Life in the Racialized United States of America

In case some of you out there still want to argue that we are somehow "post-race," I have found events of the last few weeks to be quite instructive on this front. Famously, of course, we have the beer summit attempting to resolve a conflict between a black academic and the white police officer who arrested him, a police officer who apparently survived a bunch of racial sensitivity training yet was unprepared to face an angry black academic. That Glenn Beck can then call Barack Obama "racist" for saying the Cambridge police acted "stupidly" (and by the way, there is no other way to describe Officer Crowley's arrest of Gates, aside from either "acting stupidly" or "acting on the basis of testosterone and ego," i.e. acting without consulting one's rational faculties, i.e. acting stupidly) is proof that we are a long way from the postracial utopia.

But nothing has galled me more than the "birther" controversy, in which a collection of idiotic conservatives appear intent on proving that racism is still a severe problem. It seems to me that they refuse to admit that someone who isn't white-enough-looking can be a natural-born citizen (to which I refer you to the Fourteenth Amendment or the 1898 Supreme Court decision regarding Chinese Americans or the 1917 law making Puerto Ricans into U.S. citizens for the purpose of the draft). So there can be absolutely no doubt as to where I stand on this, I have included a picture of Barack Obama's birth certificate, certifying his birth in Hawai'i (on U.S. soil) to a U.S. mother, both of which make him incontrovertibly a natural-born U.S. citizen (see the Los Angeles Times "Top of the Ticket" blog post from which I pulled the birth certificate if you don't believe me). And no, I do not think the state of Hawai'i, currently governed by a Republican, could be conspiring with Kenya to keep a non-U.S. citizen in the White House. I am writing because I am taking up Bill Maher's challenge to do what I can, in my small way, to fight this absolute inanity.

The question of whether Barack Hussein Obama, now president of the United States of America, is a "natural-born citizen" is possible only because of the racist and xenophobic history of this country. As much as I would never want Governor Schwarzenegger to be president, I do think it's plain xenophobia not to allow a naturalized citizen, someone who has probably had to express more commitment to this country and its ideals than your average "natural-born citizen," to be president. But the constitution says "natural-born citizen," so then who is naturally born a citizen? Well, U.S. legal history is complicated on this issue because of a history of racism, racism about whether formerly enslaved Africans were citizens, about whether Mexicans resident in territories stolen from them were citizens, about whether Native Americans were allowed to vote in a land wrested from their own ancestors as part of U.S. conquest, of whether people born to Chinese or Japanese parents on U.S. soil actually could consider themselves to have the same rights as U.S. citizens born on the same soil to European parents. These are all questions that laws or supreme court decisions have been issued to decide. So no wonder some crazy right-wing nutjobs feel the need to protest that Kenyans, in some long-term strategy reaching back to the era of Jim Crow, conceived a plan to hijack the U.S. presidency by impregnating a "white" U.S. citizen. The U.S. has had a long history of not recognizing anyone as a U.S. citizen who doesn't look like George Washington (and that means women too, who couldn't vote, and thus couldn't be president either before 1920).

That said, the facts are simple. Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawai'i in 1961, which is one of the 50 United States of America. And even if he wasn't, he is the son of a U.S. citizen and has lived his life as a U.S. citizen, receiving a U.S. passport because no one at the state department ever found reason to question his citizenship. He was never naturalized as a U.S. citizen because he was naturally born one. That "birthers" refuse to recognize that Barack Obama could possibly have been born a U.S. citizen is because, on some level, they are racist and xenophobic, and they are just sore losers. And I can't help but feel, as I have felt before, that we idealize different things about this country. I, for one, think it speaks well for the U.S. that the president can have a mixed ancestry and specifically does have relatives from a small town in Kansas and a village in Kenya.

Birthright Citizenship and White Paranoia

Writing in today's Los Angeles Times, Mitchell Young advocated the end of "birthright citizenship" in the United States, firmly established by the Supreme Court in 1898, a right the Irish voted to end in 2004. Young suggests that birthright citizenship is a product of feudal law, and is just untenable in a land of 11 million undocumented immigrants. What he is too educated and polite to say is what undergirds any problem with "birthright citizenship." Seeking to end "birthright citizenship" speaks, on one level, to a policy opposing state responsibilities to undocumented immigrant parents of U.S. citizens. I don't have much sympathy for that line of argument either, but at least it's a rational view from a policy standpoint.

The bigger issue is that Young and others are looking at the first president to have a father hailing from the 2/3 world, whose mother was an Anglo U.S. citizen, though a few conservatives have sought to prove that President is somehow not a citizen of the U.S. President Obama speaks symbolically to a larger truth. If birthright citizenship and current immigration trends continue, traditional "white" U.S. citizens will be a minority in a country they believe is theirs. The fear that this country will belong to people who no longer phenotypically resemble the "Founding Fathers" undergirds Young's real concern. Even if birthright citizenship originates in English feudal common law, it is practiced by most respectable countries in the world who attempt to be non-racist in their legislation from Costa Rica to Germany. Japan and Ireland, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are the places who would deny birthright citizenship, and most people understand that racism undergirds most of their reasoning. I would be pretty disgusted if the U.S. decided to join their ranks out of fear.

But Mr. Young, let's run with your point. I will support denying birthright citizenship if every single adult person (under 70) living in the U.S. is required to take the exact same citizenship test that those who become naturalized citizens are required to take. I'm not sure what poor country should be given the large swath of U.S. citizens who won't pass the test. Maybe they should just spend their life in detention facilities, dying of a heart attack without care and being erased from legal memory like Pakistani immigrant, Ahmad Tanveer.

Litigious Ridiculous

In Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President." Well it seems pretty clear that you have to have been born a citizen of the U.S. to run for president. Too bad for Governor Schwarzenegger. But apparently there is some ambiguity in interpretation. I remember as a child reading this passage of the Constitution in elementary school and being taught that I could not ever run for President of the United States. I was born a U.S. citizen to a mother who was a natural-born citizen (though my father was not a U.S. citizen), but I was not born in the United States or on U.S. soil . But this is where the ambiguity of the passage seems to confuse some people; Senator John McCain was not born in the U.S., but he was born on U.S. soil in a section of Panama then controlled by the U.S. government. I wonder if he had won the presidency if people on the Left would be pursuing legal cases to bar his installment as President?

Well, two separate individuals have pursued legal cases to bar the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, though these cases appear, thankfully, to be getting very little traction as reported in today's Los Angeles Times. In one case, Leo C. Donofrio of East Brunskwick, N.J. did in fact sue against both McCain and Obama. In another case Philip J. Berg of Lafayette, Pa. sued against Obama specifically. Of interest to me is that, in my view, where McCain might occupy something of the muddy ground I occupy in my own birth location, Obama's birth certificate clearly locates him in Hawaii, when it was already a state in the United States. While both cases have been largely ignored because you can't just bring a suit unless you can prove personal harm, it still gives me pause: what did the founding authors mean by "natural born Citizen"? Surely, all historical legal precedents recognize Obama to be one because he was born on U.S. soil, which has always been enough to make someone a citizen. You add to that the fact that his mother was a natural-born citizen, and you would think his citizenship should be unassailable. That's the beauty of the U.S. as opposed to a country like Kuwait where you and your children could all have been born there, and you would still not be citizens. Why is it that people in this country need to persist in imagining U.S. citizens to be something they have never been (except in the case of the original Americans who predate Plymouth and Jamestown), people whose ancestors have all lived and died on this land? What does it mean to be a citizen of the U.S. now or ever?

I guess because of my own background, I think that being a U.S. citizen is an enforced choice. Most of us have no choice but to be here, but some of us do actively choose it. Putting aside the specific desires of some to make Obama an absolute other, a non-citizen, what is the deeper desire to disinherit those who think differently about being a U.S. citizen? Whose very ancestry may show up the complexity of calling oneself a citizen of the U.S.?

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Image of Article II, Section 1 taken from the U.S. National Archives website.

Catholics didn't play fair in American colonization

Or so the Pope admitted, after he had claimed the indigenous peoples of Latin America were "silently longing" for Christianity. Having been criticized for that statement by a number of people including Brazilian leaders and Venezuela president Hugo Chavez, the Pope responded "It is, in fact, not possible to forget the suffering, injustices inflicted by the colonizers against the indigenous population, whose human and fundamental rights have often been trampled." This is not actually an apology for the statement, just an acknowledgment of certain historical facts.

I find this whole story quite amusing. In my undergraduate school's daily paper, there was once a profile of a Latino janitor. The title included the terms "Spic and Span." Admittedly, these students came up with this title at 2AM. But what the titling reveals is the difference between their contexts and those of Latino/as, especially the janitor they profiled. While not intending to offend, the editorial staff of the paper did apologize for their limited vision that had led to the offensive title.

The Pope's initial comment in Brazil reflects a similar situation. An aging German man living in the Vatican, his context is radically different than that of the majority populace of Latin America. An apology is not to be expected from the Vatican. But maybe the Cardinals should consider, in the next papal election, someone whose context is more representative of the Church's faithful. Maybe next time around they can look to the descendants of those colonized by Christian Europe, i.e. Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians who make up the bulk of the Church's population now.

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Photograph from Reuters.