The United States has a written Constitution, of which, each of the respective departments of the Constitution, that is the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial, must in order to be a member in good standing, take an oath that specifically stipulates without equivocation that they will support this Constitution. After the civil war, in order to protect those that were never enfranchised and those that had been previously enslaved and treated as chattel property, Constitutional amendments were ratified and passed, making these people, citizens of these United States, entitled to all privileges and immunities as a citizen, so as to not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law, as well as being entitled to equal protection of the law.
Those words, made It absolutely clear, that no longer would the United States countenance those that were of a different color, or of a different racial classification, or of a different religious persuasion, or of a former condition of servitude, to be treated as something other than the only class of citizenship legally permitted within the United States, which is the exact same class of citizenship that all are members of, from the highest of the high, to the lowest of the low. Not only that, but sham juries and targeted enforcement of the laws would no longer be permitted for all are entitled to the due process of the law, equally and fairly applied.
This then was the theory, but for a certainty, in effect, the 13th through the 15th Amendments, were ignored judicially after the Civil War, or if paid attention to, were most definitely selectively applied only to certain persons, under specific conditions, and not to others, and as for equal protection of the law, this was completely nullified for certain undesirable races or people. This meant in effect, that for certain, specific people, they were still responsible for their obedience and conformance to all of this country's laws, and therefore would be subject to penalty for failure of adherence to them, while on the other hand, they would deliberately be denied access and the full protection of the law.
Unfortunately, this type of selective enforcement of the law as well as this lack of protection of the law for certain people and specific situations still exists in America, today. This is a country that has a Constitutional duty to provide all citizens with due process of the law in addition to the equal protection of the law, but instead specifically favors chosen people over others. In the nearly, one hundred and fifty years, since the passage of these Constitutional amendments, the only really basic change in their application to people of today, is rather than the lack of due process of the law and the inequality of the law, being deliberately and selectively enforced specifically against blacks and other minorities in order to keep them down, we find that instead in today's more progressive world, that the dividing line is much more enlightened, recognizing that it isn't any longer politically correct to indiscriminately just attack minorities of color, but rather by adapting its ways of being more inclusive, the dividing line is now between the elite rich and powerful, against the masses of socioeconomic poor.
So that, the privileged people, recognizing that they are severely outnumbered, in which, for instance, just three individuals in America have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of Americans, signifies that it doesn't matter what the Constitution says; it only matters that those that are not quiescent, those that are not subservient, and those that are not obedient, be controlled in such a manner that any incipient uprising is dealt with in a manner that makes the statement: "not here, not now, not ever."