Welcome to The Braveverse

Book writing strains the mind. Taxes the body. Grinds the soul. I’ve endured and conquered it twice—this beast, this hard yet rewarding toil. My most recent conquest, Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System, published by Doubleday and out on June 3, proved exhausting. But the process instilled an audacious and indefatigable verve in me that I will bring to The Braveverse, this newsletter on law, politics, and freedom from caste.

As I completed Accomplices during the 2024 presidential campaign, I dreaded that my countryfolk would vote to further sabotage our political system and social fabric. I found clarity and direction about what loomed ahead in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. The Yale historian explains how to stave off the hell that has swallowed millions before, that is swallowing millions now, that regrettably will swallow millions more as long as hearts still beat.

He provides twenty lessons on how to resist tyranny’s onslaught. One especially grabbed me. “Be kind to our language,” the ninth lesson implores. “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone does. Think up your own way of speaking,” Snyder writes. “When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework.” If we uncritically adopt the language permeating a society polluted by the incurious and the unscrupulous, we deny ourselves the opportunity to best understand and remedy deep rooted ills and newfound challenges.

In Accomplices, I unwittingly heeded lesson nine, conceiving fresh ways of discussing the dilemma of race which has bedeviled this land for four hundred years, since the first enslaved Africans drew breath here. I built a new framework under which to assess how much America has failed at fulfilling the lost promise of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, what I called The Trinity.

The Thirteenth, ratified in 1865, granted freedom. The Fourteenth, ratified in 1868, guaranteed equality. The Fifteenth, ratified in 1870, exempted citizens from race-based denials of voting rights. I refer to these three post-Civil War amendments as The Trinity because we should imagine them as a collective whole that awarded us the legal means through which this nation could transcend its racial caste system—a racial hierarchy enforced through law, rules, and norms that confines the oppressed races into a subordinate legal, political, and social status, from womb to grave.

When we speak of racial injustice in the context of the broader social and constitutional commitments to equality, we typically employ the anti-discrimination framework. We malign discriminators and pity their victims. The villains, within this framework, commit the sin of race discrimination. We preach that Americans must strive to shape a country without such malevolence. And only until we arrest it will we satisfy the ambition of forging a true and just multiracial democracy.

In Accomplices, however, I harnessed the language of caste and infused it with analytical layers that discussions of caste have long lacked. I built a framework that implemented the principles of anticaste, the worldview that opposes the existence of the caste system. When we talk about the perils of race discrimination, we should reframe it into a conversation concerning racial oppression and how each of us, through our presence in America, is owed freedom from caste. We must set this—freedom from caste—as our ambition. A century-and-a-half ago, We the People ratified The Trinity. We each, therefore, possess a right to not to be treated as a member of a degraded caste.

The truest villains in this story are not discriminators, or racists, but rather caste preservationists, those who, in the race context, establish as an objective the eternal primacy of the white population. The MAGA movement, for example, carries the caste preservationist banner.

The truest opponents of caste preservationism are not antiracists or colorblind advocates, but rather caste abolitionists, those who establish as an objective the destruction of the racial caste system. The mid twentieth century civil rights luminaries embody the caste abolitionist spirit.

We the People must concentrate on expunging not discrimination but rather what I termed castework, caste-producing and sustaining laws, policies, and actions. Mass incarceration, schemes to dilute the Black vote, steering Black homebuyers away from White neighborhoods, all examples of castework, perpetrate evil not because they simply discriminate, but because they help maintain the racial caste system.

The anticaste framework calls for eliminating castework regardless of its underlying motivation, and for implementing remedies to the inequalities it has wrought. The anti-discrimination framework, in contrast, often allows castework to persist, largely because victims cannot always trace it back to a specific wrongdoer. Moreover, the framework places no obligation on governmental actors to redress any inflicted damage. Effectively, this dominant framework perpetuates suffering.

Various problems, beyond the intractable color line, wound our democracy as we use deficient frameworks and substandard language. Only through better frameworks and better language can we reform America into what we deserve.

As corrupt and ineffectual politicians diminish the union, millions across racial, gender, sexual, and economic lines fear what lies ahead. The Constitution allows for the production of the judicial decisions, laws, and policies necessary to unlock justice and freedom, but only bold thinking can devise and wield them to rescue the oppressed, rebuild the nation, and salvage our democracy.

Welcome to The Braveverse.