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

"Katznelson's explosive analysis provides us with a new and painful understanding of how politics and race intersect." Henry Louis Gates Jr"

In this "penetrating new analysis" (The "New York Times Book Review") Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programmes passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened, despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."

RA KATZNELSON is the Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University and the chair of the Russell Sage Foundation's board of trustees.