In 1950, a Black citizen in Alabama stood before a registrar, asked to recite the Constitution or answer a question like, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” Seventy years later, a citizen in Georgia arrives to vote—only to be turned away because of a “minor discrepancy” on their ID or a recently purged voter registration. The scene has changed, the laws have new names, but the intent remains hauntingly familiar.

Racial suppression in America is not a sequence of isolated injustices—it’s an unbroken line. The tactics have simply evolved from physical intimidation and overt exclusion to bureaucratic precision and coded language. As El Wright argues in her powerful book Project 2025, what once appeared as shackles and literacy tests now hides behind policy terms like “election integrity,” “school choice,” and “colorblindness.” The forms of suppression may look modern, but their purpose—maintaining racial hierarchy and control—remains the same.

The First Strand: Political Disenfranchisement

During the Jim Crow era, the right to vote was a privilege carefully guarded from Black citizens. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses ensured that freedom on paper did not mean freedom at the ballot box. Some were forced to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar or explain constitutional clauses most lawyers couldn’t interpret. Violence and intimidation filled in where paperwork failed.

Today’s methods are more discreet, yet their results are strikingly similar. Modern voter ID laws act as a contemporary poll tax—“free” in theory but costly in practice. After several Southern states closed Department of Motor Vehicle offices in predominantly Black areas, obtaining these IDs became a logistical maze. El Wright’s Project 2025 explains that such measures are not random administrative choices but deliberate acts of gatekeeping disguised as reform.

Voter purges represent another quiet threat. Algorithms now decide who stays registered, often using flawed data that disproportionately removes Black voters. A Georgia voter might discover on Election Day that they’ve been “inactivated” for missing a single election or due to returned mail they never saw.

The 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision accelerated this regression. Weakening the Voting Rights Act, it removed the requirement for federal oversight in states with histories of racial discrimination. Within months, several states enacted new voting restrictions—eerily reminiscent of the very practices the Act was designed to prevent.

As Project 2025 notes, these policies are not about preventing fraud—they are about protecting power. What once required a poll tax now requires a policy memo.

The Second Strand: Economic Exclusion

Economic control has always been the foundation of racial subjugation. Under Jim Crow, sharecropping and Black Codes turned freedom into another form of captivity. Laws criminalized unemployment or “vagrancy,” forcing Black laborers into cycles of debt and servitude. Decades later, redlining maps etched those racial boundaries into city blueprints, denying Black families home loans and relegating them to neighborhoods marked in red—“high risk,” as the banks called them.

Today, the echoes are unmistakable. Though redlining was banned in 1968, its effects are alive in the persistent racial wealth gap. Black homeowners still face appraisal bias, often seeing their property values fall when their race becomes visible. The consequences cascade—less equity means fewer opportunities for college, business ownership, and generational security.

Modern financial systems replicate these injustices in new forms. Payday lenders and check-cashing outlets crowd neighborhoods abandoned by traditional banks, charging interest rates that trap families in endless debt. El Wright’s book draws a direct line between these institutions and the “company stores” of the past, where wages were reclaimed through inflated prices and manufactured dependency.

Even the justice system plays a role. Fines and fees from minor offenses—traffic tickets, probation costs, late payments—can lead to warrants and incarceration. These modern “debtor prisons” perpetuate the same principle that once underpinned the Black Codes: profit from punishment.

The Third Strand: Controlled Narrative and Erasure

Power sustains itself not only through law and money but through control of memory. During Jim Crow, propaganda upheld white supremacy through myths like the “Lost Cause,” while Black newspapers were censored or burned for telling the truth. The 1921 Tulsa Massacre, where a prosperous Black district was destroyed, was erased from textbooks for generations.

That same impulse drives modern attacks on education. Book bans and laws targeting “divisive concepts” seek to sanitize history, forbidding teachers from discussing systemic racism or the legacy of slavery. As El Wright details in Project 2025, such censorship is not about protecting children’s feelings—it’s about shaping a national narrative that erases accountability.

Coded language plays its part too. Phrases like “law and order,” “urban crime,” and “welfare reform” are presented as neutral policy terms but serve as dog whistles, linking Blackness with danger, laziness, or dysfunction. “Election integrity” disguises voter suppression; “school choice” funnels resources away from public schools in Black neighborhoods.

In the digital age, the battle for truth has expanded. Disinformation campaigns—often targeting Black voters—spread lies to suppress turnout or sow distrust. Whether through fake news on social media or selective coverage on cable networks, the aim is familiar: divide, distract, and disempower.

Recognizing the Pattern to Forge a New Path

To trace this history is not to claim that nothing has changed. It is to recognize that oppression, when threatened, adapts. The literacy test becomes an ID law. The sharecropper’s contract becomes predatory lending. The banned newspaper becomes a banned book.

Understanding this unbroken line helps us respond not with nostalgia or despair but with clarity. As El Wright insists throughout Project 2025, progress is never self-sustaining—it must be defended. Each generation inherits both the victories and the vigilance of those before it.

The challenge for today’s readers, voters, and thinkers is to see through the modern camouflage of racism—to question who benefits from every policy, who is left behind, and whose story is being rewritten. True progress begins when we stop asking whether the past is repeating itself and start asking how we are allowing it to evolve.

Because the line is not broken—it’s still being drawn. And only by recognizing its shape can we finally erase it.