The Racial Basis of Capitalism and the State, and the Impact of the New Deal on African Americans*

This paper describes the ways in which African Americans were written out of or subordinated within the social policies of the New Deal period. To explain this feature of the New Deal, I argue that the existing social science perspectives on social policy need to be built on a greater appreciation of the role of racial subjugation in the construction of class interests, party processes, and the state. The recovery of this racial basis helps us understand why our liberal welfare state resists efforts to move in a more social democratic direction. Sociologists have long been attracted to the Great Depression and the New Deal as his-torical settings for their research. Whether the subject is social movements, changes in the structure of work and economy, or the increased and changing role of the state, the Depres-sion decade provides one of those pivotal historical moments when previous patterns of so-cial relationships were destroyed, and the conflicts, tensions, and causal processes involved in the creation of important new patterns were starkly revealed. If there is one paradigmatic thread that unites this diverse literature on the 1930s, it is a concern with social class and the state — an implicit assumption that class and state structures and relations are at once the constitutive features of American society as well as the features that underwent the most profound changes during this time.