What's New! April 2009

Global Migrations and Imagined Citizenship: Examples from Slavery, Chinese Exclusion, and When Questioning Birthright Citizenship

Ernesto Hernández-López

In the spirit of remembering the 200-year legacy of England's abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and the 150-year legacy of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Scott v. Sandford in 1857, this Essay comments on the relationship between international migration and citizenship. Specifically, it uses the theme of the Texas Wesleyan University School of Law and the University of Gloucestershire's Fourth Annual Summer Legal Conference, "Law and Justice in the Age of Globalization: Marking the 200th Anniversary of Britain's Abolition *256 of the Slave Trade (1807)," to analyze the historical and global migration of persons and how responding to this domestic law re-imagines national identity in the form of citizenship. This Essay's objective is to provide international and cultural contexts to legal determinations of who is (or is not) a citizen. Citizenship is studied as one example, but not the only example, of national identity. This is done by looking at nineteenth-century instances from the U.S. slavery and Chinese migration experiences and current examples of birthright citizenship in the United States and dual-nationality in Mexico. A quick view of the slavery and Chinese Exclusion histories shows these legal citizenship determinations occurred 150 and 110 years ago (Dred Scott and United States v. Wong Kim Ark, respectively), in response to prior global migration. Similarly, current citizenship issues in U.S. and Mexican law developed from changes in U.S. migration policy *257 twenty years ago, i.e., the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). This Essay is written in the year 2007, which inspires scholarly reflection of events in 1807, 1857, and 1898.

These cases illustrate how domestic law is forced by global processes to determine who is or is not a citizen. The decisions made in Dred Scott came after more than two centuries of slave trade to the United States. Similarly, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding the Chinese Exclusion measures took place after Chinese immigration to the U.S. began to increase in 1868. Likewise, Mexico's incorporation of dual-nationality for its citizens in 1997 and political and public calls to revisit birthright citizenship in the U.S. both come after steady increases in Mexico-U.S. migration. For the last twenty years, economic markets in the U.S. and in Mexico (bilateral demand and supply factors) and U.S. border policy have fed this increased presence of foreign nationals in the U.S. These trends lead to unauthorized migrants in the U.S. Children born to these migrants in U.S. territory are entitled to "birthright citizenship." Established U.S. legal interpretation entails that these children are U.S. citizens when born in U.S. territory, even if their parents are not "legally" in the U.S. This interpretation is continually contested as the "illegal" migrant presence grows consequent to economic practices and border policies. (continued)

Law and Raw Life
in the Domain of Nonexistence

Donald F. Tibbs and Tryon P. Woods

[W]e must firmly place ourselves in another space to describe our age, the age and space of raw life .... It is a place where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them, or to say what is on the side of the shadow or its obverse.

--Achille Mbembe

The welcome sign at the entrance to Jena, Louisiana, describes it as "a nice place to call home." Recent events involving its criminal justice system, however, produce a countemarrative at the intersection of race and law that refutes this slogan. Trouble in Jena arose in September 2006 over the contestation of race and space when a black student named Kenneth Purvis asked Jena High School authorities for permission to sit under the "white tree," a de facto segregated gathering place exclusively occupied by white students during school breaks. The school principal informed Purvis that he could sit wherever he pleased, and along with two of his buddies, the young man did just that. The following morning, the student body arrived to find three nooses, painted black, dangling from the tree.

Shortly afterwards, white District Attorney J. Walters Reed accompanied several police officers to address a Jena High School assembly. In a throwback to the days of Bull Connor, he threatened the black students for protesting and "making a fuss about this innocent prank," claiming that he could be their "best friend or worst enemy." Next he informed the black students, "With the stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear." *236 Joiner provided the students with a didactic lesson in the history of race and law in America: blacks are more likely to be victimized by state violence than they are to be recipients of equal protection from the rule of law. The school was put on lockdown for the remainder of the week.

Later that fall, on November 30, 2006, a fire burned down the main academic building of Jena High School. The next evening, December I, 2006, a black student possessing a printed invitation to a white party was beaten up, and on December 2, 2006, Matt Windham, a young white man, pulled out a shotgun in a confrontation with several black youth at a local convenience store. When the black youth defended themselves and seized the gun, they were arrested for theft of a firearm, second-degree robbery, and conspiracy to commit second-degree robbery. No charges were filed against the white man.

Finally, on December 4, 2006, at Jena High School, a white student named Justin Barker--who allegedly was making racial taunts, including calling the African American students "niggers" and supporting the white students who hung the nooses and beat up the black student off-campus--was knocked down, punched, and kicked by six black students. The white provocateur was taken to the hospital, treated, and released with minor bruises. He attended a social function that evening.

All six black teens were charged with attempted second-degree murder, a charge that was later determined to be unsubstantiated according to the Louisiana Criminal Code. Amidst controversy, Prosecutor Reed reduced the charges to aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. Under Louisiana criminal law, the aggravated charge requires the use of a weapon. Prosecutor Walters argued the tennis shoes worn by Mychal Bell, one of the black teens, and used to kick Barker constituted the dangerous weapons, an argument the jury ultimately accepted.

At trial, the system continued to exact its violence. Public defender Blane Williams, himself a black man, not only encouraged Bell to accept a *237 plea for a crime that was unsubstantiated by the facts of the case, but he failed to perform his duties as a zealous advocate for his client. Williams failed to challenge the all-white jury composition and rested the defense without offering any evidence or calling a single witness. The jury deliberated less than three hours and returned a conviction for Mychal Bell. Edna Thompson, a long-time friend of the Bells, summed up the jury's decision: "The best thing if you're black in this town is to stay out of the system, because once they get you, you're done for. You're not getting out." Public outrage, protests, and rallies helped provoke judicial review, which overturned the conviction on the grounds that Bell should have been tried as a juvenile since he was sixteen at the time of his arrest. On December 3, 2007, Bell pled guilty to a reduced charge of battery and was sentenced to eighteen months in a juvenile facility. The cases of the remaining five youth, four of whom were over seventeen at the time of the incident--legal adults in Louisiana--are still pending.

These six lives remain suspended in what we are characterizing here as the legal proceedings of "raw life." To live in the era of raw life is to occupy the crossroads of life and death. The interlocking of life and death signals the entanglement of past, present, and future. Professor Cornel West, in characterizing the United States in the twenty-first century as a "twilight civilization" replete with "pervasive cultural decay" and the "dangerous rumblings" of the stigmatized, policed, and degraded Others, illuminates the retrograde direction of this society at the very moment of its most powerful ascendancy. For the postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe, this emergent temporal context--the time of black suffering--is marked by a future horizon that is apparently closed, while the past appears to have receded. Ours is thus a "time of entanglement," a space "where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them": the age of raw life. The interlocking of past and present can be seen in Jena in the scene of lynching nooses at integrated schools; in the form of racialized *238 punishment in the era of formal legal equality; and, pointedly, in the ability of a prosecutor to take away a child's life "with the stroke of a pen."
(continued)

Obama's Deep Disrespect for Blacks
Glen Ford

On Tuesday, April 14, according to the Huffington Post, the White House placed a conference call to American “Jewish leaders,” all but assuring them the U.S. would not show up for Durban II, the international conference on racism, in Geneva, Switzerland. President Obama’s close adviser Samantha Power, of the National Security Council, said the event’s revised draft document “met two of our four red lines frontally, in the sense that it went no further than reparations and it did drop all references to Israel and all anti-Semitic language. But it continued to reaffirm, in toto, Durban I.”

Translation: although the document, under relentless U.S. pressure, has been watered down to the point of irrelevance, it remains unacceptable because it reaffirms declarations of the first World Conference Against Racism, in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. There is virtually no chance President Obama will reverse his decision to boycott Durban II, April 24-25.

We must first ask: Why is the White House reporting to “Jewish leaders” on an issue that is of interest to all Americans, most especially people of color? Has Obama arranged such briefings on Durban II for “Black leaders,” “Latino leaders,” or “Native American leaders” — representatives of constituencies that have suffered genocide, slavery, discrimination, forced displacement and all manner of racist assaults right here on American soil? No, he has not. Barack Obama knows full well that he risks nothing by disrespecting African Americans at will. Across the Black political spectrum, so-called leadership seems incapable of shame or of taking manly or womanly offense at even the most blatant insults to Black people when the source of the affront is Barack Hussein Obama.

Several weeks ago, popular Sirius Radio Black talk show host Mark Thompson (“Make It Plain”) wondered aloud if Obama’s threat to boycott Durban II should be a “deal breaker” — a “last straw” offense against Black interests and sensibilities. It should have been. The Obama administration’s fawning, damn near servile behavior when accommodating Zionist demands — and I use the word “demands” quite purposely — was a lesson in how Power responds to constituencies it favors, fears, or at least, respects. Blacks get nothing from Obama’s White House except permission to worship him as the ultimate role model. Less than nothing, as the unfolding Durban outrage demonstrates.

Obama has done more damage to the Durban process than George Bush, who pulled out of Durban I after the conference had begun. (continued)

Announcements

Links

African Diasporan NGO’s Declare Victory at Opening of Durban II

Buoyed by the assurances of a high official in the Office of Human Rights, a coalition of NGOs representing African Diasporan descendants have declared victory at the opening day of the UN Review of the World Conference Against Racism [WCAR].

At a briefing for NGOs, Dr. Ibrahim Salama of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said he was quite certain that the Draft Outcome Document, forwarded by the Third Preparatory Committee meeting to the Review Conference, would be accepted as an enhancement to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action [DDPA] by the over 170 countries in attendance. That draft document begins by reaffirming “the DDPA, as it was adopted at the WCAR in 2001.” This simple affirmation is important given the continuing campaign by Western countries which signed the DDPA in 2001 to revise history and eliminate the tremendous steps which the DDPA represented in setting the concrete framework for resolving racism. These steps include:

the acknowledgment of the economic basis of racism;
the declaration that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery were crimes against humanity; and
that the descendants of those victims were due compensation (reparations).

(continued)

International Human Rights
and the Black Community

Same level:

[ What's New! April 2009 ] [ March 2009 ] [ February 2009 - Race, Racism and the Law ]

Child Level:

Parent Level:

[ Law Review Articles on Race and Racism ] [ Obama Administration, Race and Racism ]

Units:

[Race and Racial Groups] [Citizenship Rights] [Justice and Race] [Patterns of Basic Needs] [Intersectionality Issues] [Human Rights]

Always Under Construction!

International Human Rightsand the Black Community