Download or read book When Affirmative Action Was White An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America written by Ira Katznelson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-08-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book For Discrimination written by Randall Kennedy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding Fisher v. University of Texas, For Discrimination is at once the definitive reckoning with one of America’s most explosively contentious and divisive issues and a principled work of advocacy for clearly defined justice. What precisely is affirmative action, and why is it fiercely championed by some and just as fiercely denounced by others? Does it signify a boon or a stigma? Or is it simply reverse discrimination? What are its benefits and costs to American society? What are the exact indicia determining who should or should not be accorded affirmative action? When should affirmative action end, if it must? Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School professor and author of such critically acclaimed and provocative books as Race, Crime, and the Law and the national best-seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, gives us a concise, gimlet-eyed, and deeply personal conspectus of the policy, refusing to shy away from the myriad complexities of an issue that continues to bedevil American race relations. With pellucid reasoning, Kennedy accounts for the slipperiness of the term “affirmative action” as it has been appropriated by ideologues of every stripe; delves into the complex and surprising legal history of the policy; coolly analyzes key arguments pro and con advanced by the left and right, including the so-called color-blind, race-neutral challenge; critiques the impact of Supreme Court decisions on higher education; and ponders the future of affirmative action.
Download or read book Racial Formation in the United States written by Michael Omi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-20 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years since the publication of the Second Edition and more than thirty years since the publication of the original book, Racial Formation in the United States now arrives with each chapter radically revised and rewritten by authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant, but the overall purpose and vision of this classic remains the same: Omi and Winant provide an account of how concepts of race are created and transformed, how they become the focus of political conflict, and how they come to shape and permeate both identities and institutions. The steady journey of the U.S. toward a majority nonwhite population, the ongoing evisceration of the political legacy of the early post-World War II civil rights movement, the initiation of the ‘war on terror’ with its attendant Islamophobia, the rise of a mass immigrants rights movement, the formulation of race/class/gender ‘intersectionality’ theories, and the election and reelection of a black President of the United States are some of the many new racial conditions Racial Formation now covers.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Fairness written by Terry H. Anderson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-07 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affirmative action strikes at the heart of deeply held beliefs about employment and education, about fairness, and about the troubled history of race relations in America. Published on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, this is the only book available that gives readers a balanced, non-polemical, and lucid account of this highly contentious issue. Beginning with the roots of affirmative action, Anderson describes African-American demands for employment in the defense industry--spearheaded by A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington in July 1941--and the desegregation of the armed forces after World War II. He investigates President Kennedy's historic 1961 executive order that introduced the term "affirmative action" during the early years of the civil rights movement and he examines President Johnson's attempts to gain equal opportunities for African Americans. He describes President Nixon's expansion of affirmative action with the Philadelphia Plan--which the Supreme Court upheld--along with President Carter's introduction of "set asides" for minority businesses and the Bakke ruling which allowed the use of race as one factor in college admissions. By the early 1980s many citizens were becoming alarmed by affirmative action, and that feeling was exemplified by the Reagan administration's backlash, which resulted in the demise and revision of affirmative action during the Clinton years. He concludes with a look at the University of Michigan cases of 2003, the current status of the policy, and its impact. Throughout, the author weighs each side of every issue--often finding merit in both arguments--resulting in an eminently fair account of one of America's most heated debates. A colorful history that brings to life the politicians, legal minds, and ordinary people who have fought for or against affirmative action, The Pursuit of Fairness helps clear the air and calm the emotions, as it illuminates a difficult and critically important issue.
Download or read book Mismatch written by Richard Sander and published by . This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that affirmative action actually harms minority students and that the movement started in the late 1960s is only a symbolic change that has become mired in posturing, concealment, and pork-barrel earmarks.
Download or read book Between Citizens and the State written by Christopher P. Loss and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.
Download or read book To Serve God and Wal Mart written by Bethany Moreton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad. While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next. This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart’s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization. The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org) and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition (www.econjustice.org).
Download or read book America and the Pill written by Elaine Tyler May and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1960, the FDA approved the contraceptive commonly known as “the pill.” Advocates, developers, and manufacturers believed that the convenient new drug would put an end to unwanted pregnancy, ensure happy marriages, and even eradicate poverty. But as renowned historian Elaine Tyler May reveals inAmerica and the Pill, it was women who embraced it and created change. They used the pill to challenge the authority of doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and lawmakers. They demonstrated that the pill was about much more than family planning—it offered women control over their bodies and their lives. From little-known accounts of the early years to personal testimonies from young women today, May illuminates what the pill did and didnotachieve during its half century on the market.
Download or read book Why Americans Hate Welfare written by Martin Gilens and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tackling one of the most volatile issues in contemporary politics, Martin Gilens's work punctures myths and misconceptions about welfare policy, public opinion, and the role of the media in both. Why Americans Hate Welfare shows that the public's views on welfare are a complex mixture of cynicism and compassion; misinformed and racially charged, they nevertheless reflect both a distrust of welfare recipients and a desire to do more to help the "deserving" poor. "With one out of five children currently living in poverty and more than 100,000 families with children now homeless, Gilens's book is must reading if you want to understand how the mainstream media have helped justify, and even produce, this state of affairs." —Susan Douglas, The Progressive "Gilens's well-written and logically developed argument deserves to be taken seriously." —Choice "A provocative analysis of American attitudes towards 'welfare.'. . . [Gilens] shows how racial stereotypes, not white self-interest or anti-statism, lie at the root of opposition to welfare programs." -Library Journal
Download or read book Congress at the Grassroots written by Richard F. Fenno Jr. and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-06-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: However much politicians are demeaned and denounced in modern American society, our democracy could not work without them. For this reason, says Richard Fenno, their activities warrant our attention. In his pioneering book, Home Style, Fenno demonstrated that a close look at politicians at work in their districts can tell us a great deal about the process of representation. Here, Fenno employs a similarly revealing grassroots approach to explore how patterns of representation have changed in recent decades. Fenno focuses on two members of the U.S. House of Representatives who represented the same west-central Georgia district at different times: Jack Flynt, who served from the 1950s to the 1970s, and Mac Collins, who has held the seat in the 1990s. His on-the-scene observation of their differing representational styles--Flynt focuses on people, Collins on policy--reveals the ways in which social and demographic changes inspire shifts in representational strategies. More than a study of representational change in one district, Congress at the Grassroots also helps illuminate the larger subject of political change in the South and in the nation as a whole.
Download or read book Between Homeland and Motherland written by Alvin B. Tillery, Jr. and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Between Homeland and Motherland, Alvin B. Tillery Jr. considers the history of political engagement with Africa on the part of African Americans, beginning with the birth of Paul Cuffe’s back-to-Africa movement in the Federal Period to the Congressional Black Caucus’ struggle to reach consensus on the African Growth and Opportunity Act of 2000. In contrast to the prevailing view that pan-Africanism has been the dominant ideology guiding black leaders in formulating foreign policy positions toward Africa, Tillery highlights the importance of domestic politics and factors within the African American community. Employing an innovative multimethod approach that combines archival research, statistical modeling, and interviews, Tillery argues that among African American elites—activists, intellectuals, and politicians—factors internal to the community played a large role in shaping their approach to African issues, and that shaping U.S. policy toward Africa was often secondary to winning political battles in the domestic arena. At the same time, Africa and its interests were important to America’s black elite, and Tillery’s analysis reveals that many black leaders have strong attachments to the "motherland." Spanning two centuries of African American engagement with Africa, this book shows how black leaders continuously balanced national, transnational, and community impulses, whether distancing themselves from Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, supporting the anticolonialism movements of the 1950s, or opposing South African apartheid in the 1980s.
Download or read book Shifting the Color Line written by Robert C. Lieberman and published by . This book was released on 1998-08-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shifting the Color Line explores the historical and political roots of racial conflict in American welfare policy, beginning with the New Deal. Robert Lieberman demonstrates how racial distinctions were built into the very structure of the American welfare state.
Download or read book The Color of Money written by Mehrsa Baradaran and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1863 black communities owned less than 1 percent of total U.S. wealth. Today that number has barely budged. Mehrsa Baradaran pursues this wealth gap by focusing on black banks. She challenges the myth that black banking is the solution to the racial wealth gap and argues that black communities can never accumulate wealth in a segregated economy.
Download or read book Affluence and Influence written by Martin Gilens and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-22 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why policymaking in the United States privileges the rich over the poor Can a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy—but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged. Affluence and Influence definitively explores how political inequality in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how this growing disparity has been shaped by interest groups, parties, and elections. With sharp analysis and an impressive range of data, Martin Gilens looks at thousands of proposed policy changes, and the degree of support for each among poor, middle-class, and affluent Americans. His findings are staggering: when preferences of low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, there is virtually no relationship between policy outcomes and the desires of less advantaged groups. In contrast, affluent Americans' preferences exhibit a substantial relationship with policy outcomes whether their preferences are shared by lower-income groups or not. Gilens shows that representational inequality is spread widely across different policy domains and time periods. Yet Gilens also shows that under specific circumstances the preferences of the middle class and, to a lesser extent, the poor, do seem to matter. In particular, impending elections—especially presidential elections—and an even partisan division in Congress mitigate representational inequality and boost responsiveness to the preferences of the broader public. At a time when economic and political inequality in the United States only continues to rise, Affluence and Influence raises important questions about whether American democracy is truly responding to the needs of all its citizens.
Download or read book Behind the Dream written by Clarence B. Jones and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I have a dream." When those words were spoken on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, the crowd stood, electrified, as Martin Luther King, Jr. brought the plight of African Americans to the public consciousness and firmly established himself as one of the greatest orators of all time. Behind the Dream is a thrilling, behind-the-scenes account of the weeks leading up to the great event, as told by Clarence Jones, co-writer of the speech and close confidant to King. Jones was there, on the road, collaborating with the great minds of the time, and hammering out the ideas and the speech that would shape the civil rights movement and inspire Americans for years to come.
Download or read book Fear Itself The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time written by Ira Katznelson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the New Deal era highlights the politicians and pundits of the time, many of whom advocated for questionable positions, including separation of the races and an American dictatorship.
Download or read book Affirmative Action for the Rich written by Richard D. Kahlenberg and published by . This book was released on 2012-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of race-based affirmative action in higher education has given rise to hundreds of books and law review articles, numerous court decisions, and several state initiatives to ban the practice. However, surprisingly little has been said or written or done to challenge a larger, longstanding "affirmative action" program that tends to benefit wealthy whites: legacy preferences for the children of alumni. "Affirmative Action for the Rich" sketches the origins of legacy preferences, examines the philosophical issues they raise, outlines the extent of their use today, studies their impact on university fundraising, and reviews their implications for civil rights. In addition, the book outlines two new theories challenging the legality of legacy preferences, examines how a judge might review those claims, and assesses public policy options for curtailing alumni preferences. The book includes chapters by Michael Lind of the New America Foundation; Peter Schmidt of the "Chronicle of Higher Education"; former "Wall Street Journal" reporter Daniel Golden; Chad Coffman of Winnemac Consulting, attorney Tara O'Neil, and student Brian Starr; John Brittain of the University of the District of Columbia Law School and attorney Eric Bloom; Carlton Larson of the University of California--Davis School of Law; attorneys Steve Shadowen and Sozi Tulante; Sixth Circuit Court Judge Boyce F. Martin Jr. and attorney Donya Khalili; and education writer Peter Sacks.
