Jackson, J., dissenting
middle-class America” (by giving $95 billion to veterans and their families between 1944 and 1971) was “deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow.”[1] So, too, will I bypass how Black people were prevented from partaking in the consumer credit market—a market that helped White people who could access it build and protect wealth.[2] Nor will time and space permit my elaborating how local officials’ racial hostility meant that even those benefits that Black people could formally obtain were unequally distributed along racial lines.[3] And I could not possibly discuss every way in which, in light of this history, facially race-blind policies still work race-based harms today (e.g., racially disparate tax-system treatment; the disproportionate location of toxic-waste facilities in Black communities; or the deliberate action of governments at all levels in designing interstate highways to bisect and segregate Black urban communities).[4]
The point is this: Given our history, the origin of persistent race-linked gaps should be no mystery. It has never been a deficiency of Black Americans’ desire or ability to, in Frederick Douglass’s words, “stand on [their] own legs.”[5] Rather, it was always simply what Justice Harlan recognized 140 years ago—the persistent and pernicious denial of “what had already been done in every State of the Union for the white race.” Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S., at 61 (dissenting opinion).
- ↑ Katznelson 113–114; see id., at 113–141; see also, e.g., id., at 139–140 (Black veterans, North and South, were routinely denied loans that White veterans received); Rothstein 167.
- ↑ Baradaran 112–113.
- ↑ Katznelson 22–23; Rothstein 167.
- ↑ Id., at 54–56, 65, 127–131, 217; Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Measuring and Mitigating Disparities in Tax Audits 1–7 (2023); Dickerson 1096–1097.
- ↑ What the Black Man Wants: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 26 January 1865, in 4 The Frederick Douglass Papers 68 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds. 1991).
