When Affirmative Action Was White Analysis

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How did the New Deal and World War II change the meaning and lived experience of race in America? Why did the labor rhetoric of A. Philip Randolph and speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inform the civil rights struggle during the height of the Civil Rights Movement? What are the social and economic implications of historic policies today? In When Affirmative Action Was White (2006), Ira Katznelson sheds light upon the historical inequities and policies that limited wealth creation and stifled economic opportunities for African-Americans (Katznelson 11). To that end, he explores how New Deal policies, such as the Federal Housing Administration and Social Security Act, constituted preferentially written programs for white Americans. Alas, …show more content…

In the Origins of Economic Disparities, Douglass Massey recounts how racial violence and vigilantism impacted race-relations during the year of 1919 (Massey 49). To that end, Douglass Massey also describes the political mechanisms and policies instituted to maintain an embedded social and racial hierarchy in the increasingly multicultural North. He writes that “the distinguishing feature of racial segregation in the post-war era is the unprecedented role that government played not only in maintaining the color line, but in reinforcing and strengthening the walls of the ghetto” (Massey 61). Restrictive covenants, instrumentalized by real-estate agents, legally bounded sellers by deeds. Furthermore, these deeds, written in the form of contract law, enumerated which buyers fit the description of potential homeownership. In turn, only these potential residents were deemed eligible to buy a home in their respective all-white communities. If a white homeowner willingly decided to sell their home to an African-American family, they faced harsh repercussions and often-times extra-legal violence and intimidation from their neighbors. Given the economic impact of redlining policies, many white homeowners expressed their internalized thoughts about racial-mixing in their neighborhoods (ex. Levittown, PA and Chicago, IL) and followed unwritten codes of white flight to leave their seemingly “undesirable” neighborhood (Massey 55). Simply put, white homeowner groups produced a code of conduct and stringent deed contracts in which predominately white homeowner associations enforced through local administrative control. In sum, private actors and non-governmental organizations, such as a board of realtors, banks, and brokers, systematically excluded

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