The United States is a deeply unequal society divided and segregated along lines of race despite supposed guarantees to legal equality and appeals to colorblindness. This course will take a critical look at this tension in American law and society and consider the active role of law in constructing and maintaining racial categories, inequality, and segregation in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. We will examine major developments in the relationship between race and law since the end of the Civil War, placing contemporary crises of criminalization, incarceration, immigration enforcement, and disenfranchisement in deep historical context. These major developments include the transformation of criminal justice and law enforcement during Reconstruction, the construction of the Jim Crow regime, the role of racism in transforming ideas about criminality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the roles of criminalization, policing, and incarceration in US colonialism and imperial expansion, immigration restriction and control, the criminalization of social movements and other forms of protest, and the racialization of the Wars on Crime and Drugs. We will use theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines to understand these developments, including Critical Race Theory, racial formation, and relational racialization. We will also consider the roles of race and law in shaping various other axes of power over time, including gender, labor, citizenship, and empire. Over the course of the term, we will aim to excavate a usable past that can inform and shape current movements for justice, restoration, and equality.