When we look back at American history, the worst abuses of state power seem obvious. Slavery, Jim Crow segregation, Native American displacement, internment camps, forced sterilization, and the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters stand as towering examples of injustice. These were not just local policy mistakes—they were state-level choices that shaped the lives of millions, often for generations.

But history has an uncomfortable way of repeating itself in new forms. The question now is whether some of the actions by U.S. states in the 2020s—especially as of October 2025—have become so corrosive that they deserve to stand alongside, or even displace, those original ten.

The “Original Ten” Abuses: America’s Unfinished Reckoning

The familiar catalogue of pre-21st-century state abuses is grim but instructive:

1. Slavery and Slave Codes—a system of legalized human bondage.
2. Jim Crow laws—segregation and systemic disenfranchisement.
3. Disenfranchisement of Black voters through literacy tests, poll taxes, and terror.
4. Forced sterilizations under eugenics programs.
5. Native American removal and land seizures in defiance of treaties and Supreme Court rulings.
6. Anti-miscegenation laws, banning interracial marriage.
7. State-sanctioned lynching and impunity for racial violence.
8. Violent suppression of labor movements, from Ludlow to Blair Mountain.
9. Internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
10. Redlining and housing discrimination, enforced through state and local law.

These abuses scarred communities, created legacies of inequality, and in many cases were justified by state officials as “necessary” for order, tradition, or security.

The 2025 Landscape: Old Abuses in New Clothes

The United States in 2025 does not openly legalize slavery or ban interracial marriage. Yet the echoes of those policies are unmistakable. Several modern trends deserve to be measured against the original ten.

1. Voting Rights in the Crosshairs

Cases like Louisiana v. Callais show state governments pressing to weaken the Voting Rights Act by drawing districts that dilute Black representation. This is a direct heir to Jim Crow disenfranchisement, now armed with data analytics and algorithmic precision. Where once poll taxes and literacy tests barred voters, today gerrymandering and board takeovers achieve a similar end—quietly but effectively.

2. Attacks on Bodily Autonomy

The forced sterilizations of the 20th century are often remembered with shame, but the same principle—state intrusion into reproductive freedom—is alive again. States that ban abortion outright or prosecute doctors across state lines for mailing medication are claiming power over private bodies in a way uncomfortably close to those earlier eugenics laws. Add to this the bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth, and the comparison becomes sharper still: the state dictating whose bodies are “acceptable” and whose are not.

3. Prisons as Warehouses of Neglect

Georgia’s prison system, described in 2025 federal reports as sites of rampant violence and “deliberate indifference,” is not unique. Across the country, states preside over carceral systems where abuse, overcrowding, and racial disparity are the norm. If lynching was once the tool of racial terror, mass incarceration and brutal prison conditions may be its modern institutional successor.

4. Erosion of Local Democracy

In multiple states, legislatures have stripped local governments of their powers in areas ranging from public health to education. These “abusive preemption” laws erode self-rule, hollowing out local authority when it conflicts with state political agendas. While not as viscerally cruel as internment camps or segregation, they represent a quieter, systemic assault on democracy’s foundations.

Do Modern Abuses “Displace” the Original Ten?

On one hand, no. The original ten included slavery itself—the defining atrocity of American history. Nothing in 2025 matches its scale or its horror. Similarly, the Trail of Tears and the internment camps uprooted entire populations, causing mass death and dispossession in ways that today’s abuses, serious though they are, have not yet reached.

On the other hand, yes. In certain categories, modern abuses rival or surpass their historical counterparts:

• Voting Rights: Today’s gerrymandering and election subversions may be subtler than literacy tests, but they are just as effective at disenfranchising millions. Technology has given states a scalpel where once they used a hammer.
• Bodily Autonomy: Forced sterilizations are gone, but bans on abortion and gender-affirming care extend state power into personal identity and reproduction, raising the same questions of control.
• Prison Conditions: While lynching is no longer openly tolerated, states that permit abuse, sexual violence, or medical neglect in prisons perpetuate systemic brutality against marginalized populations.

Why This Matters Now

It is tempting to treat the great abuses of American history as things safely behind us—mistakes we outgrew. But the evidence suggests otherwise. States are not only repeating old errors but refining them for the modern era. They are cloaking abuses in legality, couching them in “public safety” or “parental rights” rhetoric, and advancing them through the slow grind of legislation rather than the obvious shock of chains and camps.

The danger is that subtlety breeds complacency. The Jim Crow South advertised its segregation with signs on every door; the 2025 equivalent redraws districts quietly, adjusts parole statutes, or narrows medical access until liberty withers not with a bang but with a budget rider.

The Verdict

The original ten state abuses remain towering injustices. But some modern developments deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. If slavery and Jim Crow were America’s original sins, then today’s voter suppression, reproductive coercion, and mass incarceration may be their mutated descendants.

History does not repeat itself word for word, but it rhymes. The states of 2025 are writing new verses to old songs of oppression. Whether they displace the original ten is less important than recognizing that the list is not closed. America’s worst state abuses are not finished history—they are a living contest over the meaning of democracy itself.