Praise and Recognition for When Affirmative Action Was White

Editor’s Choice, New York Times Book Review

One of the Best Books of 2005, San Francisco Chronicle

“Katznelson argues that the case for affirmative action today is made more effectively by citing concrete history rather than through general exhortations. . . . Studying the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society and the civil rights movements of the 1960s could not be more relevant at a time when the administration seems determined to weaken many of the federal programs that for decades have not just sustained the nation’s minorities but built its solid middle class.”

—Nick Kotz, New York Times Book Review

“[A] hardheaded, history-based argument for a set of new, more far-reaching affirmative action programs that, he hopes, might win both a measure of popular support and at least five votes on the Supreme Court. . . . [When Affirmative Action Was White] gives us new insights and arguments for addressing the still urgent moral and political issues Lyndon Johnson identified 40 summers ago. . . . The country stands a better chance of moving in that direction if ordinary citizens, members of Congress and the next Supreme Court justice read and learn from When Affirmative Action Was White.”

—Sanford D. Horowitt, San Francisco Chronicle

“A gem of a book that favors brevity and precision. . . . What is needed, says Katznelson, is a better argument—a way to show white Americans that a direct relationship does exist between the recipient of affirmative action and the harm that is being remedied.”

—David Oshinsky, The Nation

“A compelling, accurate and fair-minded argument.”

—Jane Dailey, Chicago Tribune

“When Affirmative Action Was White is extraordinary. It tells a story of enormous importance and complexity in a lucid, compact, engaging way. The book is a model of how history can inform discussions of public issues.”

—Michael Katz, author of The Price of Citizenship:
Redefining the American Welfare State

“Ira Katznelson is a towering figure in the study of American and European history. This book tells a powerful and painful story of an overlooked paradox: how in the 1930s and 1940s, the white middle class was forged alongside the setting back of the black quest for citizen-ship. Even after the Civil Rights Movement, we are reaping this bitter harvest.”

—Cornel West, author of Democracy Matters

“Katznelson’s incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history. . . . [He] demonstrates conclusively that the gap in wealth between black and white Americans results not simply from the legacy of slavery but from more recent government policies that quite intentionally directed benefits to whites while excluding blacks.”

—Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom

“When Affirmative Action Was White lucidly shows that economic disparities between white and black America were deliberately created during the New Deal, and reveals how the policies that created these divisions remained in place for nearly fifty years. Ira Katznelson’s explosive analysis provides us with a new and painful understanding of how politics and race intersect, and will force everyone—students, teachers, and general readers alike—to reinterpret twentieth-century economic and social history in a completely new way.”

—Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“Ira Katznelson demonstrates how leaving blacks out was the price that the New Deal and Great Society paid for southern support to overcome the Great Depression and create individual wealth so widely enjoyed today. Programs that made possible higher education, union membership, home ownership, welfare, and other advantages marginalized blacks, particularly veterans. . . . Professor Katznelson demonstrates that affirmative action today rightly may be viewed as compensation for denials to past black generations that continue to affect their children and grandchildren.”

—Jack Greenberg, author of
Crusaders in the Courts: Legal Battles of the Civil Rights Movement

“An admirable work of innovative research and thought . . . strongly recommended to all readers.”

—Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

“This intriguing study closes with suggestions for rectifying racial inequality, but its strongest merit is its subtle recalibration of a crucial piece of American history.”—

Publishers Weekly

“Katznelson proposes new policy initiatives and urges American society to reposition its conceptions about affirmative action. His insightful analysis is strongly recommended for large public libraries and university libraries.”

—Steven Puro, Library Journal

“A belief in the immutable nature of race is the only way one can still believe that socioeconomic outcomes in America are either fair or entirely determined by individual effort. These two books [Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White and When Affirmative Action Was White] should put to rest any such claims. . . . Together, these two books indict the notion of race as, ultimately, a failure of the American imagination. We simply can’t imagine a world in which skin color does not entitle us to think we know what people are capable of, what they deserve, or their character. We can’t imagine what America might become if true affirmative action—not the kind aimed at the Huxtable kids but at poverty and substandard education—was enacted at anywhere near the level once bestowed on those fortunate enough to be seen as white.”

—Debra J. Dickerson, Mother Jones