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

A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action.

In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats 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."

• White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
• Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Updated Edition (Politics and Society in Modern America)
• The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953 (Hill and Wang Critical Issues)
• Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (National Book Award Winner)
• The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
• Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It