Try tracing the history of America’s most racially discriminatory policies, and you’ll actually wind up starting with a man hailed by many for his perceived progressiveness. In the 1930s, in desperate need of any sort of remedy to the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt enacted a sweeping package of social safety net programs and workplace reforms known as the New Deal. Under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (just one piece of the New Deal), American workers gained historic protections, including the right to organize and bargain collectively. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, meanwhile, established the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, and overtime protections.
But these protections didn’t extend to everyone. The New Deal purposefully excluded domestic and agricultural workers, “as a race-neutral proxy for excluding blacks from statutory benefits and protections made available to most whites,” as law professor Juan Perea wrote for the Ohio State Law Journal. The legacy of those New Deal-era racial exclusions persists today. There is still an agricultural and domestic worker exclusion in the National Labor Relations Act, which means millions of low-wage workers—many of them minorities—are denied the most basic of labor protections.
While the 1960s and ’70s brought significant, measurable progress, many of the most hard-won victories of the Civil Rights Era have been reversed in recent decades. Schools are re-segregating, the unions that guaranteed a reliable standard of living for many middle-income black families are in decline, and voting rights are under fire in conservative states across the country. The United States’ depressing racial history isn’t a secret, but the extent to which the discriminatory policies of our past (as well as the implicit biases of our present) continue to limit opportunities for black and minority Americans today is the topic of afascinating new report from the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank.
[For more of this story, written by Dwyer Gunn, go to https://psmag.com/the-problem-...72ddfe2a5#.ngqbacmvj]
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