The US Constitution committed to equality in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments following the Civil War. Legislators and judges quickly confronted the question of what these new provisions might mean for private actors. The Radical Republicans aimed to bring the commitment to equal protection into private spaces, propagating republican discourses about the practical requirements of equal citizenship and the potential duties of private actors. However, the Supreme Court soon reached its own countervailing conclusion that only state actors, not private actors, gained duties from the Reconstruction Amendments. While this latter understanding remained firm, private actors effectively gained obligations to equality under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later court decisions working around the initial cabining of constitutional equality. Later debates evince a revival of republican-inflected language and arguments for something like horizontal application, even while the country’s jurists viewed such an extension of rights as basically impossible. Several other episodes in constitutional politics, both at the national and state levels, would continue to revisit this question across a range of issue areas.

The false consensus effect is the observation that people tend to overestimate the number of people who share their views. In modern environments we also see growing evidence of greater polarization. For example, according to the Pew Research Center over the past five decades, congressional US Democrat and Republican ideologies have increasingly diverged, with an ever shrinking middle ground. This is appears to also be reflected among US citizens, with a "disappearing center" hastened by growing “anarchist” and “anti-establishment” ideologies. Many have speculated that this polarization is a global phenomenon. The question we pose here is how beliefs and network structure might interact to facilitate both false consensus effects and rising polarization.

After the Civil War, the American South seemed to be the exception to American exceptionalism. As the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm asserted, after the end of Reconstruction, the South remained “agrarian, poor, backward, and resentful; whites resenting the never-forgotten defeat and blacks the disfranchisement and ruthless subordination imposed by whites when reconstruction ended.” Confederate defeat and the emancipation of slaves left the American South faced with the challenge of embarking upon the “Age of Capital” while largely bereft of capital. This chapter focuses on how the southern capital shortage turned much of the rural South into a “vast pawn shop” with financing for planting crops coming from a mortgage on a crop not yet produced. As beggars for capital, the American South became the ragged stepchild of the industrializing American economy, an economic backwater controlled by outside capital. Active economic legacies of the capital-starved South still haunt the region’s economic landscape in the form of underdeveloped human capital.

The historical apartheid dichotomy and its present-day effects in South Africa remain characterised by exclusion and inequality along racial lines, with specific reference to land access. While land redistribution efforts have sought to foster inclusion and equity, the narratives on landownership remain multi-dimensional. This study aimed to determine the underlining narrative themes and potential gaps in research regarding the landownership struggle in South Africa. The methodology includes a bibliometric review to identify keywords, clusters and research trends in relevant publications through VOSviewer (v1.6.17) software. Furthermore, a thematic analysis using NVivo 12 was applied to achieve the research aim. Four clusters were identified, including agricultural production, land reform, the rural economy and poverty reduction, with recent research focused on agricultural land, livelihoods and poverty alleviation. The findings highlighted the continuing inequality in landownership and a gap in research regarding the post-redistribution use of land. The chapter proposes a reimagining of urban planning in South Africa, Africa and the global south through identifying future research avenues in land redistribution to catalyse the equitable and productive utilisation of land. This includes research on the role of financial support mechanisms and political capacity in land redistribution interventions.

Rhetoric is of paramount importance when facing an issue that requires a reformation of public sentiment. Such an issue is the struggle for the protection of the civil rights of black Americans. This section consists of six speeches that address this issue. The speakers include Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Malcom X.

This chapter focuses on the British community in pre-war Hong Kong and explores how Britishness as a non-European identity translated to a colonial setting. Drawing from laws, social practices, and press debates, this chapter explores how white Britons viewed colonial British subjects and other non-British Europeans in Hong Kong. Many white Britons clearly saw ‘British’ as a racial category, and they worked hard to maintain the arbitrary boundary of the ‘British race’. But by the 1930s the latest, hostility towards other Europeans became visible as international relations deteriorated in Europe. Amidst talks of ‘Buy British’ and ‘Britons First’ were also vocal appeals to include colonial subjects as part of being British. Findings of this chapter uncovered in the British community in 1910–45 Hong Kong not only an increasingly inclusive attitude towards British subjects of colour, but also a determination to define Britishness as not only a race, but also a national identity.

Many Black intellectuals and artists have called for a counter-historiography that would redress the silencing of Black voices and the inadequate representation of Black experiences in earlier comics. This chapter identifies three categories of graphic historiographies, each with thematic and formal recurrences: those that propose a frontal look at the context of enslavement, from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the violence of the plantation world; those focusing on the political and social struggles of Black communities after the Civil War, from the Jim Crow era and the courageous actions of Civil Rights leaders to twenty-first-century police brutality; and, finally, those that imagine new Black futures in the mode of speculative fiction, while metaphorically referencing past forms of exploitation and repression. The chapter studies the specific devices of several of these works, including the use of temporal shifts in the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reliance on oral history and photo-based illustrations in John Lewis’s Run, Book One, the depiction of Black women’s subordination in Shirlene Obuobi’s ShirlyWhirlMD webcomic, and the futuristic metaphors of slavery and capitalism in Roxane Gay’s The Sacrifice of Darkness.

We begin with a narrative about the vast inequalities between the 2021 women’s and men’s college basketball championships (sponsored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association). These disparate events exemplify systemic inequalities across college athletics that we document with data showing sex-based disparities in participation, resource allocation, and leadership. We introduce a critical perspective on Title IX – the celebrated 1972 U.S. sex nondiscrimination law – arguing that aspects of institutions employed under nondiscrimination policy can nevertheless undermine the quest for equality. We outline a set of policy proposals to address gender inequalities. These include more aggressive enforcement of Title IX, policies to ensure equal resource allocation and protections for women student-athletes, and initiatives to increase opportunities for women’s industry leadership. We then theorize three routes to policy change – from the bottom up, top down, and outside in – as well as the institutional hurdles that stand in the way of change. Throughout this discussion, we make a concerted effort to highlight how sex segregation, inadequate representation, androcentric organizational culture, and market demands are hurdles faced not just by those seeking equality in athletics but by other marginalized groups as well.

A final possible path for change is from outside the system – that is, from the public and/or consumers of college sports advocating from the outside in. We theorize that fans will be less supportive of gender equity initiatives than the general public, given their investment in the product and the overwhelming media bias that places higher value on and coverage of men’s sports. We also predict those men who participated in formalized sports in high school will be more inured to gender inequalities and less supportive of aggressive change – a downstream socialization effect from participating in a sex-segregated system. We find strong support for our hypotheses, using a novel measure of fandom. We also find that parents with daughters who play sports express greater support for gender equity initiatives; however, this effect is dwarfed by the fandom and enduring high school sports dynamics. This shows barriers to change from the marketplace and the enduring impacts of sex-segregated institutions preventing change from the outside in.

This chapter focuses on the possibilities for pursuing change toward gender equity policy from the bottom up. Women are targeted beneficiaries of the gender equity initiatives (and therefore we expect their support to be relatively high); however, they comprise only 43 percent of student-athletes. Stronger majority coalitions thus require obtaining the support of male student-athletes. We theorize one route to coalitions via interpersonal contact. We build on the enormous extant literature on contact to identify conditions under which male student-athletes may become more supportive of policies for marginalized female student-athletes. These include when men understand the plight of the marginalized group (women) and when they trust the policymaking institutions (colleges and the NCAA). We argue that interpersonal contact is a mechanism by which the first condition is met. We provide clear evidence for our predictions with observational and experimental data. However, we also find that the sex-segregated institutions of college sports prevent significant contact between women and men, thereby vitiating the likelihood of such a coalition emerging to pursue change from the bottom up.

Chapter 2 analyzes the life histories and experiences of métis children who were wards of the colonial state in the 1930s in Senegal and Gabon. They received government funding and management of their education. The daily lives of métis wards became a battleground through which fictive and blood kin, métis activists, emerging African political leaders, French colonial administrators, and Catholic missionaries debated the meanings of race, culture, and child welfare. In Senegal, African stakeholders mediated métis children’s access to French education, living conditions, and colonial welfare payments based on their parentage from French and European men. The state was obliged to provide access to education for all children born in Africa, with métis as a distinct group. In Gabon, an association of adult métis lobbied for access to favorable material conditions for métis children and for them to attend a school for European children and reside in a boarding home without black children. Contestations around their welfare hinged on the French republican rhetoric of universal rights and equality and racialized hierarchies within African societies.

In order for democratic deliberative interactions in educational settings to fruitfully occur, certain favorable conditions must obtain. In this chapter, I chiefly concern myself with one of these putative conditions, namely that of school integration, believed by many liberal scholars to be necessary for consensus-building and legitimate decision-making. I provide a critical assessment of the belief that integration is a necessary facilitative condition for democratic deliberation in the classroom. I demonstrate that liberal versions of democratic deliberation predicated on this condition are puzzlingly inattentive both to the inevitability of segregation, as well as the inequities occasioned by “school integration.” I then move to probe the possibilities for democratic education in the absence of integration. I argue that neither the possibilities for deliberation nor the cultivation of civic virtue turn on an environment being “integrated.” Indeed, some kinds of segregation may be more conducive to fostering both deliberation and civic virtue.