9.5: Contemporary Legal-Political Battlegrounds

The struggle over the state’s role in racial ordering continues in several key policy domains.

Voting Rights: The VRA of 1965 was a monumental achievement that dramatically increased Black voter registration. However, the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder invalidated a key provision (Section 4) that determined which jurisdictions with a history of discrimination needed federal preclearance before changing their voting laws. In the wake of this decision, many states have passed a wave of laws that restrict voting access—through strict voter ID requirements, purges of voter rolls, and reduced early voting—which disproportionately affect racial minorities (Bentele and O’Brien 2013). This represents a contemporary racial project that, while race-neutral on its face, functions to reorganize political power along racial lines.

The U.S. criminal justice system is also a paramount example of systemic racism as through the contemporary use of the carceral proxy. The “War on Drugs,” launched in the 1970s and 1980s, targeted Black and Brown communities despite similar rates of drug use across races. Michelle Alexander (2010) argues that this system functions as a “New Jim Crow,” creating a permanent undercaste through mass incarceration, felon disenfranchisement, and legal discrimination in housing and employment. Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of White Americans (Nellis 2021). This system is sustained by a feedback loop between law enforcement practices, punitive legislation, and media portrayals that link crime to people of color.

U.S. immigration policy has also always been a racial project, determining who is worthy of becoming American. The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act abolished national-origins quotas but also established new restrictions that criminalized migration, particularly from the Western Hemisphere (Massey and Pren 2012). Contemporary debates over immigration are saturated with racialized narratives that paint Latino and other non-White immigrants as criminal threats (Chavez 2013). Policies like “Remain in Mexico” and the repealing of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) create a legally precarious population, reinforcing a racialized boundary between “true” Americans and perpetual foreigners.

In even more recent instances, the Trump Administration has imposed massive Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) sweeps, seemingly targeting a whole host of individuals that do not meet the proximate the White ideal. Many immigration advocates have noted that these ICE agents used racial profiling as their main indicator in distinguishing who should be apprehended. These sweeps have been particularly difficult on the Latinx community, not necessarily identifying individuals due to criminal arrest warrants or status, but more commonly by darker phenotypes and even the sound of spoken Spanish.