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BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP AND THE RACIAL CONTRACT

The United States' Jus Soli Rule against the Global Regime of Citizenship1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2013

Annie Menzel
Annie Menzel*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle
*
Annie Menzel, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Washington, 1045 E Gorham St, Madison, WI 53703. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Since 1981, there has been a sea change in longstanding policies of jus soli, or birthright citizenship, reinforcing the global divide between affluent spaces of whiteness and impoverished spaces of nonwhiteness. I argue that these moves highlight the global system of citizenship as an increasingly consequential aspect of what Charles Mills terms the Racial Contract: the set of agreements, historically explicit and currently tacit, that divides the earth's peoples into full persons—Whites—and subpersons—nonwhites—such that the latter are constitutive outsiders to the political, moral, and epistemological norms that structure the White social world. Mills posits that the present phase of the Racial Contract disconnects present geographies of inequality from the violent history of the earlier phase that brought them into being, thereby moving them outside the realm of redress. I focus on formal citizenship as a central locus of such erasure, using the figuration of the undocumented mother in the controversy over U.S. birthright citizenship as a case study. I argue that the global regime of citizenship perpetuates White supremacy in two ways: first, through a Westphalian map of citizenship, and second, through gendered and raced neoliberal norms of citizenship. The alchemy between these two rationalities both entrenches and hides the violence of the Racial Contract. Building upon Mills' standpoint epistemology, I analyze arguments from both sides of a 1995 congressional hearing on birthright citizenship. I argue that the arguments opposing birthright citizenship exhibit what can be thought of as a White epistemology of citizenship, which relies upon a profound amnesia about the exclusionary and violent history of the global regime of citizenship.

Keywords

Birthright CitizenshipFourteenth AmendmentRacial ContractNeoliberalismBordersWestphalian MapUndocumented ImmigrantsWhite EpistemologyImmigrant Mothers
Type
State of the Discipline
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 2013 , pp. 29 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2013 

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Footnotes

1

The author would like to thank Chip Turner, Christine DiStefano, Naomi Murakawa, Bob Mugerauer, and Jamie Mayerfeld for their feedback on earlier versions of this article, and the Du Bois Review's two anonymous reviewers for their meticulous and extremely helpful comments.

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