Not to belabor the point (or perhaps to belabor it, because I think it needs belaboring), but I have to return to the post WWII GI Bill this week, to talk about what is probably its second-most-famous part, the guarantee of veterans' home mortgages. This part of the GI Bill shaped the American landscape in powerful ways; it caused the creation of the American suburb as a category. It also moved Jews and (perhaps to a more limited extent) Catholics from the working class, inner city neighborhoods they had formerly inhabited to middle class neighborhoods, and it ensured that they were able to own homes in those neighborhoods. African American veterans, perhaps unintentionally but also probably predictably, were rarely able to access this part of the GI Bill. Here's how it happened.

The mortgage part of the GI Bill worked in an interesting way--it was a fairly typical American solution, in that it supported the private sector doing something (lending money to vets) as a way of implementing public policy, instead of having the public sector do it. The veterans got the right to have the federal government guarantee their mortgages, kind of like having someone with better credit history co-sign your loan. In theory, this was supposed to incentivize banks to give mortgages to veterans so that they could own homes. The theory worked pretty well for "white" (including Jewish and Catholic) vets. So much did they swell the ranks of American home owners after the war that a building boom took place, and whole suburbs (including, famously, Levittown on Long Island) were constructed partly to house veterans with government guaranteed mortgages.

Black vets were not so lucky. The problem with incentivizing the private sector to do stuff (as we've seen recently with policies of lowering corporate taxes so corporations will create jobs) is that the private sector doesn't have to do what it's told. It can refuse the incentive. And that's exactly what banks in the South did when it came to giving mortgages to African American vets; they just didn't do it. Having the government guarantee your loan only works if a bank will give you a loan, and so African Americans in the South were entirely left out of this boom in homeownership. They and their descendents were thus deprived of a-owning financial assets that could appreciate in value, and b-having the control over their living situations that comes with owning housing.

On the surface, this appears to have been an unintended consequence partly of the way the GI Bill was administered, meaning that the feds gave the responsibility of administering benefits to the states. But there's some concrete evidence that the wiggle room given to states in terms of how to administer benefits was something Southern legislators bargained for and won, specifically so they could prevent black veterans from accessing benefits that Southern whites didn't think they should have. (It's also worth noting that the American Legion, the veteran's group which was key to passing the GI Bill in the form it eventually took, was a whites-only group at this time--black vets were not allowed to join).

You would have thought that things would be better on the home ownership front for black vets in the North, but in practice they were not. The suburbs did not allow black buyers or residents. This was made explicit in the Federal Housing Authority loans that the builders got in order to build them (the government did not subsidize housing for "mixed" neighborhoods), and in the covenants that residents had to sign when they bought the homes (when you bought a home in Levittown, you agreed never to sell it to a black person). When African Americans tried to buy homes in the traditionally "white," less crowded areas of the northern cities where they lived, they were met with sometimes violent resistance. (Any one who's seen or read A Raisin in the Sun should remember this). So even in the theoretically-less-racist North, blacks stayed in overcrowded inner city "black" neighborhoods. If a veteran did manage to get a federally backed mortgage, he could maybe buy a house in one of those inner city neighborhoods, but that was it. Lots of Jews and Catholics, on the other hand, bought houses in the suburbs.

The "white" exodus to the suburbs after WWII was probably the first instance of "white flight;" it was also the first step toward making the "inner city" what it is today. As the preceding paragraph should make clear, though, it wasn't just the GI Bill that conferred this particular form of anti-privilege on black neighborhoods, and enabled Jews and Catholics to live in "white" neighborhoods. The Federal Housing Authority was involved too. What?? It was? Yes. Stay tuned for next week to find out how.

My point in writing these posts is not to say that somehow Jews and Catholics are bad because we benefited from these policies. My point is to say, however, that we did benefit from them, and that they formed the real context of our American success. That being the case, I also feel like we have a responsibility to understand how random this all really was and is. And how totally divorced from any "natural" or personal characteristics on anyone's part. One of the most pernicious things about racial segregation is that it convinces all of us, both "minority" and "majority," that it's based on this series of natural categories called race. Even if you don't believe (as many Americans still do) that being white makes you smarter, more reliable, etc, you probably do believe that whiteness is an actual, biological thing. And that blackness is an actual, biological thing. But that's not true. If it was, how could it be that my great grandfather was Jewish and I am white? How could it be that non-biological privileges like college access and home ownership could transfer thousands, even millions, of Americans from the "Hebrew" race to the "white" one? If race was truly a natural occurance, no government policy in the world could undo it.

(I know that if you're reading this and you're Jewish or Catholic and of immigrant descent, you might be thinking, "But I LOOK white." This puzzled me for a long time too. But I think it's actually not that we look white--it's that the definition of what it means to look white, at least on the East Coast of the US, has been expanded to include how we look. I'm planning on writing about that in two weeks, so you can check back then if you're curious.)

References:
McKenna, Cyd. 2008. The Homeownership Gap: How the post-World War II GI Bill Shaped Modern Home Ownership Patterns for Black and White Americans. Unpublished MA Thesis, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44333