SWIERCEK: Affirmative action still has long way to go in U.S.

It's difficult to discuss affirmative action in America without running into many people's lack of historical perspective.

Ask most Americans when they think affirmative action began and they're likely to say the 1960s. Ask them who they think affirmative action has benefited throughout our country's history and you're likely to hear some mention about people of color. And among more hostile individuals, you're likely to hear about allegedly unearned ‘racial preferences' given to people of color at the detriment of white people.

This isn't too surprising given most Americans' historical shortsightedness.

The reality is that affirmative action's roots extend far back to our country's founding and the greatest beneficiaries of ‘unearned racial preferences' haven't been people of color but actually white Americans.

This might surprise many white Americans who think they or their families earned their wealth, homes and education solely through hard work and determination. Of course many Americans have struggled and worked hard for what they have, irrespective of their skin color. But the truth is, our country has time and time again granted systemic preference – white preference – to Americans who were born with the right skin color and has granted white Americans an unfair leg up in society compared to people of color.

The most obvious early form of racial preference is that of citizenship. The Naturalization Act of 1790, one of our country's first laws, dictated that only "free white persons" could become citizens. Belying our country's founding rhetoric of inalienable rights, citizenship granted whites the rights to vote, serve on juries and hold claims to property.

In terms of land, systemic preference literally gave free land to whites both at people of color's expense and their exclusion. The 1830 Indian Removal Act forcibly relocated thousands of Native Americans east of the Mississippi River to open land for white settlement. The 1862 Homestead Act privatized and gave whites millions of acres of land – 270 million acres or more than 10 percent of the United States to be exact – that had been Indian Territory.

During the Civil War, Union Army leaders proposed that African Americans, then recently-freed slaves, receive free land redistributed from southern plantations – popularly known as getting their "40 acres and a mule."

Instead of receiving land, millions of African Americans found themselves in a new form of bondage – the sharecropping system – that tied them to former slave-owners' land and denied them fair wages and rights to property and mobility. The only compensation awarded was $300 per slave to former slave-owners for their loss of ‘property.'

From the 1870s into the 1960s American essentially existed as an apartheid state throughout the country – and not just in the South. African Americans were denied voting rights through poll taxes, literacy tests and violent coercion. Jim Crow laws throughout the nation created social and legal boundaries that dictated specific boundaries that African Americans could not cross. And white extralegal violence persisted unchecked.

It took a century to begin to dismantle legal apartheid in America. Yet during that period subtle forms of systemic preference gave white Americans an extraordinary advantage toward building family wealth and reaching the middle class.

Take for instance the New Deal and postwar programs.

The Social Security Act of 1935 created a post-retirement safety net for millions of hard working Americans. The Act, however, denied benefits to agricultural workers and domestic servants – occupations comprised largely of low-income laborers and those of color.

The 1935 Wagner Act, which granted unions collective bargaining rights, allowed unions to deny membership to non-whites. The result is that people of color were excluded from union benefits – better wages, health care, pensions, job security and access to specific jobs.

The Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934, revolutionized America by subsidizing low-interest home loans and making home ownership affordable to millions of Americans. Yet simultaneously the FHA established an appraisal system that deemed communities of color a financial risk and encouraged banks to deny people of color loans for purchasing or repairing homes. Over a 30-year period, 98 percent of loans went to white Americans out of $120 billion.

The FHA essentially created the suburban communities that developed since the 1940s while restrictive covenants during much of the century denied non-whites from purchasing homes in white communities. At the same time urban renewal and freeway projects demolished approximately one-fifth of all housing occupied by people of color.

Even the GI Bill of Rights offered millions of veterans free college education and reduced home loans, but non-white veterans struggled to find banks willing to lend and colleges willing to admit.

It took decades for these federal initiatives to be corrected. In the meantime millions of white Americans were able to save money toward retirement, pursue college, invest in new homes and pass their wealth along to their children much more than their non-white counterparts.

The result is that white preferences generated an enormous wealth disparity and explains why such disparity persists today.

White families on average have eight times the wealth of African American families. At the same income level, white families tend to have two to three times more wealth. People of color are 60 percent more likely than whites to be rejected for mortgages and home ownership remains higher among whites (71 percent) compared to African Americans (44 percent). In terms of employment, a 2004 study suggested that job applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to receive interview requests than those with black-sounding names.