When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

by Ira Katznelson

Writing in the mid-1970s, the sociologist Nathan Glazer remonstrated against “the new concept of ‘affirmative action’ that . . . assumes that everyone is guilty of discrimination; it then imposes on every employer the remedies which in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could only be imposed of those guilty of discrimination.”