White Men’s Law recounts and explores the legal and extralegal means by which systemic White racism has kept Black Americans “in their place” from slavery to police and vigilante killings of Black men and women, from 1619 to the present. The book argues that African Americans have always been held back by systemic racism in all major institutions—especially the legal and educational systems—that hold power over them. Based on a wide range of sources, from the painful words of former slaves to Supreme Court decisions and test scores that reveal how our education system has failed Black children ... More

White Men’s Law recounts and explores the legal and extralegal means by which systemic White racism has kept Black Americans “in their place” from slavery to police and vigilante killings of Black men and women, from 1619 to the present. The book argues that African Americans have always been held back by systemic racism in all major institutions—especially the legal and educational systems—that hold power over them. Based on a wide range of sources, from the painful words of former slaves to Supreme Court decisions and test scores that reveal how our education system has failed Black children, the book examines the various ways White racists justify and perpetuate their superior position in American society. The book is framed around the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1935. An illiterate Black farmhand, Stacy was accused of assaulting a White woman and was lynched by a deputy sheriff and a mob that fired seventeen bullets into his lifeless body. White Men’s Law poses a critical question: What historical forces preceded and followed this and thousands more lynchings that show the damaging—and often deadly—impact of systemic racism on Black Americans? After recounting struggles over racism from the first shipment of slaves to colonial Virginia until the present, it concludes with a look at efforts by President Joe Biden to “root out systemic racism” in both public and private institutions and the barriers those efforts face from entrenched racism in those institutions.