I Exist as I Am, That Is Enough: What Is and Isn’t Enough Under Our Legal System (Week 9)

I Exist as I Am, That Is Enough: What Is and Isn’t Enough Under Our Legal System (Week 9)

Hi everyone, welcome back to my blog! Today I’ll be discussing the final part of defining discrimination within my project.

Wolfe—Race as a Patch

In his 2004 article, Patrick Wolfe argues that race exists to bridge the gap of contradictions between the ideal of equal citizenship and the reality of social inequality and systemic racism. Whereas citizenship appears to promote equality by lending all individuals the same legal status, race inherently restores an innate social hierarchy specifically within settler-colonial nations such as the US. He also uses the societies of Australia and Brazil to justify his argument, but that’s veering a bit off topic so I’ll just cover his US-centric points applicable to my project.

I believe Wolfe’s argument can be separated into two distinct theories: 1. The idea that citizenship is legally egalitarian, and 2. That race is intrinsically hierarchical, resulting in the patchwork of race and citizenship we can observe in the status quo. Race is often used as a means by which inequality is maintained within the framework of formal equality—the framework of citizenship. 

One major historical example of this is the Naturalization Act of 1870 which granted citizenship to all individuals of African descent yet was effectively negated by Jim Crow laws following the Civil War. Although African Americans were technically equal under the guise of citizenship, they never truly experienced this supposed equality. Citizenship has never abolished inequality; at times, it can fundamentally mask and reinforce it via race.

Molina—Mexican-Americans on the Border

This section will be slightly shorter because a large portion of the article was dedicated to a specific case study which is not super relevant to my project, but I’ll summarize the general ideas. All you’ll have to know about the specific case is that a multi-generational Mexican-American by the name of Nicolas Flores experienced a deportation case in the early twentieth century despite having US citizenship.

What the Flores case revealed was that, despite possessing generational US citizenship, his belonging was still questioned and the government still treated him as an alien, an Other. This, and other cases, revealed that citizenship is not as colorblind as we perceive it to be, but rather defined by race, language, class, etc. Flores’ case is simply one instance of a widely prevalent issue, one that is still being observed today.

Project Application

After reading these two articles, I realized just how much these issues are still ingrained within our current naturalization process. Race, language, class—these are all factors that, summed together, result in the intersection of those least likely to obtain citizenship. Although the current naturalization system may not be explicitly inequitable, the results certainly are.

And with that, today’s blog post comes to an end. Thanks for reading, and see you next time!

Sources

Natalia Molina. “The Long Arc of Dispossession: Racial Capitalism and Contested Notions of Citizenship in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in the Early Twentieth Century.” Western Historical Quarterly 45, no. 4 (2014): 431–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.45.4.0431.

Wolfe, Patrick. “Race and Citizenship.” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 5 (2004): 66–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163727.