GI Bill, from FHA home loans, from the suburbanization that built White wealth. These weren’t minor administrative oversights. They were policies."
No doubt the first sentence is true, but it is unclear that these were actually policies in the sense that those who crafted such government benefits, on the whole, consciously sought to exclude black people. It seems more likely that the main problem was that discrimination at the community level made full use of these benefits impossible, such as discrimination that kept black people out of vocational programs that could have been stepping stones to well-paying skilled labor jobs, or from buying homes in desirable new suburbs. The fact that such discrimination was permitted is a moral blight on our country, especially given the sacrifices of black servicemen in the war. But it doesn't seem to have been engineered top-down.