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Commentary

Subversive Law, Subverting Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Extract

Colorblind Injustice is an angry, ambitious, and very valuable book. In it,Kousser argues that the Second Reconstruction—that is, the post-1965 edifice of law and institutions securing essential African American and Latino civil rights and effective political voice—has been disastrously undermined, possibly mortally so, by the distorted, ignorant, or malicious (and, ultimately, to Kousser, dangerous) misinterpretations of the history of American race relations and of the meaning of the nation’s voting rights laws and Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments.The culprits in this tale include, among other members of the Rehnquist Supreme Court, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and ClarenceThomas; political scientist AbigailThernstrom,who believes that past discrimination against racial minorities never justifies raceconscious remedies; overzealous Republican (and Democratic, though more of the former than the latter) party partisans; and a lot of additional white politicians, officials, and judges ranging in localities from Los Angeles to North Carolina.

Type
Symposium on J. Morgan Kousser’s Colorblind In justice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2000 

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