Caitlin Wilson (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - Rutgers Law School) has posted It Has Always Been About Race: Understanding The Paradoxical State Of Voting Rights Through Historical Negligence, Colorblind Ignorance, & Structural White Supremacy on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Over time, the United States Supreme Court has steadily limited the right to vote for American citizens, facilitated by a founding document that retains anti-democratic and white supremacist tenets. An outdated Constitution founded on principles of white supremacy, outright racially discriminatory beliefs, and implicit biases, coupled with the steady erosion of proper public education leading to severely limited civic and historical knowledge within the U.S. population at large, has contributed to the rapid downfall of democracy in the United States. This essay describes these flaws and analyzes a contemporary Supreme Court voting rights case, Alexander v. S.C. State Conf. of the NAACP (2024), to illustrate the dire need for massive reform in education, voting rights legislation, and the Constitutional structures of our alleged democracy.
This essay offers an analysis of the inequity that defines the U.S. government and society, through historical neglect, educational manipulation, and an ideologically extreme Supreme Court that refuses to accept the reality of structural racism. Thus, this essay analogizes the Court's theories of "colorblind constitutionalism" and a "post-racial" society, with the erroneous "separate-but-equal" doctrine, to highlight the dangers that lie ahead and the necessity of massive reform.
