ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that affirmative action and welfare were used as substitutes for radical economic reform. This work contests the view that civil rights advocates in general and King in particular saw affirmative action and welfare as primary goals of the civil rights movement or that the rise of black Power was primarily responsible for white backlash. In contrast to mainstream political science literature, the new work on "Whiteness" sees white supremacy as an integral part of American democracy rather than an anomaly or exception. The "culture of poverty" model of the sixties was replaced with an urban underclass model that compared black Americans unfavorably with Asian Americans and West Indian immigrants. The mainstream reaction to the black power movement was not fear of black domination so much as a fear of the disintegration of the reigning ideology.
