Pluralist public policy process theories without hierarchical racial caste and post-racial caste: Is this America?

Classic pluralist theorists, based on Enlightenment ideals of democracy, equality, and individual rights, posit that interest groups engage in political pressure, bargaining, lobbying, and mobilization of bias, and no single group politically dominates. From 1619 to the end of American civil rights in the 1960s, the historical agenda of segments of a dominant white caste has been a stratified racial hierarchy. The effort to reverse the progress of civil rights and advance new forms of a racial hierarchy since 1970 has included countering voting rights, police violence, mass incarceration, housing, education, and economic discrimination, and laws prohibiting the teaching of accurate scholarly conclusions about US institutional racism. Scholarly endeavors in public policy process theory need to incorporate as a significant policy driver, as described in Critical Race Theory, how stratified and non-pluralistic American racialized practices operate and dominate in public policy processes.