Starkey rearranges our understanding of American law by showing us how doctrines like equal protection, due process, and states’ rights have been deployed to fail Black citizens and shield white supremacy ... With subtle revision, Part II could have been published as a stand-alone work comparable in wisdom and timeliness to Ari Berman’s Give Us the Ballot (2015) and Carol Anderson’s dynamic duo, White Rage (2016) and One Person, No Vote (2018) ... Starkey’s work bears the imprint of legal thinkers like Derrick Bell, Michelle Alexander, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, as well as the cultural critics Saidiya Hartman, Du Bois, and James Baldwin ... Starkey’s sharpest interventions come in his deconstruction of constitutional 'intent' and the Supreme Court’s garbled legalese. His critique redeems what Baldwin termed the 'unwritten and despised' history of Black resistance to judicial betrayal. By foregrounding that resistance, Starkey demolishes the myth of color-blind jurisprudence and lays bare SCOTUS’s central role in preserving caste-based inequalities in American life.
[Filled with] extensive research ... Starkey masterfully uses a unique blend of storytelling and legal documentation to share his declarations excellently.
A powerfully argued study of a legal system that favors those who 'persevere in undermining Black freedom' ... Searing indictment of judicially condoned—and even enshrined—racism in American law ... From that carefully elaborated starting point, Starkey moves on to examine some of the most critically important legal cases touching on racial justice, among them Plessy, Brown, and Bakke, always with twists of judicial interpretation that, he argues convincingly, never quite deliver promised equality to Black stakeholders in the polity.
