Anti-affirmative-action rationales are new theories justifying old racial job exclusion.

Evidence

White workers and professionals had come to widely believe that they must secretly help their racial fellows in the job market, on the false assumption that government policies were helping Blacks more than Whites. Discriminating Whites had replaced the “old black-inferiority rationale for exclusion” by a more sophisticated affirmative action rationale for exclusion. It was a new racist theory to justify an old job discrimination. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1117

Categorization

• XREF: This is a textbook instance of Kendi’s central inversion — policy and self-interested discrimination first, then a ‘new racist theory’ produced to justify it — directly usable for the reader’s stated goal of testing the causal reversal.
• SEED: Angle: the affirmative-action rationale for exclusion as a case study in how progressive-sounding justifications get repurposed for discrimination — a modern echo worth tracing to present-day hiring discourse.