Voting rights under fire

"With the increasing demands for changes in how we vote, the authors analyze the complications of race tied to these proposed policies through historical and contemporary challenges"-- "Voting Rights under Fire is a timely addition to Praeger's series, Racism in American Institutions (RAI). With continued debate over existing and proposed voter ID laws and a host of other measures that seem designed to impede the ability of people of color to vote, racism as an institutional factor in American voting and politics is clear. The RAI series examines the ways in which racism has become a part of the fabric of many American institutions. For example, while the United States may have done away with overtly racist policies such as Jim Crow segregation, racism still affects many of America's established institutions from public schools to corporate offices. Similarly, schools may not be legally segregated, and yet many districts are not integrated. Voter ID laws have targeted perceived voter fraud, but there is no real fraud to speak of and hence these anti-voting measures serve to take us back to the period before the advent of the Voting Rights Act when people of color, especially black people, could not vote"--