Political Inequality, Voting Rights, and Systemic Racism

Vocabulary flashcards reviewing political inequality, voting rights legislation, Supreme Court decisions, disenfranchisement mechanisms, and sociological models of systemic racism.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Federal legislation that eliminated discriminatory state provisions for voting, enforced the 15th Amendment, and is regarded by many scholars as making America a full democracy for the first time.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act

A nationwide provision anchored in the 15th Amendment that prohibits any denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

A provision establishing that certain jurisdictions with histories of voting discrimination must obtain federal "preclearance" before enacting new changes to election laws.

Coral Anderson

Scholar who examines the disparate effects of historical and contemporary "race neutral" laws, as well as the impact of the Supreme Court's 2013 changes to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Black Reconstruction and Politics

A transformative post-Civil War era during which approximately 1,500 Black politicians were elected to local, state, and federal public offices.

W.E.B. Du Bios (Black Reconstruction, 1935)

A landmark 1935 historical work that challenged and rewrote prevailing portrayals by white historians who had depicted Reconstruction as corrupt, a travesty, and an utter failure.

Redemption

The historical backlash following Reconstruction aimed at evading the 14th and 15th Amendment constitutional protections of civil rights for Black Americans.

Wilmington Coup (1898)

An 1898 white supremacist takeover where perpetrators issued a declaration, burned down a Black newspaper, ousted elected Black city officials, jailed leaders "for own safety" before expelling them, and caused thousands of Black citizens to flee.

"The Mississippi Plan"

A 1902 strategy championed in Virginia by Senator and newspaper publisher Carter Glass designed to establish white supremacy by achieving unconstitutional discriminatory goals through ostensibly "race-neutral" constitutional means.

Disenfranchisement Strategies

Mechanisms used to suppress Black voter registration and participation, including poll taxes, literacy tests, "understanding" clauses, voter purges, and physical violence and intimidation at the polls.

Interest Convergence (Derrick Bell)

A legal theory formulated regarding Brown v. Board of Education arguing that Black civil rights progress occurs when Black interests align with white elite interests, such as countering Soviet Cold War propaganda that weaponized American racism globally.

Fannie Lou Hanner

Civil rights activist and leader within the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), founded in 1964 to protest all-white primaries, who gave powerful testimony on Black voting rights before the Credentials Committee in Washington, D.C.

Shelby County v. Holder (2013)

A landmark Supreme Court decision that invalidated the formula used for Section 5 preclearance under the Voting Rights Act, granting states immediate leeway to alter voting and election rules.

The "Umbrella" Metaphor

A critique of the Shelby v. Holder ruling stating that striking down preclearance because discrimination had decreased is like "throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm because one is not getting wet."

Racial Gerrymandering vs. Partisan Gerrymandering

The redrawing of electoral districts based on race (which is illegal) versus political affiliation (which is currently legal), both incentivized by political parties seeking to "fix elections."

Alabama Voter ID Law (2011)

A restrictive voter identification statute passed in 2011 that was withheld from implementation until the immediate day after the Shelby v. Holder decision removed federal preclearance constraints.

Administrative Burdens in Voting

Institutional barriers that suppress voting access, such as disproportionately longer polling line wait times for Black voters compared to white voters and restrictive registration practices.

Felon Disenfranchisement

Laws revoking the voting rights of individuals convicted of felony offenses, exemplified by Florida legislators overturning a popular reenfranchisement vote and Iowa's lifetime ban leading to the lowest Black voting eligibility rate in 2020.

For the People Act

Proposed federal legislation aimed at countering state voter suppression by establishing automatic voter registration, overturning restrictive voting laws, and outlawing partisan gerrymandering.

Louisianan v. Callais

A Supreme Court redistricting case arising after lawmakers created only 1 majority-Black district out of 6 despite Black citizens comprising one-third of Louisiana's population in the 2020 census, testing the remaining enforcement powers of the VRA.

Common Model of Racism

An individualistic framework that analyzes racism primarily as psychological attitudes, prejudice, irrational thinking, or explicit interpersonal statements.

Racism as a System

A sociological perspective emphasizing that racialized social systems operate across multiple levels and institutional domains, using ideology to justify and reproduce unequal resource distribution.

Colorblind Racism

An ideology analyzed by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva where individuals profess abstract adherence to equal opportunity in surveys while simultaneously justifying systemic racial inequalities in extended interviews.

Audit Studies (Devah Pager)

Experimental field studies in which matched Black and white applicants apply for identical jobs with standardized resumes to measure discrimination; found that white men with criminal records received more callbacks than Black men.

The "Meso" Level

The intermediate structural level of sociological analysis where race is constructed relationally through the unequal distribution of social, psychological, and material resources.