Critical Race Theory, Voting Rights History, and Structural Determinism

Concept of Sankofa and Historical Framing

• Definition and Symbolism of Sankofa:

  • Sankofa is represented by the image of a bird whose body faces forward while its head is turned backward.

  • It originates from Ghanaian culture in West Africa.

  • The core Akan proverb translates to: "Go back and fetch it. Then carry it forward," or "It is not wrong to go back for what you left behind."

  • The concept establishes that history is not simply behind us or disconnected from the present; rather, history provides the essential context, precursor, and foundation for understanding the present and directing the future.

• Luggage Metaphor for Knowledge:

  • Packing luggage for a journey represents carrying foundational knowledge forward.

  • While baggage must occasionally be unburdened or unpacked, travelers need critical items to carry on and change into as their journey progresses.

• Pedagogical Objective:

  • The fundamental purpose of academic analysis through critical frameworks is not to dictate what to think, but rather how to think.

  • Students must cultivate critical analysis skills to deconstruct, evaluate, and digest information encountered via social media, family, and peer networks rather than accepting assertions uncritically.

Core Tenets of Critical Race Theory

• Permanence of Racism (Derrick Bell):

  • Racism is an enduring, foundational feature of American social, legal, and political life rather than an anomalous deviation.

  • Racism does not simply disappear; instead, it adapts and changes form over time to preserve prevailing hierarchies.

• Interest Convergence:

  • Racial progress and legal remedies for minorities tend to be enacted by the dominant society only when such advancements simultaneously align with and serve the interests of the white majority or those in power.

  • Historically, the interests of marginalized groups align with national or dominant interests during specific sociopolitical windows.

  • Example: The ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ($1954$) dismantling legal school segregation occurred in the context of the Cold War, wherein the United States needed to repair and protect its international democratic image abroad against Soviet critique.

  • Example: The shift in Northern focus during the Civil War, culminating in the Emancipation Proclamation, transformed the conflict from solely preserving the Union into explicitly freeing enslaved populations once doing so served military and geopolitical objectives.

• Counter-Storytelling:

  • The lived realities, oral traditions, and experiential narratives of people of color constitute substantive, empirical evidence capable of challenging, dismantling, and correcting official historical narratives.

Detailed Examination of Analytical Lenses

• Critique of Color Blindness:

  • Scholarly Origin: Formulated by Critical Race Theory scholars including Kimberlé Crenshaw and Neil Gotanda.

  • Theoretical Definition: The legal and social assertion that race should be treated as entirely irrelevant in statutory law and policy under the rationale of creating a neutral system. CRT demonstrates that seemingly race-neutral rules on paper perpetuate and entrench existing structural inequalities.

  • Plain-Words Formulation: Equal treatment of unequal situations keeps conditions unequal.

• Structural Determinism:

  • Scholarly Origin: Conceptualized by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.

  • Theoretical Definition: The principle that an institutional system's internal structure—including its statutory rules, categorical boundaries, operational methods, and modes of thinking—renders it structurally incapable of recognizing, confronting, or repairing systemic injustices, regardless of whether individual actors within the system possess good intentions.

  • Plain-Words Formulation: The system produces the exact results that it was constructed to produce.

  • Proverbial Analogy: Addressing massive systemic structures requires incremental, methodical deconstruction ("eating an elephant one bite at a time").

Historical Timeline of American Voting Rights

• Foundational Principle:

  • Every codified civil and legal right established on paper originated from deliberate, grassroots community organizing, agitation, and collective struggle.

• Civil War and Reconstruction Era ($1861$–$1870$):

  • $1861$–$1865$: The American Civil War concludes in $1865$.

  • Civil War Constitutional Amendments: Designed to integrate formerly enslaved African Americans into the body politic.

  • $13^{\text{th}}$ Amendment ($1865$): Formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

  • $14^{\text{th}}$ Amendment ($1868$): Conferred national and state citizenship to African Americans and established the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses.

  • $15^{\text{th}}$ Amendment ($1870$): Prohibited states and the federal government from denying or abridging a citizen's right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

  • Enforcement Realities of the $15^{\text{th}}$ Amendment: Contrary to common belief, the amendment did not positively guarantee the universal right to vote to all citizens; it solely barred racial discrimination in voting qualifications. Furthermore, it applied exclusively to men; women were not enfranchised until the passage of the $19^{\text{th}}$ Amendment in $1920$.

  • Lack of Enforcement: Congress did not establish statutory enforcement mechanisms at ratification. Formal statutory enforcement required the passage of the Enforcement Acts of $1870$ and the Ku Klux Klan Act of $1871$.

  • State Ratification Discrepancies: The first state to ratify the $15^{\text{th}}$ Amendment was Nevada in March $1869$; the final state to formally ratify it was Tennessee in $1997$.

• Jim Crow Retrenchment ($1890\text{s}$–$1960\text{s}$):

  • A $70$-year period characterized by state-sponsored disenfranchisement and white supremacy.

  • Disenfranchisement mechanisms included poll taxes, grandfather clauses, arbitrary literacy tests, all-white primary elections, physical intimidation, and state-sanctioned racial violence.

  • $1896$: The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson established the constitutional doctrine of "separate but equal."

• Civil Rights Era Enactments:

  • $1954$: Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, ruling that de jure segregation in public schools is inherently unequal.

  • $1965$: The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of $1965$ was enacted following direct civil rights actions, notably the Selma to Montgomery marches and the "Bloody Sunday" state violence inflicted upon John Lewis and fellow demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

• Modern Jurisprudential Rollback:

  • $2013$: The Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder invalidated the Section $4\text{(b)}$ coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act of $1965$, effectively disabling the Section $5$ preclearance regime that mandated jurisdictions with extensive records of racial voting discrimination obtain federal approval before implementing changes to voting laws.

  • $2026$: The Supreme Court case Louisiana v. Callais reconsidered the legality of majority-minority voting districts, testing the bounds of race-conscious legislative redistricting under the VRA.

• The Cycle of Progress and Backlash (The Accordion Pattern):

  • Civil rights history behaves like an accordion—expanding rights forward, followed by systemic compression, backlash, and political retrenchment.

  • Derrick Bell observed that when minority groups achieve political, legislative, or legal gains, the dominant power structure regularly pushes back to reassert systemic control.

  • Political Taste Buds: Institutional shifts depend heavily upon prevailing political winds—whether national and local political bodies possess the appetite to support civil liberties or choose instead to roll back protections when political priorities shift.

Structural Disenfranchisement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

• Mechanisms of Evasion:

  • Constitutional amendments on paper proved ineffective in the Deep South due to widespread statutory evasion and administrative discretion.

  • Statutory laws alone cannot govern individual prejudice; systems allow bad-faith actors to construct facially neutral hurdles that circumvent statutory intentions.

• The Louisiana Literacy Test of $1964$:

  • Used by white registrars to arbitrarily disqualify Black citizens seeking to register to vote.

  • Sample Procedural Questions:

  • "Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence."

  • "Draw a line under the last word in this line."

  • "Draw five circles that [have] one common interlocking part."

  • Structural Mechanics: The instructions are intentionally convoluted, confusing, and ambiguous, paired with strict time limits and a total absence of an objective answer key. The administering official holds absolute discretion to decide whether an applicant passes or fails, ensuring that Black applicants are excluded regardless of their education, literacy, or accuracy.

• Quantifiable Impact of the Voting Rights Act:

  • In $1964$, prior to the Voting Rights Act, Black voter registration in Mississippi stood at $6.7\%$.

  • By $1967$, just $3$ years after federal registrars and preclearance mechanisms were enacted under the VRA, Black voter registration in Mississippi increased dramatically to $59.8\%$.

  • Narrowing, rolling back, or striking down voting rights legislation halts forward momentum and precipitates rapid backward regression in registration and representation.

Institutional History and Social Mobility at Cal State LA

• Student-Led Institutional History:

  • $1967$: The Black Student Union (BSU) at Cal State LA organized and demanded the creation of a Black Studies program, accompanied by substantial increases in Black student enrollment and faculty hires.

  • $1968$: A sustained five-month student strike secured the establishment of the academic Black Studies department at Cal State LA.

  • $1969$: The Chicano Studies department was formally established at Cal State LA, becoming the second-oldest Chicano Studies program in the nation.

  • $2020$: California enacted state legislation establishing Ethnic Studies as a mandatory graduation requirement across the entire California State University (CSU) system.

• Upward Mobility:

  • Cal State LA is ranked number $1$ in the United States for upward economic mobility.

  • Upward mobility denotes an institution's capacity to elevate students from lower socioeconomic brackets into sustained financial security and middle-class stability, allowing them to transcend the socioeconomic limitations of their birth, neighborhood, and zip code.

Practical Scenarios: Distinguishing Color Blindness and Structural Determinism

• Scenario A: A school dress code bans "distracting hairstyles" and applies the rule to everyone equally.

  • Color Blindness: The rule appears universally neutral and impartial on paper ("applies to everyone equally"), but ignores the unequal reality that natural textures, protective braids, beads, and cultural hair arrangements worn by Black and Brown girls are disproportionately deemed "distracting."

  • Structural Determinism: The structural definitions, dress code boundaries, and behavioral expectations of the school were built around Eurocentric cultural norms. As a result, the code operates automatically to penalize minority students, producing unequal disciplinary outcomes by design.

• Scenario B: A company fills every opening only through referrals from its current employees.

  • Structural Determinism: Even when existing personnel harbor no malicious intent and genuinely desire to locate qualified candidates, an exclusively internal referral structure predictably clones and reproduces the demographic, socioeconomic, and racial makeup of the existing workforce.

• Scenario C: A hiring panel scores every candidate on "cultural fit" with no written criteria.

  • Critique of Color Blindness / Structural Determinism: Without concrete, objective, written assessment metrics, "cultural fit" functions as an unexamined proxy for belonging to the dominant in-group. It licenses arbitrary personal preference, rewarding candidates who mirror the panel's demographics while systematically screening out candidates from diverse backgrounds.

• Scenario D: A voter qualification test consists of $30$ questions in $10$ minutes, identical for every applicant, with no answer key.

  • Color Blindness: Promotes a facade of absolute procedural fairness—every individual takes the identical test within the identical time parameters.

  • Structural Determinism: Serves as a classic model of structural determinism. Because there is no objective answer key, the systemic architecture leaves complete evaluative discretion to the test administrator. The system is structurally engineered to ensure that arbitrary, biased gatekeeping determines the outcome regardless of the applicant's test performance.

Contemporary Jurisprudence: Louisiana v. Callais and Redistricting

• The Ruling:

  • In a $6$-to-$3$ decision, the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court struck down a newly drawn congressional map in Louisiana featuring a second majority-Black congressional district.

  • The Court held that the Louisiana state legislature relied too heavily on race when drafting the congressional district boundaries.

• Substantive Impacts and Predictions:

  • Statutory Weakening: The decision directly weakens the core mechanisms and enforcement reach of the Voting Rights Act of $1965$.

  • Nationwide Threat: Legal analysts indicate the ruling opens the door to expansive legal challenges across the nation targeting established majority-Black and majority-Latino legislative districts.

  • Direct State Policy Consequences: In Illinois, state lawmakers immediately dropped a proposed state constitutional amendment regarding legislative redistricting protections. Lawmakers halted the legislative proposal pending comprehensive review by legal scholars, including Northwestern University law professor Michael Kang, to evaluate the implications of the Supreme Court's ruling on state redistricting practices.

Questions & Discussion

• Activity: One-Word Emotional Temperature of the Electorate:

  • Student Contributions: When prompted to summarize their immediate gut reaction to the state of the nation on the eve of the election in exactly one word, students provided: Pointless, Impactful, Choices, Alive, Confused, Nervous, Crucial, Curious, Divided, Empowered, Vulnerable, Fraught, Awful, Responsibility, Anxious, and Powerful.

  • Peer Discussion on Electoral Trust: During peer-to-peer sharing, a student observed that they harbor deep skepticism toward mail-in voting because mail-in ballots are easily discarded or manipulated, while noting that democratic shifts concerning Roe are being visibly mobilized across social media and physical posters.

• Sankofa Applications: What Students Carry Forward:

  • Parental Philosophy on Success: A student shared a maternal principle: "You can go to the best city, the best school, the best everything, but if you do not put yourself forward, you will not succeed." A dedicated student will achieve more at a community college than an unmotivated student at an elite, prestigious institution because success depends on individual mindset ("blooming where you are planted").

  • Cultural and Faith Traditions: A student highlighted carrying their high school tradition of prayer into the university setting, finding that the campus community embraced and integrated this practice.

  • Linguistic Ties: A student described the Spanish language as an indispensable cultural anchor, noting that encountering Spanish-speaking peers on campus creates an immediate communal bond.

  • Legacy of Scholarly Resistance: A student described how their father, an author, poet, and former Cal State LA student, challenged a professor in real time when confronting academic discrimination. He recorded class lectures for research and accountability, inspiring the student to view research, poetry, and analytical writing as their personal "superpower."

• Generational Sacrifices Enabling Academic Seats:

  • First-Generation Pursuit of Public Service: A student shared that their parents immigrated from Mexico and insisted that their children attend college, viewing higher education as an indispensable path to financial stability and personal elevation. Both the student and their sister chose careers in law enforcement, supported by their parents' emphasis on community service, active engagement, and social empathy, aiming to positively reshape community-police interactions.

  • Broad Extracurricular Exposure: A student shared that their single mother consistently enrolled them in swimming, singing, piano, mathematics, and Spanish courses whenever an interest was voiced. This broad exposure provided them with clear career direction and confidence in navigating their academic future.

• Analysis of Cyclical Civil Rights Patterns:

  • Prompt: Why does civil rights history follow an ebb-and-flow pattern where racial progress is met with systematic pushback?

  • Student Response: Societal backlash occurs because granting legal and political power to marginalized groups threatens existing power structures. As minority populations grow and claim civil rights, the dominant power structure reacts by pushing back and enacting restrictive laws to preserve its dominance.