Whitelash Unmasking White Grievance at the Ballot Box

If postmortems of the 2016 US presidential election tell us anything, it's that many voters discriminate on the basis of race, which raises an important question: in a society that outlaws racial discrimination in employment, housing, and jury selections, should voters be permitted to racially discriminate in selecting a candidate for public office? In Whitelash, Terry Smith argues that such racialized decision-making is unlawful and that remedies exist to deter this reactionary behavior. Using evidence of race-based voting in the 2016 presidential election, Smith deploys legal analogies to demonstrate how courts can decipher when groups of voters have been impermissibly influenced by race, and impose appropriate remedies. This groundbreaking work should be read by anyone interested in how the legal system can re-direct American democracy away from the ongoing electoral scourge that many feared 2016 portended.

Introduction: the long night of déjà vu; 1. Electing Trump and breaching norms; 2. The exoneration of white voters; 3. White voters and the law of alternative facts; 4. The sirens of white nationalism; 5. Law as pretext; 6. Voting while white; 7. Holding candidates and parties accountable; 8. We the people: fashioning a legal remedy for voter whitelash; Conclusion: the globalization of whitelash.

This book is for anyone seeking an understanding of the 2016 US presidential election and its fallout. It uses analogies from anti-discrimination law that Americans intuitively understand to discuss voting, and asks the question: do Americans have a legal obligation not to racially discriminate in the privacy of the ballot box?

Terry Smith has spent twenty-five years teaching at national law schools, most recently as a Distinguished Research Professor. His legal scholarship has been cited by federal courts, and he is the author of the book Barack Obama, Post-racialism, and the New Politics of Triangulation (2012).