by Oyebade Kunle Oyerinde & Teri Platt
Federalism, the division of power among autonomous governing units, is often celebrated as an inevitable pathway to liberty in the United States through foot voting, policy competition, mitigation of racial tension, and checks on governmental overreach. However, for African Americans, federalism has frequently served to entrench rather than alleviate oppression since the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness—the internal struggle of being both Black and American—offers a powerful lens for assessing how federalism has regionalized discrimination, restricted mobility, and complicated identity formation, leaving African Americans with the task of reconciling national ideals with regional exclusion. Through Du Bois’s framework, this article evaluates five key metrics of federalism: foot voting, interstate competition, prevention of harmful policies, mitigation of racial tension, and checks on governmental overreach. It demonstrates that federalism has produced both avenues for reform and mechanisms of racial inequality across the Reconstruction era, the Civil Rights Movement, and contemporary crises, such as COVID-19 and environmental injustice. Ultimately, the analysis reveals that liberty in the United States’ federal system remains uneven and racially contingent, further suggesting that federalism can cease to be an albatross in the United States if it equally safeguards liberty for all.
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Oyebade Kunle Oyerinde is Professor of Public Administration, NSF NAIRR AI Education Fellow, and Special Assistant to the Provost for AI, Data, and Analytics at Clark Atlanta University, and Teri Platt is Full Professor of Public Administration & Edmond Asa Ware Endowed Professor at Clark Atlanta University. Send Oyebade mail: ooyerind@hotmail.com.
Isonomia Quarterly 