Critical review of Ira Katznelson's "When Affirmative Was White"

In this "penetrating new analysis" Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner.

When President Lyndon Johnson first introduced his plan for affirmative action at historically black Howard University on June 4, 1965, he was addressing the glaring disparities between black and white life in America, Reflecting on Johnson's vision for remedying this situation, Ira Katznelson asks why the socioeconomic gap between these groups had widened rather than decreased by the 1960s, despite preceding decades characterized by national prosperity. He proposes that the answer to this troubling question lies in the complex political history surrounding the social policies instituted in the 1930s and 1940s. Focusing on New Deal and Fair Deal legislation and reforms, Katznelson explores how the development and administration of these programs laid the foundation for institutionalized racism.

With few exceptions, during this time blacks' access to welfare funds, employment opportunities, educational advancement, and housing assistance sharply curtailed or even denied. Consequently, Katznelson finds, this was indeed a time "when affirmative action was white." Much of what Katznelson relates is familiar. He emphasizes the powerful role of southern Democrats in defining the limits of the national welfare state in their region. Exclusion of agricultural laborers and domestic workers (the large majority of whom were black southerners) from the benefits of Social Security and unemployment compensation is examples of the Solid South's ability to influence the outcomes of national policy during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. While legislation and guidelines appeared to be color blind on the surface, southern Democrats' insistence on state and local administration of federal policies meant that Jim Crow customs prevailed.

In explaining southern Democrats' influence in shaping federal labor legislation, Katznelson speaks to change over time. Since the South was less industrialized and less urbanized than other portions of the country during the 1930s, and since most factories refused to employ black labor, unions were not of serious concern in the region. With the coming of the war and wholesale military recruitment of white workers in the 1940s, however, blacks found new employment opportunities and the forces of unionization gained a foothold. To thwart these changes southern Democrats reached across party lines and joined Republicans in sponsoring a number of restrictive labor policies that eventually culminated in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

Katznelson contends that the act diluted and redirected the power of labor, thereby curtailing possibilities for a more expansive welfare state. In addition, he argues, labor's relative impotency meant that the nascent Civil Rights Movement emerged with a focus on political and civic rights instead of economic issues. When Affirmative Action Was White is a brief scholarly work that incorporates valuable statistical information and analysis, making it appropriate for upper-level or graduate college classrooms. Ira Katznelson's own ideas of how America might now come to ...