The American political system was built to manage the contradiction of having 30% of the southern population being black slaves. It was designed to have a "democracy" where it would take 400 years from black people arriving as slaves to still being mass incarcerated and killed in random violence today.

You can't accomplish that without having some veneer of democracy and fairness otherwise it would have been overthrown in a slave revolt in 1850 instead of being kept alive by false hope in the civil war.