The Expulsion
The Republican-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two of its members. The expulsions were exceptional: only three expulsion votes had occurred in the legislature’s entire history, the most recent of which involved a member who was the subject of sexual harassment allegations by more than twenty women.
The two members expelled in April 2023 had done something considerably less severe. They had stood at the well of the House chamber and led chants of protest. They had spoken through a megaphone. They had joined with students from Nashville high schools calling for gun legislation.
Three Members, Identical Conduct
Representative Justin Jones of Nashville was expelled 72–25. Representative Justin Pearson of Memphis was expelled 69–26.
A third member, Representative Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, had participated in the same protest and faced the same expulsion vote. It fell short of the required two-thirds majority by a single vote: 65–30.
Asked afterward why she had been spared while her two colleagues had not, Johnson gave the most direct possible answer: “It may have to do with the color of our skin.”
The two members expelled were Black. The member spared was white. The conduct was identical. The stated principle — violation of decorum — was the same for all three. Only the application differed.
Temper Tantrum
The legislators who prosecuted the expulsions framed them as matters of institutional decorum. Representative Andrew Farmer, who sponsored the resolution to remove Pearson, described the protest as “a temper tantrum” and berated him for “immaturity.” He told Jones: “Just because you don’t get your way, you can’t come to the well, bring your friends and throw a temper tantrum with an adolescent bullhorn.”
The decorum standard was applied with notable selectivity. A Republican House Speaker had previously been under investigation for sexual harassment without facing an expulsion vote.
What the Pattern Requires
This is the book’s clearest statement of how the mechanism works in its modern form, and it is worth quoting directly: the pattern “does not require overt racial animus to operate; it requires only that the principles invoked be applied differently to different people, and that the differential application consistently favor the same group.”
No participant needs to state a racial motive. No rule needs to mention race. A neutral principle, applied unevenly, produces the same result as an explicit one — and leaves each individual decision defensible in isolation.