|
Books by Ira Katznelson
Black Men, White Cities:
Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900-1930,
and Britain, 1948-1968 (1973)
Black Men, White Cities:
Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900-1930,
and Britain, 1948-1968 (1973)
Schooling for All: Race, Class, and the Decline of the
Democratic Ideal (with Margaret Weir;1985) /
Marxism and the City (1992)
Desolation and
Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after the Holocaust,
Totalitarianism, and Total War (2003)
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History
of Racial Inequality in America
* * * *
*
New Deal / Raw Deal
By Ira Katznelson
Hurricane Katrina's violent winds and waters
tore away the shrouds that ordinarily mask the country's racial
pattern of poverty and neglect. Understandably, most
commentators have focused on the woeful federal response.
Others, taking a longer view, yearn for a burst of activism
patterned on the New Deal. But that nostalgia requires a heavy
dose of historical amnesia. It also misses the chance to come to
terms with how the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s
contributed to the persistence of two Americas.
It was during the administrations of Franklin
Roosevelt and Harry Truman that such great progressive policies
as Social Security, protective labor laws and the GI Bill were
adopted. But with them came something else that was quite
destructive for the nation: what I have called "affirmative
action for whites." During Jim Crow's last hurrah in
the 1930s and 1940s, when southern members of Congress
controlled the gateways to legislation, policy decisions dealing
with welfare, work and war either excluded the vast majority of
African Americans or treated them differently from others.
Between 1945 and 1955, the federal government
transferred more than $100 billion to support retirement
programs and fashion opportunities for job skills, education,
homeownership and small-business formation. Together, these
domestic programs dramatically reshaped the country's social
structure by creating a modern, well-schooled, homeowning middle
class. At no other time in American history had so much money
and so many resources been targeted at the generation completing
its education, entering the workforce and forming families.
But most blacks were left out of all this.
Southern members of Congress used occupational exclusions
and took advantage of American federalism to ensure that
national policies would not disturb their region's
racial order. Farmworkers and maids, the jobs held by
most blacks in the South, were denied Social Security pensions
and access to labor unions.
Benefits for veterans were administered
locally. The GI Bill adapted to "the southern way of
life" by accommodating itself to segregation in higher
education, to the job ceilings that local officials imposed on
returning black soldiers and to a general unwillingness to offer
loans to blacks even when such loans were insured by the federal
government.
Of the 3,229 GI Bill-guaranteed loans for
homes, businesses and farms made in 1947 in Mississippi, for
example, only two were offered to black veterans.
This is unsettling history, especially for
those of us who keenly admire the New Deal and the Fair Deal. At
the very moment a wide array of public policies were providing
most white Americans with valuable tools to gain protection in
their old age, good jobs, economic security, assets and
middle-class status, black Americans were mainly left to fend
for themselves.
Ever since, American society has been
confronted with the results of this twisted and unstated form of
affirmative action. A full generation of federal policy, lasting
until the civil rights legislation and affirmative action of the
1960s, boosted whites into homes, suburbs, universities and
skilled employment while denying the same or comparable benefits
to black citizens.
Despite the prosperity of postwar
capitalism's golden age, an already immense gap between white
and black Americans widened. Even today, after the great
achievements of civil rights and affirmative action, wealth
for the typical white family, mainly in homeownership, is 10
times the average net worth for blacks, and a majority of
African American children in our cities subsist below the
federal poverty line.
President Lyndon Johnson faced up to racial
inequality in "To Fulfill These Rights," a
far-reaching graduation speech he delivered at Howard University
in June 1965. He noted that "freedom is not enough"
because "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 they say, 'you are free to compete with all
the others,' and still justly believe you have been completely
fair."
What is needed, he argued, is a set of new
policies, a dramatic new type of affirmative action for
"the poor, the unemployed, the uprooted, and the
dispossessed." He had in mind the kind of
comprehensive effort the GI Bill had provided to most returning
soldiers, but without its exclusionary pattern of
implementation.
This form of assertive, mass-oriented
affirmative action never happened. By sustaining and advancing a
growing African American middle class, the affirmative action we
did get has done more to advance fair treatment across racial
lines than any other recent public policy, and thus demands our
respect and support. But as the scenes from New Orleans vividly
displayed, so many who were left out before have been left out
yet again.
Rather than yearn for New Deal policies that
were tainted by racism, or even recall the civil rights and
affirmative action successes of the 1960s and beyond, we would
do better in present circumstances to return to the ambitious
plans Johnson announced but never realized to close massive
gaps between blacks and whites, and between more and less
prosperous blacks.
Without an unsentimental historical
understanding of the policy roots of black isolation and
dispossession, and without an unremitting effort to cut the Gordian
knot joining race and class, our national response to the
disaster in the Gulf Coast states will remain no more than a
gesture.
Ira Katznelson, a professor
of political science and history at Columbia University, is the
author of "When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History
of Racial Inequality in America."
 |
Ira Katznelson earned his B.A. at Columbia
University in 1966 and his Ph.D. in History at Cambridge
University in 1969. He has taught at the University of Chicago
and the New School for Social Research, and has been Ruggles
Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia
University since 1994.
His books include
Black Men, White Cities:
Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900-1930,
and Britain, 1948-1968 (1973),
City Trenches: Urban
Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States
(1981),
Schooling for All: Race, Class, and the Decline of the
Democratic Ideal (with Margaret Weir;1985),
Marxism and the City (1992), Liberalism's Crooked Circle:
Letters to Adam Michnik (1996; winner of the American
Political Science Association's Michael Harrington Prize and
Columbia's Lionel Trilling Award), and
Desolation and
Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after the Holocaust,
Totalitarianism, and Total War (2003). |
posted 18 November 2005
* * *
* *
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* *
* * *
 |
Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the
Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
Pulitzer
Prize for History 2012 Winner—For a
distinguished and appropriately documented book
on the history of the United States, Ten
thousand dollars ($10,000). Awarded to
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by the
late Manning Marable (Viking), an exploration of
the legendary life and provocative views of one
of the most significant African-Americans in
U.S. history, a work that separates fact from
fiction and blends the heroic and tragic. (Moved
by the Board from the Biography category.)—Pulitzer
* *
* * *
|
The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 17 April 2012
|
