Whiteness has been synonymous with
citizenship (if not legally, then in popular thought) in European colonized
countries, like the U.S., South Africa and Brazil, since their inception. In
the United States full civil, political and social citizenship has largely been
restricted to free white men, denying the rights and protections of citizenship
to white women, both free and enslaved blacks, Native Americans and aliens
(Glenn, 2002). Across the globe, the Union of South Africa was formed and
“founded on the premise that Africans would be denied voting rights in all but
the Cape Colony,” connecting whiteness and citizenship for generations to come(Goodman,
2004:146). In this post I will explain
how whiteness has been inextricably tied to citizenship, both formal and
substantive, through racial categorization. I will also discuss how shifting
racial discourse affects the way societies view race which in turn affects
racial categorization, whiteness and access to citizenship.
Just as whiteness has been formed in
opposition to non-whites, citizenship has been created in opposition
non-citizens—both are social constructions which are fluid and shift to protect
the rights and privilege of those in power (Glenn, 2002; Dalmage, 2011). In
European colonized countries like the United States, South Africa and Brazil,
whites formed new colonizer governments which would establish rights for
themselves over those of the indigenous people, and create a claim on land,
resources and labor (Glenn, 2002). Although all three began as colonies of a
monarchy, each eventually established themselves as independent nations,
consisting of citizens rather than subjects (Glenn, 2002). Citizenship means that you have “full
membership in the community in which one lives,” providing certain rights for
the citizen in exchange for certain duties (Glenn, 2002:19).
According
to T.H. Marshall, citizenship has three types of rights: civil, political and
social (Glenn, 2002). Civil rights are “the rights necessary for individual
freedom,” which include freedom of religion, speech and thought, as well as the
right to justice, to own property and the form contracts (Glenn, 2002:19).
Political rights are the rights necessary to participate in the governance of
the community, this includes the right to vote or exercise political power
(Glenn, 2002). Finally, social
citizenship or the ability to have one’s basic needs met, this includes the
right to some degree of economic security, ability to participate in society
and to “live the life of a civilized being according to the standards
prevailing in the society” (Glenn, 2002:19; Dalmage, 2011). Full citizenship is
the ability to participate in all three of these rights. This makes social
citizenship vital to being a full citizen because it is what allows individuals
to turn formal rights into substantive rights—meaning without social
citizenship, the ability to provide for yourself and your family and the
ability to participate in social life, one is unable to exercise their other
rights (Glenn, 2002).
Substantive
access to citizenship has often been curtailed by using racial categorization
to control access to social rights either implicitly or explicitly. Racial
categorization is more than just sorting individuals by shared phenotypes like
skin color, hair texture or facial features; it is about creating systems of
privilege and denial. Race is socially constructed, meaning that phenotype has
no significance in itself, only what society attributes to it; therefore it is
not fixed and can change according to the popular beliefs and discourse at the
time. In the U.S. black Americans have explicitly been excluded from
citizenship based on their race, as well as implicitly through Jim Crow and
mass incarceration (Waquant, 2005; Alexander, 2010). Although blacks were granted civil and political citizenship
in 1870, after being deemed subhuman and incapable of citizenship during
slavery, Jim Crow effectively barred them from social citizenship—many were
unable to vote due to restrictive poll taxes, reading tests and violence (Glenn,
2002; Alexander, 2010). Today many African Americans are barred from full
citizenship by state laws which limit the social rights of formerly
incarcerated by supporting restrictive employment laws and rescinding the
ability of those convicted of a felony to vote (Alexander, 2010). These
restrictions are not explicitly based on race, but African Americans are
disproportionately affected due to the denial of privilege based on race. The
fluidity of racial categories can be seen in census categories (Nobles, 2004).
Census
categories themselves are a form of racial discourse (Nobles, 2004). The U.S.
census enumerates by race, while the Brazilian census enumerates by color—both
reflect political and popular ideas about race and the construction of
difference (Nobles, 2004). Although their beliefs were grounded in the idea of
white supremacy, both countries took different tactics to support it. Brazil
promoted the idea that through intermarriage indigenous people, descendents of
African slaves and European colonizers would meld into one white race—therefore
color was more important to account for (Nobles, 2004). The U.S. took this
approach when dealing with Native Americans, but when it came to other racial
groups the prime tactic was exclusion (Nobles, 2004). The U.S. denied
citizenship to non-whites, used miscegenation laws, exclusionary immigration
policies, and reconstructed ideas about
familial lineage in order to exclude people of color from citizenship—because
of this the identification of race was important (Pascoe,1996; Nagel, 2003; Nobles,
2004).
If one takes the U.S.
census as an example it is possible to see how popular ideas about race have
been reflected in the census, which in turn affect government policy (Noble,
2004). There were eighteen changes to the
twenty censuses that occurred between 1790 and 2000 (Noble, 2004). One example
is how polygenists lobbied congress for,
and received, the inclusion of the term “mulatto” in the 1850 census in order
to support their claim that the offspring of two different races, black and
white, would be infertile (Nobles, 2004; Dalmage, 2011). This both reflected
one “scientific” approach to race at the time and had an influence on the way
race was discussed in society. According to the “one-drop rule” which had
dominated popular thought prior, and deemed anyone with “one-drop” of “black
blood” black, the term “mulatto” differentiated between levels of blackness.
Racial discourse is not
only restricted to the census. It is also seen within policy. After the Civil
Rights Amendment was passed in 1964 racial discourse began to move away from
overt racism and the census was needed to identify whether historical
inequalities were being addressed in a meaningful way through the group rights
won by activists (Dalmage, 2011). As the U.S. moved into the 70s and 80s,
neoliberalism began to take hold of policy, including a movement away from
group rights and towards individual rights and racial discourse began to shift
to colorblind ideology. Colorblind ideology states that society is beyond race
and to have truly fair society we must omit race from our policies, including
efforts to address historical inequality (Dalmage, 2011). Now right wing
activists are asking if we even need to enumerate race in the census.
Colorblind ideology works to defend white privilege by limiting citizenship
through the family ethic and the idea of the deserving poor (Glenn, 2002;
Dalmage, 2011).
Colorblind ideology is
informed by the neoliberal idea of personal responsibility. Everyone is
responsible for their own lives and choices and no attention is paid to the
circumstances under which you were born. The historical lack of access to
citizenship and privilege blacks have had is discounted and instead there is a
focus on “bad choices.” Common arguments
for larger amounts of black poverty are connected to ideas about the family
ethic, what “good citizens” strive for: women who are chase and bound to the
private sphere (home) and men who are breadwinners and bound to public space.
Many African Americans do not fit into this ethic because due to the historical
inequalities women have been forced to leave the home to work and men are often
incarcerated, ironically often times for participating in the underground
economy to provide for their families (Dalmage, 2011). Meanwhile white ethnics
are used as a defense of neoliberal ideas and the family ethic. They are held
up as people who have been discriminated against and through “hard work” have
raised themselves up by their bootstraps and accomplished what blacks could not
(Guglielmo, 2003; Maly, etal., 2010). Of
course, the fact that they were not denied citizenship for near 200 years is
neatly forgotten.
It is not difficult to
see the myriad of ways that whiteness has been tied to citizenship. People of
color have been explicitly denied citizenship based on their race and commonly
held popular and scientifically held beliefs that they were inferior to whites.
They have also been denied citizenship implicitly through racist policies like
Jim Crow and the Rockafeller drug laws which have targeted African Americans,
as well as through miscegenation laws and exclusionary immigration policies
(Pascoe, 1996; Nagel, 2003; Alexander, 2010). One only has to look at current
policy, like Arizona’s S.B. 1070, which allows police officers to ask anyone
who looks illegal for their U.S. identification. If not in law, in popular
thought to be American is to be white.
REFERENCES
REFERENCES
Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New
Press.
Dalmage, Heather. 2011. Lecture Notes,
Global Whiteness, Roosevelt University. February 2011- March 2011.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2002. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped
American Citizenship and Labor.
Guglielmo, Thomas. 2003. White on Arrial: Italians, Race, Color and
Power in Chicago, 1890-1849. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hale, Grace. 1998. Making Whiteness. NY. Vintage Books
Maly, Michael, Heather Dalmage and
Nancy Michaels. 2010. “The End of an Idyllic World: Race Memory, and the
Construction of White Powerlessness.”
Nagel, Joane. 2003. Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Nobels, Melissa. 2004. “Racial
Categorization and Censuses.” In Census
and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Language in National Censuses.
Edited by David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pascoe, Peggy. 1996. “iscegenation
Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of “Race” in Twentieth-Century America.” The
Journal of American History.83(1):44-69.
Waquant, Loïc. 2005. “Deadly
Symbiosis.” Boston Review.
Zaal, Frederick Noel. 2008. “The
Ambivalence of Authority and Secret Lives of Tears: Transracial Child
Placements and the Historical Developments of South African Law.” Journal of Southern African Studies.
18(2):372-404.
Everybody says there is this RACE problem. Everybody says this RACE problem will be solved when the third world pours into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.
ReplyDeleteThe Netherlands and Belgium are just as crowded as Japan or Taiwan, but nobody says Japan or Taiwan will solve this RACE problem by bringing in millions of third worlders and quote assimilating unquote with them.
Everybody says the final solution to this RACE problem is for EVERY white country and ONLY white countries to "assimilate," i.e., intermarry, with all those non-whites.
What if I said there was this RACE problem and this RACE problem would be solved only if hundreds of millions of non-blacks were brought into EVERY black country and ONLY into black countries?
How long would it take anyone to realize I'm not talking about a RACE problem. I am talking about the final solution to the BLACK problem?
And how long would it take any sane black man to notice this and what kind of psycho black man wouldn't object to this?
But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.
They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.
Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.
The real problem is that we have assigned skin color importance, when it is an arbitrary physical trait that has no larger connection to anything on its own. It is when we enact racist policies that limit rights based on skin color that it has a real bearing on life chances. This is the race problem. Before you go off on a "reverse racism" rant, whites have the better life chances--we are talking generally here.
ReplyDeleteI do not know your personal opinions on genocide. I can tell you that hate and anger damage the vessel that carry them. Do yourself a favor and let go of it.