BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP AND THE RACIAL CONTRACT

Abstract

AbstractSince 1981, there has been a sea change in longstanding policies ofjus 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 aWhite epistemology of citizenship, which relies upon a profound amnesia about the exclusionary and violent history of the global regime of citizenship.