Brando Simeo starkey
Author of
Their Accomplices Wore Robes (Doubleday, 2022)
In Defense of Uncle Tom (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Brando Simeo Starkey is a writer and a scholar who concentrates on race, law, and American history. A member of the NY Bar, he taught law at Villanova Law School and the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and now writes for ESPN’s The Undefeated, a website that mines the intersections of race, sports, and culture. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, he graduated from The Ohio State University and Harvard Law School. He lives in Southern California with his wife and son.
Books by Brando
Their Accomplices Wore Robes levels a provocative thesis–the judicial system, and specifically the Supreme Court of the United States, even more than the presidency or Congress, functioned as an indispensable ally in both promulgating a racial caste system and in aiding white America to preserve the benefits that they accrued from it. Best positioned to pull the nation into compliance with its purported principles and constitutional mandates, the Justices instead pushed the nation to betray the virtuous self-image it projected. Time after time, when petitioned to make real for black Americans the nation’s founding conceit—that all men are created equal—the nine black robes instead colluded with the enemies of their complete emancipation.
Their Accomplices Wore Robes takes readers from the post-Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court has aligned with the enemies of black progress to keep intact a racial hierarchy. Throughout history, the judicial system has chosen white supremacy over racial fairness. The Fourteenth Amendment converted the Constitution into a potential anti-caste document. But after the video-captured killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, black people and their allies seized the streets because the Supreme Court has refused to allow the amendment to fulfill that promise. This book will explain how America arrived at this point, an endeavor that furnishes implicit directions of how society might arrive somewhere better.
“Uncle Tom” is the most piercing epithet blacks can hurl at one another. It marks targets as race traitors, and that painful stain is often permanent. Much more than a slur, Uncle Tom is a vital component of a system of social norms in the black community that deters treachery. In this book, Brando Simeo Starkey provocatively argues that blacks must police racial loyalty and that those successfully prosecuted must be punished with the label Uncle Tom. This book shadows Uncle Tom throughout history to understand how these norms were constructed, disseminated, applied, and enforced. Why were Martin Luther King Jr., Marcus Garvey, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, and others accused of racial betrayal? In Defense of Uncle Tom answers this and other questions and insists that Uncle Tom is too valuable to discard. Because it deters treachery, this epithet helps build black solidarity, a golden tool in promoting racial progress.