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

In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review), Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of 20th 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 70 years of American history."

• American Slavery, American Freedom
• The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
• The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
• The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
• Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
• Black Reconstruction in America
• Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II