Colorblind Injustice
Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction
by J. Morgan Kousser

608 pp., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 10 tables, 17 figs., notes, bibl., index
January 1999
ISBN: 0-8078-2431-3 Hardcover $65.00
ISBN: 0-8078-4738-0 Paperback $29.95

   

Kousser argues that it is not culture, but rather institutions and institutional rules that have shaped American race relations over the past century. He presents a series of case studies detailing the manipulation of electoral rules and judicial decisions to disadvantage minority voters.

"Colorblind Injustice is an indispensable guide to the uses of discrimination and fraud against racial and ethnic minorities in American politics, especially since the Second Reconstruction."--C. Vann Woodward, Yale University

"Colorblind Injustice should be required reading for anyone--scholar, lawyer, or judge--working in the field of voting rights. It combines meticulous historical case studies of race and the political system with penetrating analysis of contemporary legal doctrine regarding vote dilution and race-conscious redistricting. Colorblind Injustice is an absolute model of what interdisciplinary scholarship should be: informative, thought-provoking, and open-minded."--Pamela S. Karlan, Stanford University Law School

"Colorblind Injustice connects meticulous details of politics with the largest, most significant themes in the nation's history. Fulfilling the role of the public intellectual to speak truth to power, Kousser presents original explanations and observations on topics ranging from the First Reconstruction to the most recent Supreme Court cases on voting rights. He challenges both the 'colorblind' school of academics and the 'conservative' majority on the Supreme Court, which he demonstrates is really quite radical. This stunning achievement of scholarship is as deeply researched as it is deeply felt and will change the way historians think about American race relations and public policy."--Vernon Burton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Challenging recent trends both in historical scholarship and in Supreme Court decisions on civil rights, J. Morgan Kousser criticizes the Court's "postmodern equal protection" and demonstrates that legislative and judicial history still matter for public policy.

Offering an original interpretation of the failure of the First Reconstruction (after the Civil War) by comparing it with the relative success of the Second (after World War II), Kousser argues that institutions and institutional rules--not customs, ideas, attitudes, culture, or individual behavior--have been the primary forces shaping American race relations throughout the country's history. Using detailed case studies of redistricting decisions and the tailoring of electoral laws from Los Angeles to the Deep South, he documents how such rules were designed to discriminate against African Americans and Latinos.

Kousser contends that far from being colorblind, Shaw v. Reno (1993) and subsequent "racial gerrymandering" decisions of the Supreme Court are intensely color-conscious. Far from being conservative, he argues, the five majority justices and their academic supporters are unreconstructed radicals who twist history and ignore current realities. A more balanced view of that history, he insists, dictates a reversal of Shaw and a return to the promise of both Reconstructions.

J. Morgan Kousser is professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology and author of The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910. He has served as an expert witness in nineteen federal voting rights cases.


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