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.
Twitter / Represented by Ayesha Pande
Books by Brando
Their Accomplices Wore Robes (DoubleDay, 2025)
A magisterial new history of the role of the Supreme Court as an ally in implementing and preserving a racial caste system in America.
Their Accomplices Wore Robes takes readers from the Civil War era to the present and describes how the Supreme Court—even more than the presidency or Congress—aligned with the enemies of black progress to undermine the promise of the Constitution’s Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
The Reconstruction Amendments—which sought to abolish slavery, establish equal protection under the law, and protect voting rights—converted the Constitution into a potent anti-caste document. But in the years since, the Supreme Court has refused to allow the amendments to fulfill that promise. Time and again, when petitioned to make the nation’s founding conceit—that all men are created equal—real for Black Americans, the nine black robes have chosen white supremacy over racial fairness.
Their Accomplices Wore Robes brings to life dozens of cases and their rich casts of characters—petitioners, attorneys, justices—to explain how America arrived at this point and how society might arrive somewhere better, even as today’s federal courts lurch rightward. In this groundbreaking grand history, Brando Simeo Starkey reveals a troubling and dark aspect of American history.
In Defense of Uncle Tom (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
“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.