A case in point: to suppress a biracial movement of the region’s farmers at the turn of the century without running afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment, white elites in state after southern state devised new laws that decimated black voter turnout without ever mentioning race. Those rules held down everyone but the most wealthy for generations, but they hurt racial minorities most, because they needed the federal government to preserve their rights in the face of abusive employers and state authorities. They still do. And from the start, as Calhoun’s calculations illustrate, the notion of
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