Institutionalizing Racial Inequalities: Worker Exclusions in the New Deal

• In Event: Theorizing Structures of Domination, Challenging Modalities of Racial Exclusion

Abstract

The New Deal profoundly shifted the political economic landscape of the United States. And although the programs and services are frequently touted as universal, many scholars have argued that rather than alleviate significant racial, gender, class-based divisions, the New Deal programs exacerbated those divisions. At a time of great expansion of the federal and state government, the actions of organizations and citizens were critical in securing inclusion in these new programs and services. By focusing on the organizations that were advancing racial equality and equity in the early twentieth century (namely the NAACP, National Urban League, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters), this paper highlights both the strategies and tactics used by these organizations and the ideologies they were espousing. My argument is not that there was a unified set of strategies or ideologies, but rather that there were significant moments of divergence and convergence among these groups that affected the trajectory of racial equality and civil rights battles. This paper intervenes in this debate by arguing that the legacy of the New Deal programs, particularly those that exposed the issue of black economic inequality, were ultimately vulnerable to an ideology that allowed for the creation of formal and informal structures that perpetuated racially skewed economic disadvantages. One such example was the exclusion of the domestic and agricultural worker classes from many of the New Deal employment programs. Many scholars and advocates have argued that these exclusions were deliberate efforts by the southern Democrats to exclude African Americans from these new federal programs. Indeed, roughly 60% of African Americans were employed in these two worker categories. However, other scholars have highlighted that while these exclusions disproportionately affected African Americans, the vast majority of excluded workers were white (DeWitt, 2010). Thus, these scholars argue that the racial motivations were less salient than the administrative burden of implementing these new programs, specifically the taxation provisions of the Social Security Act. In this paper, I argue that neither of these perspectives is completely satisfying in explaining the exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act. Rather and instead offer a more nuanced and contextual analysis of both the racial and class dynamics of the New Deal. This analysis offers a clearer synthesis of the way in which race and class have been constitutive of the structures of domination and exclusion in U.S. politics.

Author

• Katherine Rader, University of Pennsylvania