Take the G.I. Bill. Katznelson notes that it promised veterans returning home from World War II a number of benefits: access to low-interest home loans, money for education, and job training. The letter of the law did not favor veterans of one race or another, but in practice, several things prevented black Americans in particular from getting their share of benefits. First of all, the bill was administered by states, not the federal government. This meant that Southern states, which had kept up a system of legal segregation, could require that black veterans seeking college degrees enroll at historically black colleges, which were almost always underfunded and had few of the resources that primarily white colleges did. In fact, Katznelson notes, some Southern congressmen supported the bill precisely because of the presence of such loopholes.

Likewise, the job-training component of the G.I. Bill was hampered by the fact that it was implemented on the state level. The program’s administrators, most of them white, tended to steer black veterans away from higher-paying jobs in carpentry, woodworking, photography, or electrical work and instead toward training programs for lower-paying service jobs, such as those in dry cleaning or tailoring. This happened despite the fact that black newspapers at the time widely reported that black veterans were just as eager as white ones to take advantage of the benefits promised to them by the government.

The G.I. Bill also provided for veterans to get affordable home loans with low down payments, but these too ran up against the realities of discrimination: Banks, which were responsible for actually making the loans, were (and indeed, still are) usually much more inclined to grant them to white people than black people. Many white vets availed themselves of the G.I. Bill-sponsored loans, which facilitated a wave of mostly white homeownership and the growth of the mid-20th-century middle class. Additionally, as segregation was still commonplace, even when black veterans did secure loans, they were often only for houses in predominantly black areas where property values were lower.

In all of these cases, the fact that the law wasn’t written with preexisting racial imbalances in mind meant that many non-white veterans were left without access to classic American paths to upward mobility. And, on top of that, the law didn’t account for another danger of colorblind policies, which is that failing to provide for existing inequalities leaves room, down the line, for people to enforce the law unevenly. The end result of all this is what Katznelson describes as affirmative action for whites. This was not because Congress wrote legislation explicitly intended to disenfranchise veterans of color; rather, the G.I. Bill—like many of the other policies Katznelson describes in his book—was written as race-neutral and specifically stated that all veterans were eligible. As Katznelson shows, the law didn’t fully deliver on its promise because it didn’t devote any special attention to the racial dynamics that undergird employment, homeownership, and education.