Guest Speaker to Discuss Unconventional View of Affirmative Action in Oct. 12 Lecture at Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems

PITTSBURGH—The University of Pittsburgh Center on Race and Social Problems (CRSP) continues its Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC Fall 2011 Speaker Series Oct 12 with a noon lecture by Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University.

Katznelson’s talk, titled “When Affirmative Action Was White: Further Reflections,” will take place in the School of Social Work Conference Center, 20th floor, Cathedral of Learning, 4200 Fifth Ave., Oakland. It is free and open to the public, and registration is not required; lunch will be provided. For more information, call 412-624-7382.

Katznelson is the author of When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequity in Twentieth-Century America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006). In it, Katznelson argues that many additional economic disparities between White and Black America were created during the New Deal and that the policies that occasioned those disparities remained for years. Programs, the author says, were set up deliberately to exclude underrepresented groups. Laws like the GI Bill were administered by local governments, which often prevented Black veterans from receiving the benefits they had earned.

Katznelson also coauthored Liberal Beginnings: Making A Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and he is currently completing Fear Itself, a book dealing with American democracy from the New Deal to the Cold War, and Liberal Reason, a collection of his essays on the character of modern social knowledge. Katznelson is a past president of the American Political Science Association and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

CRSP’s annual Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC Fall Speaker Series provides an opportunity for faculty, students, and members of the community to engage in race-related discussions of mutual interest. Two more lectures are scheduled through early December.

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