This piece is part of “America in the balance: The fight for our history and future,” a special series from MS NOW that explores where we are as a nation as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence promised liberty to people it enslaved, and at the 250th anniversary of that signing, Americans are confronted with uncomfortable questions, among them, why the civil rights framework we built to enforce our founding document’s promise of liberty continues to fall short.
The answer is in our civil rights architecture. We built a jurisprudence that, by identifying violations and punishing wrongdoers, mostly seeks to bring a halt to discrimination after it occurs. To be sure, that architecture has produced indispensable gains, but our country declared racism illegal while leaving in place the infrastructure that produces racial inequality: the land use decisions that segregate neighborhoods, the transportation systems that isolate communities from opportunity, the housing and lending policies that concentrate wealth and poverty, the schools that reflect those patterns of exclusion and the public institutions that distribute resources unevenly across race and place.
The civil rights framework we built to enforce our founding document’s promise of liberty continues to fall short.
As long as those systems continue to shape where people live, learn, work, travel and access opportunity, discrimination will continue to be reproduced, even when individual acts of bias are prohibited.
The evidence is clear that by itself, prohibiting discrimination cannot fulfill our founding promises. Racial inequality, which persists in 2026, was built from the ground up, so the system of racial justice to combat it must be built from the ground up, too. This 250th year of our country taught us this lesson well; the Supreme Court further gutted the Voting Rights Act, one of the few civil rights laws drafted to help prevent discrimination from happening.
More than a decade ago, the court struck down the section of the Voting Rights Act that required states and localities with a documented history of discriminatory voting practices to obtain federal “preclearance” before changing their voting laws. In April’s regrettable Louisiana v. Callais ruling, it gutted the section drafted to ensure fair representation for Black and other marginalized voters. The formal right to vote still exists, yes. But when the infrastructure of democratic participation is torn down — when polling places close, voter rolls are purged and districts are redrawn to dilute marginalized voters’ political power — the formal right is hollow. A right to vote has little meaning without an infrastructure around it that makes it real.
The rush by multiple Southern states to dilute the voting strength of marginalized voters after the Callais ruling was a demonstration that the Voting Rights Act, as it was written, is still needed.
The Supreme Court’s body blow to the Voting Rights Act not only represents the erosion of voting protections but the abandonment of a model of racial justice that pairs the prohibition of discrimination with the prevention of it, a model that is necessary if we are to come closer to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
Not only do we need to restore the Voting Rights Act, but we also need more similarly constructive civil rights laws that reorient our racial justice framework. That is, we need to move beyond civil rights law that focus on discriminatory intent toward richer analyses that ask whether, regardless of intent, a law, policy or institution predictably produces racialized disadvantage. Such a racial justice framework would acknowledge that many racial harms are not just individual but also collective. For example, the displacement of a community, the devaluation of its property, the destruction of its infrastructure. A racial justice framework would treat the design of transportation, housing, environmental protection, public investment and education as a matter of constitutional significance, not merely technical policy.
We’re in another reconstruction moment, and we need the same things the country needed during its previous reconstructions.
A state that adopts policies focused on affirmative obligations aims not only to refrain from discrimination, but to promote full participation in civic and economic life. Equity impact assessments, participatory planning requirements, community stabilization policies and forward-looking redesign mandates, for example, can help ensure that public systems sustain, rather than undermine, democratic inclusion and belonging.
None of this is radical but is instead a return to what this country did at its most expansive moments of democratic ambition. Reconstruction spawned the building of public schools, voting rights protections and federal civil rights enforcement. The New Deal — another kind of reconstruction — reshaped the relationships between government and economic security, and built social security, unemployment insurance, bank deposit insurance and more. The Civil Rights era — yet a third moment of reconstruction — brought an end to legally sanctioned segregation while also expanding access to jobs, housing, education and political power. In each of those moments, equality became more durable because it was embedded in the structures of everyday life.
We’re in another reconstruction moment now, and we need the same things the country needed during those previous reconstructions. To get us started, we need to protect meaningful political participation, strengthen the agencies that enforce our civil rights laws and invest in the public infrastructure that makes opportunity real.
The semiquincentennial has produced no shortage of commentary about the gap between America’s promises and its reality. Most of it is diagnostic. This call is something different: a demand for a more ambitious account of what equality requires and a demand for more ambitious action to make those requirements a reality.
If we truly want to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, we cannot just defend against discrimination. We must build a society that makes discrimination unthinkable and justice inevitable. That is the work this anniversary demands. Because you don’t respond to a demolition by mourning. You respond by building.
The post America’s 250th year was horrible for civil rights. But there’s a path forward. appeared first on MS NOW.
Author: Source Author
From MS Now.
Leave a Reply