The book When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America does a good job of detailing how whites were given a ladder into the middle class as part of the Great Society but blacks were, for years, carved out of government programs in order to appease racist white Southerners. The South was willing to support the New Deal so long as it did not threaten Jim Crow: So southern members traded their votes for the exclusion of farmworkers and maids, the most widespread black categories of employment, from the protections of these statutes. In circumstances where the congressional Republicans were adamantly opposed to these laws, the Democratic Party made these racially relevant adjustments to secure a winning coalition that included southern members of the party. As a result, these new arrangements were friendly to labor but unfriendly to the majority of the African-Americans who lived below the Mason-Dixon line. These sort of legislative maneuvers created the white middle class and maintained the black “underclass”, but you’ll never know it if you don’t read a book. Maybe Mr. Cosby, Barkley and Stein should spend more time on their Kindles and less time bloviating about issues with which they have no familiarity. breakingbrown/2014/11/ben-stein-blames-pathetic-self-defeating-black-underclass-for-lack-of-progress/
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 03:50:19 +0000