The Fair Labor Standards Act deliberately excluded majority-Black occupations

Evidence

Black workers, however, simply weren’t part of the new wave of employment incentives and protections. By deliberately leaving majority-black occupations out of the Fair Labor Standards Act, Congress ensured that black workers would have to work for whatever wages an employer wanted to provide—and forget about raises or pensions. Employers were permitted to pay black workers less, keep them out of jobs that could be filled by white workers, and exclude them from insurance and benefit plans, all with the legal backing of the federal government. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 358

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the specific statute and its exact mechanism: the FLSA’s occupational exclusions are the race-neutral-looking doorway through which Black workers were locked out of the tax-benefit wave described in [357].
• XREF: This is one concrete instance for the reader’s argumentative frame of facial neutrality plus unequal starting conditions.