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Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White

438 Words2 Pages

In the book, “When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America,” by Ira Katznelson, he takes us, the readers, back to the 1930’s through 1950’s during the when he considered affirmative action to be pro-white rather than today’s perception of affirmative action where we ensure that interviewees are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, belief, color, or national origin. Katznelson points out that this period of history was driven by politicians during the New Deal started creating government programs in order to take care of the wellbeing of people, their work, and during World War II in the 1930s and 1940s. The government intentionally single out and treated the vast majority of African Americans very differently. The fundamental issue was the support of Southern representatives in Congress was needed in order for the Democratic leaders to pass laws that are not in favor to African Americans. Simply put, that the New Deal union was being framed as a real mean middle man, making bargains between white people that want to help (aka progressives) and the white people that do not want to help and keep all the government benefit to themselves (aka …show more content…

Even though many federal officials understood that black sharecroppers (a resident farmer who gives a part of each crop as rent payment) were hit pretty harshly during the Great Depression, African Americans around 60 percent were denied access to unemployment insurance, government grants, social security benefits, elderly poor assistance, and so on. Administered by local politicians within the South, a large number of African Americans where basically not given any of the benefit from the New Deal relief programs. Ultimately further developing the black people’s

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In Ira Katznelson’s book, When Affirmative Action Was White, he establishes a clear, understood meaning of affirmative action. In this text, affirmative action is best described as policies enacted around the mid-1900s that required traditionally marginalized minorities to be in spaces (such as classrooms, workplaces, and sports teams) to help level the playing field. Essentially, affirmative action policies sought to give benefits to minorities as compensation to alleviate past ills. The book’s title, however, seems to flip this definition on its head, describing a time where affirmative action policies were arranged to favor white people. Katznelson argues that New Deal era policies were created to continue legal segregation without truly

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