In Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System, Brando Simeo Starkey delivers a devastating cross-examination of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), arguing that the ostensible guardian of justice has functioned, since its inception, as a conservative steward of the U.S. caste system.
Surveying two centuries of landmark rulings—including Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education (I and II), McCleskey v. Kemp, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, and Shelby County v. Holder—Starkey rearranges our understanding of American law by showing us how doctrines like equal protection, due process, and states’ rights have been deployed to fail Black citizens and shield white supremacy.
Opening and farewell addresses frame the whole work. Starkey makes his case in two parts, each one containing a prelude statement and four chapters. He presents each chapter as a leg in an intellectual, legal, and national tour he’s leading readers on.
Part I opens in the postbellum era, when the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th, which Starkey calls the Trinity—presented the newly reestablished Union with an opportunity to begin again as a democratic republic offering all citizens, including freedmen, equal protection under the law and legal due process. But that possibility, Starkey argues, hinged on abolishing caste culture.
The American racial caste system, he writes, rests on three principles: that power belongs to white people who believe it is theirs by right; that democracy’s rewards should go principally to them; and that the nation must be structured to ensure those outcomes, generation after generation. Caste culture, he explains, was not born in 1865 or even 1787 but dates back to 1619, when enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia. Still, the three-fifths compromise of the Constitutional Convention codified the notion of Black subhumanity and white entitlement into the nation’s foundational charter.
This logic undergirds what Starkey terms the “White deed”—a tacit belief that the United States contractually belongs to white people. Laws that violate that deed, he explains, are seen by caste preservationists as inherently illegitimate. By passing this mindset on to their children, they pass on the deed itself.
In 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney gave that logic judicial expression in Dred Scott, writing that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Even after the Civil War, the ratification of the Trinity, and the successful but foreshortened period of Black Reconstruction (to borrow the title of W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 masterwork), Southern legislatures, under the inspiration of Taney’s logic, systematically blocked Black voting power and economic mobility through poll taxes, literacy tests, and “grandfather” clauses. Starkey focuses particularly on the 1890 Mississippi Plan, a ruthless template for such disenfranchisement.
While Plessy is infamous for institutionalizing segregation, Starkey shows that a cluster of late-19th-century cases permitted states to deny civil rights on racial grounds even as they professed adherence to equal protection. In decision after decision, the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge clear racial violations, instead refining the art of judicial deceit.
This refusal empowered early-20th-century Southern regimes to implement new schemes of reenslavement—vagrancy laws, debt peonage, and restrictions on Black labor mobility. When Black litigants sought redress, SCOTUS again failed to recognize the racial caste system at work, declining to use the due process clause to secure real freedom.
In Part II, Starkey interweaves scenes from Thurgood Marshall’s activist and investigative legal work between the 1930s and 1950s; telling moments from crucial late-20th- and 21st-century SCOTUS chambers transcripts; and highlights from 70 years of conservative judicial philosophy, including the rise of the Federalist Society.
Serving as lead attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and, later, as U.S. solicitor general before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Marshall was a decisive actor in dismantling 19th- and early-20th-century caste-preserving decisions. He was one of the 20th century’s most important legal figures. Yet Starkey remains incisively critical of Marshall’s misreadings and missteps.
Starkey contrasts Marshall’s cautious liberalism with the duplicitous strategies of the preservationists—figures like Ronald Reagan, William Rehnquist, and John Roberts—who, Starkey argues, deployed elaborate subterfuge. Preservationists “cannot openly declare their allegiances without putting White Supremacy’s project at risk,” so they perform fidelity to fairness while advancing the opposite. With subtle revision, Part II could have been published as a stand-alone work comparable in wisdom and timeliness to Ari Berman’s Give Us the Ballot (2015) and Carol Anderson’s dynamic duo, White Rage (2016) and One Person, No Vote (2018).
Starkey’s work bears the imprint of legal thinkers like Derrick Bell, Michelle Alexander, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, as well as the cultural critics Saidiya Hartman, Du Bois, and James Baldwin. Their Accomplices Wore Robes wrestles with what Baldwin called the “nightmare of history.” Reading this book at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidency, with its transparent corruption and caste-preserving agenda, I am reminded of Baldwin’s essay “Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption,” in which he writes that the caste preservationist would “like you to be his accomplice—discreet and noiseless accomplice—in this friendly, democratic, and, alas, absolutely indispensable action. ‘I didn’t,’ he will tell you, ‘make the world.’ You think, but you don’t say, to your friendly murderer, who, sincerely, means you no harm: ‘Well, baby, somebody better. And, in a great big hurry.’”
Starkey’s sharpest interventions come in his deconstruction of constitutional “intent” and the Supreme Court’s garbled legalese. His critique redeems what Baldwin termed the “unwritten and despised” history of Black resistance to judicial betrayal. By foregrounding that resistance, Starkey demolishes the myth of color-blind jurisprudence and lays bare SCOTUS’s central role in preserving caste-based inequalities in American life.•
THEIR ACCOMPLICES WORE ROBES: HOW THE SUPREME COURT CHAINED BLACK AMERICA TO THE BOTTOM OF A RACIAL CASTE SYSTEM, BY BRANDO SIMEO STARKEY
Walton Muyumba is the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism. He is a visiting associate professor in the Departments of African Cultural Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
