Racial Legitimacy and the Battle Over Who Belongs

In every society, racial legitimacy determines who belongs, who has power, and who is seen as fully human. For much of American history, whiteness was the primary marker of legitimate personhood and citizenship. Those outside this racial hierarchy - Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, immigrants - were either excluded from legitimacy entirely or assigned a lower status that justified their oppression.

While laws and policies have changed, the struggle over racial legitimacy has never ended. Every gain in racial equality has been met with backlash, as those invested in hierarchy-based legitimacy fight to maintain white dominance. Today, Trumpism has reinvigorated this backlash, not just through policy but through a fundamental rejection of fairness-based legitimacy in matters of race.

The Racial Legitimacy Hierarchy: Who Gets to Be Fully American?

From the founding of the U.S., legitimacy was explicitly racialized.

The Constitution protected slavery and counted enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a person - not to acknowledge their humanity, but to give white slaveowners more political power.
Citizenship was restricted to “free white persons” for much of early U.S. history.
Jim Crow laws codified a racial legitimacy hierarchy, ensuring that Black Americans remained second-class citizens.
Redlining, mass incarceration, and voter suppression served the same purpose in the 20th and 21st centuries - denying Black people full legitimacy in American life.

Despite legal victories - emancipation, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act - racial legitimacy remains contested.

The Civil Rights Movement: A Battle for Legitimacy, Not Just Rights

The Civil Rights Movement was not just about ending segregation - it was a direct attack on hierarchy-based legitimacy. Black Americans were not just demanding legal rights; they were asserting full legitimacy as equals in a society that had built itself on their exclusion.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this when he framed the movement as a fulfillment of America’s founding ideals. He forced the nation to confront the gap between its stated values and its actual legitimacy structures.
White backlash to the movement was not just about policy disagreements - it was about the perceived illegitimacy of Black political participation.
The movement’s victories did not destroy racial hierarchy-based legitimacy - they only forced it to evolve into more subtle forms.

The “Post-Racial” Myth and the Backlash to Obama

The election of Barack Obama was hailed as proof that America had finally embraced fairness-based racial legitimacy. In reality, his presidency triggered a renewed legitimacy crisis.

Obama’s legitimacy was constantly questioned. He was accused of being a secret Muslim, an illegitimate president, and an outsider - all coded ways of saying he did not belong.
The rise of the Tea Party was fueled by the idea that a Black president was not just bad policy, but a fundamental violation of the racial legitimacy order.
Donald Trump built his political brand on birtherism, claiming that Obama was not a legitimate American - a direct assault on fairness-based legitimacy in favor of racial hierarchy.

Obama’s presidency did not prove that racial legitimacy was settled. It proved that the battle was far from over.

Trumpism and the Return of Open Racial Legitimacy Politics

Trump’s political appeal is often framed as economic anxiety, cultural resentment, or nationalism. But at its core, his movement is a reaction to the perceived loss of white racial legitimacy.

His campaign launched with an attack on Mexican immigrants, painting them as criminals and invaders - a classic legitimacy-denial tactic.
His administration tried to ban Muslim immigration, reinforcing the idea that non-white outsiders were not truly American.
His presidency saw an explosion of white nationalist rhetoric, including his infamous response to Charlottesville: “very fine people on both sides.”
His 2024 campaign has leaned even further into racial hierarchy-based legitimacy, openly promoting the idea that the country must be taken back from “woke” forces who have illegitimately seized power.

The racial legitimacy war is not just about policy. It is about who is allowed to belong, who is allowed to govern, and whose power is seen as natural.

The War on Racial Legitimacy Today

Even as explicit racism has become socially unacceptable in many circles, hierarchy-based legitimacy still manifests in structural ways:

Voter suppression disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities, ensuring that political legitimacy remains tilted toward whiteness.
“Anti-woke” legislation targets discussions of race in schools, erasing historical truths that challenge hierarchy-based legitimacy.
Economic exclusion keeps racial wealth gaps intact, reinforcing the idea that success and power belong to certain groups.

Why This Matters: Racial Legitimacy and the Future of American Democracy

If racial legitimacy remains contested, American democracy itself remains unstable.

A country that cannot agree on who belongs cannot function democratically.
A political system that allows racial legitimacy to be manipulated for political gain will continue to produce authoritarian leaders.
The legitimacy war is not just a battle over laws - it is a battle over the fundamental structure of American power.

Fairness-based legitimacy in matters of race is not just about justice for marginalized communities. It is about whether democracy itself can survive.

The Legitimacy War