Jamelle Bouie cites a passage from Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields:

Consider the statement “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color”— a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke — paff — reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole.

The actor vanishes from the act because the statement is in the grammatical passive voice. In this construction, the victim becomes the apparent subject of the sentence, and his own skin color masquerades syntactically as the cause of his affliction.

A rump-end “agent” phrase introduced with “by” is the only way to smoke out the doer of the deed:

Black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color by White Southerners.

Here’s the statement in active voice:

White Southerners segregated Black Southerners because of their skin color.

(Jamelle Bouie, “The John Roberts Two-Step,” New York Times, 7-8-23)

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