Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White

But unfortunately the reality was that the minorities had much harder times than white Americans. In 1933, the general unemployment rate in the United States was over 25 percent; at the same time, unemployment rates for various American minorities ranged up to 50 percent or more (“Great Depression and the New Deal Reference Library”1). Racial discrimination was high and minorities were the first to loose their jobs during the Great Depression. They were denied to work. They were often denied employment in public works programs, they were sometimes threatened at relief centers when applying for work or assistance, and even some charities refused to provide food to needy minorities, especially to blacks in the South.

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

They yearned for “racial purity” and inflicted upon the fairness of government and politics due to their biased outlooks. Especially in the South, African American people were harshly discriminated against and society was slow to progress when compared to the North and other more diverse parts of the United States. During the Great Depression, they endured the most struggles surrounding employment and were prone to living conditions that were lesser than wealthy politicians that were commonly

These facts were more of a fabrication because the easing of debt and mortgage was not dedicated to African Americans who were in fact U.S citizens. One of the programs called the Federal Housing Authority “refused to guarantee mortgages for blacks who tried to buy in white neighborhoods” (African Americans and the New Deal 2). The New Deal did serve lunches for school children but “constitutes the only hot meal of the day” (Hot Lunches for a Million School Children 4). Many problems were noticed but the New Deal left them unsolved.

This affirmative action has worked to great effect, creating a more racially-just and diverse society than otherwise would have been the case. “Many view Affirmative Action as an expensive exercise that violates principles of merit of equal opportunity and that, in any event, has not achieved its original goals as enunciated by President Johnson in 1965. Further, there is no agreement or clarity about what, if anything should be put in its place” (Katznelson, n.d). The almost exclusively white-targeted nature of the extensive federal legislation before 1965 has largely been ignored by policy critics, just as it was ignored by Lyndon Johnson.

The percentage of Americans that were losing jobs was outrageous “25 percent of all workers and 37 percent of all nonfarm workers were completely out of work. ”(Great Depression) and that only increased. The people moved and were kicked out of their lands feed to find work elsewhere but work was scarce and was no where to be found. The african americans also had a harder time finding work as the whites were given unfair priority. Their was a substantial gap between the rich and the poor and the poor was the lowest percentage of people in the Americas.

The Great Depression was a time period in the United States from the late 1920s to early 1940s, marked by severe unemployment rates nationwide. It had many origins, most notably of which was the Stock Market Crash of October 29th, 1929, also known as “Black Tuesday.” The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the crippling unemployment and poverty rates of the Depression by establishing federal work programs to provide much-needed jobs to millions of Americans. Overall, however, this response was only marginally effective, because there was still rampant unemployment and discrimination throughout the duration of these programs. Through the establishment of these programs, the role of the federal government changed from a capitalist

Reagan’s campaign against poor Black people was successful in sharpening discrimination at a national level, even after the Civil Rights Movement worked to end discrimination within the system. Tillotson strongly argues that conservative ideology is “anti-African American agency and as an ideology it poses a significant threat to the internal security of African Americans” (51). Also that it has “destroyed to a large degree any efforts at an equal playing field for poverty stricken citizens of African ancestry in America” (Tillotson 50). Tillotson includes W.D. Wright’s argument that welfare segregates African Americans in ghettos by acting as a “substitution for educating masses of Black people” (40), and failing to properly train them for good paying jobs. Furthermore, even if they were skilled, they are already closed out of the job market based on skin color, the only place available for Black folks to remain is as an exploited underpaid cheap labor

From 1920 to 1950s, views on the race/ethnicity of Jews changed in the USA to view them as white. Their upward mobility has caused some Jewish people of today to look down upon African Americans for not being able to do what Jewish people did. The US discovered that in Europe there were lower classes of people (Jews were one of them), but before that most immigrants were accepted into the white race and treated decently (they got jobs, lived in the cities, etc). The Red Scare introduced anti-immigrant feelings, causing Jewish people and others to be excluded from society, and many feared that mixing races would make them “impure”. In the 1920s, science was used to show that the only “true” Americans/whites were those that came from north-west Europe, and laws started coming about that defined race (including a Supreme Court ruling that tried to

“Affirmative Action may not be a perfect system, but there should be no doubt that it has endangered many successes. It has opened the doors of America’s most elite educational institutions to minority students, granting them unprecedented opportunities” (Ogletree 12). Thanks to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson a policy that prohibits employment and education discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, and sex is offered today to those who suffer from said discriminations (A Brief History). Affirmative action has opened abundant openings for minorities, allowing the cycle of going to college to be passed down generations and provided job opportunities that otherwise would not be considered by most. Affirmative

RESEARCH PAPER Affirmative action is a set of governmental policies which tend to give privileges to minorities who suffered from discrimination in the past by providing them with access to educational and employment opportunities. First nuanced by Franklin Roosevelt with war-related work, Affirmative action only became an executive order (10925) in 1961 under John F. Kennedy to ensure that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin, to which was later on added sex by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 (11246). From that day till now affirmative action has been a controversial issue in America, with some who find it fair and some other who consider it as a reverse discrimination.

And when the depression hit, blacks were hit the hardest; when Roosevelt took office, over 50% of blacks were unemployed because the blacks, who typically worked low-skill, low-paying jobs, had their jobs stolen by desperate whites.

The New Deal gave plenty of Americans aspiration towards circumventing the Great Depression, but not all had such a great outcome. Indeed, the restored white men with employment, a home, security and much more, but what about the “colored,” people? The colored people in the 1930s were often forgotten about, many were discriminated against in the New Deal programs. Although the New Deal did help “Americans,” financially, they promoted something more crucial, this was inequality, segregation and discrimination towards colored people, for this reason I am convinced the New Deal was a failure. Our president at the time, President Franklin Roosevelt, would often attempt to relieve the American people of the financial crisis through his renowned

This bureau was designed for newly freed slaves or homeless white men to take shelter after the war. The bureau acted at a ‘early welfare system’ which allowed these people to receive food, shelter, and medical aid if needed. They were also allowed to offer people farms that had been confiscated after the war however this was demolished after Johnson took office and pardon the initial land owners from any wrong doings which caused many of these farms to be repossessed ad given to their initial owners. However, one of the biggest accomplishments of this bureau were the 3,000 schools they opened for blacks which resulted in as many as 200,000 blacks getting an education until they no longer received funding from the government which occurred in

Racial inequality has plagued our society for centuries and has been described as a “black eye” on American history. It wasn’t until the passing of The Civil Rights Act of 1965 that minorities were given equal protection under the law. This was a crucial step on our society’s road to reconciling this injustice. However, the effects of past racial inequality are still visible to this day, and our society still wrestles with how to solve this issue. In 1965, President Lyndon B Johnson said: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still just believe that you have been completely fair.