<p>Check out this NY Review of Books review of "When Affirmative Action was White," by Columbia professor Ira Katznelson.
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<p>"Ira Katznelson has made a major contribution to the affirmative action debate in his book When Affirmative Action Was White. ... He presents a new version of the argument that affirmative action is justified as compensation for historical wrongs against black people. Instead of going back to slavery, he maintains that people who are still alive (or have living children or grandchildren) and have been the victims of specific historical injustices can provide strong claims for restitution from the United States government, the direct source of these injustices. </p>
<p>Most of Katznelson's book is devoted to showing how the economic and social legislation of the 1930s and 1940s favored whites over blacks. Katznelson is not the first historian to argue that the New Deal and Fair Deal widened the gulf between whites and blacks in the United States, but he is the first to consider such discrimination as the principal justification for an ambitious affirmative action program that would include reparations for blacks.</p>
<p>The undeniable fact is that, by comparison with whites, blacks became relatively worse off during this per-iod. But this relative failure has been obscured by the equally undeniable fact that the material circumstances of African-Americans improved and were, on average, significantly better in 1950 than they had been in 1930. What Katznelson shows is that the Democratic social and economic policies of the Thirties and Forties were rigged so that whites got much more than a fair share of the benefits. </p>
<p>The primary cause of this inequity, Katznelson contends, was the influence of Southern segregationists within the Democratic Party. In the 1930s, when the first New Deal policies were being enacted, white Southern congressmen provided necessary votes for liberal measures that strengthened the labor movement, set minimum wages, and gave relief or temporary work to the unemployed. But they did so only on the condition that the Southern racial order remain insulated against federal actions that might threaten it. The cooperation of New Dealers and segregationists broke down in the 1940s, when a strengthened labor movement began to look south and consider organizing blacks as well as whites. At that point, a new coalition of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats succeeded in stopping the advance of organized labor, especially by passing the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which put heavy restrictions on union organizing. ...</p>
<p>The New Deal policies that worsened the situation of blacks were not overtly discriminatory. The primary device used by Southern white supremacists was to exclude agricultural laborers and domestic servants from coverage under the Social Security Act and National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Since these were the occupations of most Southern blacks and of much smaller proportions of Southern whites, such exclusions meant that most blacks were being left out of the new welfare state and denied the same chance to escape from poverty that was available to many relatively poor whites. In the South, therefore, the New Deal actually had the effect of strengthen-ing the economic basis of white privilege."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18450%5B/url%5D">http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18450</a></p>