A Degraded Caste of Society: Unequal Protection of the Law as a Badge of Slavery

This densely argued legal brief by attorney Fede (Homicide Justified: The Legality of Killing Slaves in the United States and the Atlantic World) makes the case that, despite the 13th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, white-supremacist laws exist in the United States today. The book begins with the 2020 “citizen’s arrest” of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia by three white men who murdered Arbery when he failed to stop at their command. Fede traces the actions of Arbery’s killers, which is protected by law in some U.S. states, to a 1661 Barbados statute that degraded enslaved Africans as dangerous and not entitled to equal protection of the law. These principles were adopted in the U.S. by Antebellum Southern states and reflected in their laws and common law cases. Enslavers were considered to have “uncontrolled authority” over enslave people, while enslaved people and free Blacks received separate and unequal treatment in criminal law. Fede works through North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida cases that made Black “insolence” a crime. Even today, he concludes, federal antidiscrimination laws have not eliminated racial prejudice in American law.