Over the twentieth century, a college education increasingly functioned as a ladder to professional occupations and ample-paying employment. Until the GI Bill, access to college remained tightly limited, although the expansion mostly served White matriculants.

In the 1970s, tuition, room, and board (TRB) rates remained beyond the financial grasp of talented young adults from low-wealth families. Lois Dickson Rice, herself a first-generation college student, worked tirelessly to expand access to college and eventually persuaded Congress to fund what became known as Pell Grants. These awards were distributed inversely to household income and given directly to the recipients, who could then decide where to enroll.

At one time, maximum Pell awards could finance nearly 40 or 80 percent, respectively, of the TRB costs of attending a private or public four-year college. Over the past half century, the Pell Program has assisted tens of millions of students from marginalized communities enroll and graduate from college.

This chapter examines how the promise of Pell unraveled. Middle-class parents wondered why their kids did not benefit. The Clinton Administration shifted emphasis toward using tax policies to assist families with the cost of college. Enrollment management strategies shifted institutional aid from need-based to merit-based aid.

Six tax expenditures can trace their existence to the enactment of the federal income tax. Swept into office after nearly a half century of Republican control, Democrats moved quickly to enact a tax on incomes. Tasked to write a draft law, Rep. Cordell Hull (D-TN) wrote a fifteen-page bill that experienced modest resistance and was largely adopted. Simultaneously, the Wilson Administration was moving to segregate the federal bureaucracy as lynchings and Confederate monument building reached their apex across the country.

While all the tax expenditures clearly favored the wealthy, almost all were enacted for other equally persuasive reasons. Life insurance benefits and charitable giving were given preferential treatment as they would limit demands on public services. Preferences given to state and local bond income as well as state and local tax payments were made in deference to constitutional concerns.

Over time, these tax expenditures have taken on increased value and generated powerful allies. Attempts to close the estate step up in basis exclusion and later the exclusion on capital gains were quickly rescinded.

Most of the changes over the past half century of supposed racial reconciliation has been to make these expenditures more valuable to wealthy, mostly White households.

In 1980, the fledgling Entertainment and Sports Programming Network delivered the first live television coverage of the NFL draft. The draft would become one of the biggest events on ESPN’s and the NFL’s calendars and demonstrate to the emerging cable industry that talk sold – sometimes better than the thing being talked about. Chapter 5 recounts how ESPN, for years the leading cable channel, built a multibillion-dollar business by nurturing an obsession with scouting athletic giftedness. The talent talk allowed the network to bridge the two dominant racial ideologies of the time, color blindness and multiculturalism, and model for other cable networks and media how to turn commentary into mass entertainment.

Chapter 2 explores how racial classifications within statutory law affected who gets to vote, immigrate to the United States, self-govern, or become citizens in the years after the Fourteenth Amendment. The chapter addresses current questions related to immigration and paths to citizenship, and also focuses on the criteria that have been used to determine both the qualifications for citizenship and the rights and obligations that come with it. Sovereignty and the ability to self-govern is the core question discussed in relation to indigenous peoples. The ways in which whiteness shaped the definition and exercise of citizenship and sovereignty are introduced, emerging more fully in subsequent chapters. The debates explored here demonstrate the centrality of the consistent demand for assimilation into “American culture,” with the concomitant justification of excluding those who cannot match our expectations of citizenship due to stereotypes of their culture and “race.” Students will reckon with the significance and intention behind the framing of a singular “American culture,” and the ongoing demands for and costs of racial and cultural assimilation.

The Introduction of the book exposes students to key concepts surrounding how U.S. law has constructed and maintained the idea of race in society. Introducing the framework of individual and systemic oppression, the chapter explores the dualistic role that the law plays in the democratic process by both advancing and preventing societal change, based on how it is wielded.

Chapter 3 encourages students to struggle with how some people have been geographically separated from Whites or divided within communities based on skin color, language, or cultural markers. This chapter explores how housing and education opportunities continue to be distinct today for different racialized populations, and the legal actions that have resulted from people living in segregated communities in the United States. Building on some of the most recent research on the relationships between law and segregation, the cases and excerpts in this chapter explore the role of law in forcing people to live in isolated neighborhoods, resulting in the depression of income for some and limiting the accumulation of wealth over generations based on race. Readers are asked to consider the ways in which local, state, and federal governments are responsible for ongoing inequities in the United States based on race, and the implications of such accountability.

Chapter 1 encourages students to investigate the Constitution’s role in upholding slavery, and how political values informed those decisions. This chapter highlights the differences between global and contemporary slavery versus the race-based chattel slavery seen in the U.S. and in the Americas/Carribbean, exploring how a nation founded on competing legal claims of equality and liberty denied personhood under the law to so many. It also examines how free African Americans, and some Whites, challenged these conflicting notions, and in what ways the law – in upholding property as a key liberty – also created and maintained slavery and racial distinctions. Slavery in the U.S. has not been a static concept; the law embedded slavery, institutionalizing it as a political structure that continued to evolve after formal emancipation. Finally, competing interpretations of the Constitution continue to impact how the nation evaluates its capacity to engage with robust and equitable definitions of liberty and equality. Students are asked to consider what might be the best interpretation of the Constitution’s engagement with slavery and why such competing definitions matter.