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Old Posted Aug 28, 2017, 10:20 PM
emathias emathias is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by moorhosj View Post
I hope you would say the same thing about the GI Bill, a governmental transfer of wealth that helped build the great white American middle class. The over-the-top libertarian bent of this board is a little too much sometimes. (Unless we are talking about a parking podium or ugly design, then this board is all about government intervention, but that is a topic for another day.)
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It's not commonly known by the general population, but despite the fact that the GI Bill was originally created to help WWII vets, it wasn't until long after World War II that black soldiers were able to benefit from it anywhere near as much as white soldiers. This was due to two primary reasons. First, when it came to housing, even the GI Bill housing benefits fell under jurisdiction of lending requirements that included "red-lining," the racist practice of legally preventing blacks from buying in certain areas, and banks refusing to loan money for homes that weren't in those areas. Second, the educational aspect of the GI Bill was allowed to be administered at the state and local level, which meant that Jim Crow and other vestiges of institutional racism prevented large numbers of returning black soldiers from taking advantage of higher education in the same way that returning white soldiers were.

It's really one of the great shames of Federal programs, and that history is starting to be better known recently - in the past couple of years there have been some bigger main-stream stories highlighting it - but for a long time few people outside of the black community or people who were really intimately familiar with the way the programs actually played out, knew that the GI Bill was of so little use to returning African-American soldiers. It was (maybe) better than nothing for the returning black soldiers, but white soldiers benefited much, much more from it to such a degree that it actually ended up perpetuating racial disparities more than helping to heal them. I found that especially disheartening when I learned about it since prior to learning about it, I'd often seen the role of black soldiers in WWII as playing a big role in getting the Civil Rights Era started, and of their service helping to level the playing field. Unfortunately, while it did contribute to the Civil Rights Era, it didn't help level the economic playing field and may have actually made it worse.
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