Race and Voting in the United States

Catalog description

This course will introduce students to the history of and contemporary fight for voting rights in the United States. We will begin with a brief overview of historical struggles over access to the ballot box, up through and including the 15th Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The bulk of the course will focus on the contemporary context of voting rights, looking specifically at recent Supreme Court decisions, and include scholarship about white backlash against the growing political power of Americans of color. We will examine both laws with discriminatory intent and facially-neutral laws that nonetheless have racially disparate outcomes. Of course, Americans of color have always organized and fought for their rights as citizens. As such, we will pay close attention to the agency and power of these groups. This course specifically attends to how voting laws both reflect and codify structural iniquities in the American context. While we focus on race in this class, we will use an intersectional lens to discuss how different laws disproportionately burden different identities.