“Whites received more from the New Deal than old-age protection and insurance against the business cycle. Housing subsidies paved the way for a white exodus to the suburbs; federal tax breaks secured union-bargained health and pension benefits and lowered the cost to workers; veterans’ benefits were an avenue of upward mobility for many white men. To assume that government policies benefited only blacks or were color-blind, as many white Americans commonly believe, is like looking at the world with one eye.

Three laws passed by Congress in the mid-1930s were instrumental in generating the pattern of racial stratification that emerged during the New Deal: the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, and the Federal Housing Act. These laws contributed to the accumulation of wealth in white households, and they did more than any other combination of factors to sow and nurture the seeds of the future urban ghetto and produce a welfare system in which recipients would be disproportionately black. It is commonly assumed that the New Deal was based on broad and inclusive policies. While there is some truth to the claim that Roosevelt’s New Deal was designed, as Jill Quadagno states it, to provide a “floor of protection for the industrial working class,” it was riddled with discrimination. Brokered compromises over New Deal labor and social policies also reinforced racial segregation through social welfare programs, labor policy, and housing policy.”

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Michael K. Brown et. al, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society  (via wretchedoftheearth)

these are the types of things that make this country a white supremacist society. because not only is institutional racism at play here, where Black people were denied benefits that whites were afforded that have allowed them to accumulate wealth for decades and which has helped many whites maintain their huge wealth gap over Black and Latin@s over the recession. but a white supremacist society allows for laws and policy’s to be passed that were made specifically NOT benefit Black people and benefit ONLY white people. and those laws and policy’s include hoarding of land resources, housing, income for retirement and children, etc. barring Black people from housing, one of the biggest wealth predictors and assets in the U.S., has allowed white people to send their children to better schools, save for “better” neighborhood (which are rated by their whiteness), and have wealth to use for businesses and to save to pass on to future generations. All while this is happening, we erase the reality of that legislation, say we have always been a fair and equal society, say that we all start on an equal level, that racism doesn’t exist, that whites don’t have any advantages. Then people ask questions like why can’t Black people save money, go to college, raise their kids specific ways or are always being “set back as a race”. Hence the illusion that white people are in fact SUPERIOR to all Black people because they supposedly are more prudent in saving, investing, raising their kids and instilling values. It supports the illusion that white culture is better and that Black people were better off as slaves because at least white people helped give us their values. It supports the idea that white people just have all the best systems of government, economy and cultural values while completely erasing how many people those things have killed, tortured, destroyed and left damaged.

(via strugglingtobeheard)

(via strugglingtobeheard)