Julia Azari
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almost always applied to black women
living in cities.) Finally, as the political
scientists Michael Tesler, John Sides,
and Lynn Vavreck show in their book,
Identity Crisis, attitudes about race and
immigration motivated many o
Trump’s voters.
In other words, race has deeply
shaped—and continues to shape—both
American institutions and American
political behavior. That is problematic
enough on its own, but even worse,
the United States is stuck with institu-
tions that fail to appreciate this fact.
Civil rights legislation, particularly the
1964 Civil Rights Act, focuses on
preventing discrimination, a laudable
goal but not an entirely eective tool
for solving matters o structural racism,
such as unequal access to housing and
high-quality schools. Since the 1960s,
laws have moved even further toward
the colorblind model, with armative
action in university admissions and
proactive support for voting rights both
suering setbacks in the courts.
Not surprisingly, then, generations
o white Americans have been raised
with the idea that they are living in a
race-blind society. To the extent that
racism does exist, the argument goes,
the problem has to do with individuals
rather than the system. In reality, o
course, systematic racial disparities
persist, with black Americans experienc-
ing far worse outcomes than their white
counterparts in terms oÊ health, educa-
tion, income, and criminal justice.
Yet it is controversial to acknowledge
this reality—something that Obama
discovered when he became president.
In 2009, after the Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who is black, was
mistaken for a burglar outside his ownTHE MYTH OF COLORBLINDNESS
Finally, it is impossible to talk about the
functioning o American democracy
without considering the role o race. Many
o the United States’ political institu-
tions were designed to preserve a racial
hierarchy. The Constitution counted
slaves as three-Ãfths o a person for the
purpose o apportioning seats in the
House o Representatives, and because
the Electoral College allocated votes
using the same formula, it enhanced the
inÁuence o slave states before the
Civil War. The Federal Housing Admin-
istration, created in 1934 to insure
private mortgages, systematically discrim-
inated against black neighborhoods,
making it extremely dicult for their
residents to obtain home loans and thus
to accumulate wealth.
The legacies o such discrimination
are not hard to Ãnd. Decades o racist
public policies account for current
disparities in wealth between blacks
and whites, as the writer Ta-Nehisi
Coates pointed out in his seminal 2014
article in The Atlantic, “The Case for
Reparations.” Racism lurks behind
contemporary political behavior, too.
As research by the political scientists
Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell,
and Maya Sen has found, the legacy o
slavery still shapes politics in the South
today: whites who live in counties that
once had a high share o slaves tend to
support Republicans and are more
likely to oppose armative action.
Race has also long shaped the divergent
language politicians use to describe
rural and urban constituencies, with the
former depicted as idyllic and deserv-
ing o greater attention and the latter
as chaotic and undeserving. (Think o
the “welfare queen” trope, which is