Formal legal equality substituted for material redistribution as a way to end reform.

Evidence

The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment caused Republicans to turn their backs on the struggle against racial discrimination. After refusing to redistribute land, and giving landless Blacks the ability to choose their own masters, and calling that freedom; after handing poor Blacks an equal rights statement they could use in the expensive courts, and calling that equality; they put the ballot in the Black man’s hand and called that security. “The ballot is the citadel of the colored man’s safety,” parodied one Black southerner, “the guarantor of his liberty, the protector of his rights, the defender of his immunities and privileges, the savior of the fruits of his toil, his weapon of offense and defense, his peacemaker, his Nemesis that watches and guards over him with sleepless eye by day and by night.” As this Black southerner knew so well, the ballot never did stop all those hooded night riders. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 665

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core project: this is policy-before-ideas in microcosm — Republicans chose a policy (giving the ballot, not land) and then generated the justifying idea that the ballot was ‘security’ or ‘safety.’ Also resonates with the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s framing of nominal solutions standing in for structural ones. — connects to: Formal equality doctrine becomes a weapon against material equality — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 959; Neoliberals deployed formal legal equality to block redistribution and reparations. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 417
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this Republican substitution of ballot for land redistribution map onto Kendi’s argument that assimilationist strategies accept the framing of formal equality over material transformation?