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

by Ira Katznelson

Even if Cornel West is right to call affirmative action a weak response to the historical plight of black Americans, it has been the most important tool that the federal government has endorsed and used since the heyday of the civil rights era to promote a more equitable society.

Perhaps because proponents of affirmative action have been unable to persuade most white Americans that it is a good idea, they have mainly relied on decisions in executive agencies and the courts, usually skipping the effort to win broad support either in public opinion or in Congress.

In truth, the brutal harms inflicted by slavery and Jim Crow are far too substantial ever to be properly remedied.

Even today’s proponents of affirmative action pay almost no heed to this recent record of profound and pervasive racial bias. Such a serious omission produces more than defective history.

If African Americans had been included on fair and equal terms in social welfare provisions, labor unions, work protection, the Army, and benefits for veterans, Lyndon Johnson might have offered a rather different speech in June 1965.

Extend affirmative action in order to end it within one generation.