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 East Asian community of states, having matured by the tenth century, thereafter continued to develop along somewhat independent trajectories. China settled into a distinctive late imperial form, characterized by the presence of an examination-recruited mandarin elite. Korea became more uncompromisingly Confucian; Vietnam gained independence; and Japan came to be dominated by uniquely Japanese warrior elites: the Shogun and samurai. China, under the Song Dynasty, became a major center of maritime trade and advanced technology. In the thirteenth century the Mongols erupted into East Asia, conquering China and reducing Korea to a subordinate “son-in-law” state. The Mongols, ironically, helped expose Koreans to Neo-Confucianism, and under increasing Confucian influence, Chinese-style family patterns became the new “tradition” in Korea. In Japan, conflict between leading warrior families resulted in the epochal Gempei War (1180–1185), from which Minamoto Yoritomo emerged victorious and became Japan’s first Shogun. By the end of this period, growing volumes of maritime trade ushered East Asia into the Early Modern age.

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.

In the late eighteenth century, the British East India Company discovered that opium grown in colonial India sold well in China, where it was, however, illegal. Mounting tensions caused by the illegal trade led to an Opium War in 1840–1842, won by Britain and leading to the establishment of a “semi-colonial” treaty port system in China. Mid nineteenth-century China was also wracked by multiple rebellions, including the massive Christian Taiping Rebellion. Yet the Qing Dynasty not only survived but also experienced some revitalization. Meanwhile, in 1854 a U.S. Navy squadron pressured Japan to end its seclusion policy, and a similar treaty port system was established in Japan as well. In 1867 the last Shogun resigned, and in 1868 power was returned to the Japanese imperial government in the Meiji Restoration. Meiji Japan embraced rapid Westernization in the name of an allegedly primordial imperial line. Japan then pressured Korea into granting it treaty port privileges, and, after defeating China in a war fought over Korea, Japan eventually reduced Korea to an outright colony. Starting with the seizure of Saigon in 1859, Vietnam was colonized by France.

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.

Far from being “the end of history,” the post-Cold War era has seen dramatic new developments in East Asia. China rose with astonishing speed to superpower status, and reasserted Communist Party control after a period when it seemed in danger of becoming irrelevant to China’s new consumer society. China is now openly challenging the United States and western Europe for global leadership. China has also, surprisingly, witnessed some revival of old traditions such as Confucianism. South Korea has captivated the world with its attractive modern pop culture, as well as with the products of its industry such as smartphones and automobiles. South Korea has also ended authoritarian rule and become a democracy (while North Korea, on the other hand, still seems to be mired in the Cold War). Japan has remained economically stagnant after the bursting of its stock market and real estate bubbles in 1990, but Japan has also made itself a globalizing center of exciting new pop culture. Vietnam, meanwhile, consolidated its socialist reunification, and implemented some of the same kinds of market-based economic reforms that had been pioneered in China.

The Cold War divided East Asia. Beginning around 1978, the communist People’s Republic of China implemented market-based reforms that unleashed spectacular economic takeoff, but which were not accompanied by corresponding political reforms. After a bloody war, Korea has remained divided between an impoverished and isolationistic communist regime in the north and the non-communist south. Japan’s postwar “developmental state” economy boomed, and by 1981 Japan had become the world’s largest automaker. Trade wars with the U.S. led to a sharp increase in the exchange value of the yen, however, and the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy in 1990. In Vietnam, after the defeat and withdrawal of French colonial forces, massive American military intervention in support of the non-communist south became deeply controversial. Eventually the U.S. disengaged, and Vietnam was reunified by communist northern forces in 1975. The Cold War therefore ended, somewhat surprisingly, with communist regimes still entrenched in East Asia in mainland China, Vietnam, and North Korea.

This chapter relates the legendary origins of the modern East Asian nations, and the importance of those legends to modern national identities. It then reconstructs the somewhat different story of the origins of Bronze Age civilization in East Asia based on the archeological evidence, starting in the Central Plain of what is today north China. As a fundamental feature, the languages of East Asia are discussed. This chapter argues that it was widespread shared regional use of the largely non-phonetic Chinese written characters, despite great linguistic diversity, that gave East Asia much of its cultural coherence and distinctiveness, as well as much shared vocabulary.

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.

Much of the foreign investment that has fueled China’s post-reform economic boom has come from overseas Chinese people, with Hong Kong serving as China’s largest single source of foreign direct investment. In addition, there is extensive sharing of popular culture throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Hong Kong, a British colony since 1842, was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under the formula “one country, two systems” – supposedly allowing Hong Kong a continued degree of autonomy. But a controversial extradition agreement in 2019 sparked mass protests, which Beijing reacted to in 2020 by imposing a new National Security Law that brought Hong Kong more firmly under control. Taiwan, meanwhile, became the last refuge for the Chinese Nationalist Party after it lost the Civil War to the Communists in 1949. In the 1980s–1990s, opposition political parties were legalized, and Taiwan evolved into a genuine multiparty democracy. Because Beijing insists that Taiwan is a renegade province that must be recovered eventually, and because Taiwan is a flourishing democracy that now produces more than 60 percent of all the world’s computer chips, Taiwan is a place of great global strategic concern.

Chapter 7 queries how the law addresses evolving concepts such as intentionality, intersectionality, and multiracial identities. In a common law system, legal precedents are static even though public understanding of race in society has expanded dramatically. This chapter explores the historic requirement to demonstrate evidence of an intent to discriminate to justify intervention by the law, which emerged from a traditional understanding of racism as personal and purposeful. Despite the potential harm of neutral policies creating disparate damages in racialized communities, this barrier to governmental action and its concomitant justification for neglect, matters. Students will explore the inability of the law to address multiple racial identities simultaneously and the legal consequences of ignoring intersectionality. The text considers a proposed constitutional amendment to address this limitation. Finally, the law’s hesitance to address multiracial identities is explored, questioning whether current legal structure is adequate to address contemporary understandings of racism and racial discrimination.