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.

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.

Chapter 4 examines the consequences when the state does not protect the security of people within its realm because of their race, and how this negligence intersects with the contemporary criminal justice system. The chapter focuses on current arguments surrounding Black Lives Matter and similar movements in Latino and Native communities regarding state violence against communities of color. The primary sources examine several criminal justice protections provided under the Constitution, consider the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirements of state and federal governments, and question how the government protects the people against itself and from White majorities. Readers may engage with the continuing debates around the responsibility of governments to ensure that policing is not racialized and consider the most just specific policies or legal interpretations focusing on the accountability of state actors. The chapter conncludes by exploring the potential of the constitutional requirement of a jury of peers for criminal prosecution may hinder the exercise of state-sanctioned racialized violence.

Chapter 6 investigates the legal options to ameliorate historic approaches to race, allowing the United States to more closely align with its national ideals. Over time, different branches of government developed strategies to ameliorate the damage caused by institutionalized racism. However, courts have wrestled with the question of how these remedies might reify race – making it more central to American life – or destroy the unique aspects of communities, forged by their shared experiences fo race, in an effort to provide greater equality. The chapter asks if the law and Constitution require public institutions to be color-blind in their treatment of race, or does the racial history of the nation demand color-conscious remedies. The text traces the evolution of affirmative action, especially in education, as a means of compensating for generational exclusion and the Supreme Court’s changing perception on color blindness as a constitutional principle.. The treatment of those U.S. territories that have not been granted statehood, where the majority of the population are people of color is explored. Finally, recent expansions to Native sovereignty are examined and the reader is asked to consider the impact of such protections on Native equality.

Chapter 5 queries how cultural and community identities legally intersect with issues of race. Here readers explore how the law wrestles with the relationship between laws and cultural customs and norms within racialized communities. The text asks the reader to determine if the law should treat discrimination against cultural expressions frequently connected to race, such as hair style or language, with the same scrutiny as racial discrimination. Scholars and the courts have disagree about the relationship between the two and the text engages this debate by presenting different scholarly attempts to resolve this conflict. In this chapter students will explore the statutorily protected capacity of Native communities to privilege the adoption of children of indigenous descent into Native families over White families. Another significant question emerges from the excerpted cases of whether Native tribal communities in the United States are racial or political entities. The answer to this question impacts core questions of political autonomy and sovereignty, as well as the social constructions of other racial identities.

The Conclusion to the book introduces two new metaphors that force readers to consider their own personal and collective responsibility in addressing the relationship between race and the law in the United States. Students should leave the text with a clearer personal understanding of the national dynamics around racial discourse in the United States and, ideally, a better understanding of both the potential and limitations of the law in solving societal problems within a democratic system.