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Summary Of Affirmative Action By Ira Katznelson

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In his commencement address at Howard University one year after signing into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson raised a question regarding the growing inequality between white and black Americans after World War II despite the country’s prosperity. Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White posits that the vast programs such as the New Deal and G.I. Bill of Rights of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, seen as progressive, were inherently racist. Katznelson discusses these programs and how they affected black Americans in their various political, economic, and social spheres. He examines these problematic and discriminatory areas under four scopes: welfare, the workplace, military service, and education. …show more content…

During the time of its enactment, more than half of all black men remained in the labor market after the age of 75, compared to one third of white men. Yet, despite its ties to long-term assistance and potential for black Americans, it primarily benefitted white Americans. Because hierarchically, black Americans were at the bottom of the social structure and more prone to job layoffs. Although I discuss educational inequality in depth later in this paper, it is important to note that education too played a role in the difficulty for blacks to obtain any sort of benefits through the New Deal. In 1944, the American Council on Education ranked the states by the amount of additional expenditure necessary to educate all children between age 5-17 (34), where nine of the ten most needy states were southern states; fourteen of the fifteen states that spent the least in support for each classroom were in the South; the value of school plant equipment for each southern black child was $34 versus that of $162 for a while child; and most teachers were the poorest trained and lowest salaried teachers (35). One can assume that black achievement and literacy were relatively low, and therefore ask the following: how would black Americans be able to reap any of the public benefits if most of them were illiterate? The answer is simple as Katznelson’s thesis: the New Deal and GI …show more content…

Bill of Rights of 1944 was signed into law as an expansion of welfare for people who have served in the armed services with three major tenets: 1) government guarantee of loans for homes, farms, and business, 2) tuition and stipend for veterans able to get into college or a job training program, and 3) health care (if injured in active line of duty). While he does not refute the idea that the GI Bill created a more middle-class society, Katznelson explains it is almost exclusively for whites. He argues that the people who benefited the most from the government guarantee of loans were white Americans due to redlining. How did this happen? Economic security was determined by home ownership, but banks would not give out loans to people who lived in areas on a map that had been redlined, which were neighborhoods determined by race. In terms of education, the gap between whites and blacks widened. Black veterans were denied admission to universities and job training programs in both the North and South. And although the doctrine of “separate but equal” had been upheld by Plessy v. Ferguson, black colleges were not created equal. Limited to education, theology, and various trades, it was nearly impossible for blacks to participate in graduate or professional training (133). However, Katznelson does mention that “it is indisputable that the G.I. Bill offered eligible African Americans more benefits and more opportunities than they possibly could have imagined in the early

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