Ira Katznelson

“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders as you please. 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 justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus is it not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.”
― Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

“When Affirmative Action Was White is one result of this endeavor. It reveals how policy decisions dealing with welfare, work, and war during Jim Crow’s last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s excluded, or differentially treated, the vast majority of African Americans. It also traces how inequality, in fact, increased at the insistence of southern representatives in Congress, while their other congressional colleagues were complicit. As a result of the legislation they passed, blacks became even more significantly disadvantaged when a modern American middle class was fashioned during and after the Second World War. Public policy, including affirmative action, has insufficiently taken this troubling legacy into account.”
― Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America