The GI Bill’s racial exclusions created the White middle class and widened inequality

Evidence

America experienced an unprecedented postwar boom in residential and new highway construction as White families moved to the suburbs and had to commute farther to their jobs. To buy new homes, Americans used wartime savings and the benefits of the GI Bill, passed in 1944. It was the most wide-ranging set of welfare benefits ever offered by the federal government in a single bill. More than 200,000 war veterans used the bill’s benefits to buy a farm or start a business; 5 million purchased new homes; and almost 10 million went to college. Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending for former soldiers in this “model welfare system” totaled over $95 billion. As with the New Deal welfare programs, however, Black veterans faced discrimination that reduced or denied them the benefits. Combined with the New Deal and suburban housing construction (in developments that found legal ways to keep Blacks out), the GI Bill gave birth to the White middle class and widened the economic gap between the races, a growing disparity racists blamed on poor Black fiscal habits. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 918

Categorization

• XREF: Supplies the structural, policy-level counterweight to individualistic explanations of the wealth gap — parallels to discussions of how policy precedes ideas in earlier chapters. — connects to: The GI Bill opened elite law schools to talented veterans regardless of class. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4058
• QUESTION: Kendi tests his inversion against cases where ideas seem prior to policy; the GI Bill shows policy excluding Blacks and then racist ideas justifying the resulting disparity.