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Now, this will not go away because not only did
Tancredo and Deal get a group of 92 lawmakers in
the House attempt to force a vote
on legislation that would revoke the principle of birthright citizenship.
It also came up again in the Presidential Campaign.
There were times when during the campaign presidential candidate then
candidate Donald Trump called for an end
to the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.
Now, however coded it is,
this call for a ban on birthright citizenship.
Also has much to do with issues of race and ethnicity.
It is aimed first and foremost at immigration from Mexico.
Undocumented and particularly at the children of undocumented immigrants.
And is also part and parcel of a kind of
belief that somehow race is so critical to the building of American society.
Is so critical to the national identity.
And so, when Stephen King in March of this year said
that we can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies.
He actually echoes the race based foundation of the 1790 Naturalization Act.
That is proposing to limit citizenship to a European population or white population.
So, the opposition whether it's to Muslims,
whether it's to Mexicans,
whether it's to Asians,
the opposition to other immigrants coming into
the United States and being naturalized as a citizen goes back to 1790.
And even as it has been defeated and the 14th amendment on the McCarran Act of 1952,
or in the Hart-Celler Act of 1965,
it hasn't gone away.
It hasn't gone away because of concerns about race perceptions of race,
the ways in which race enter into and affect so many phases,
so many aspects of our society is still there.
And so, we can't hope that this will go away with the blast of a trumpet.
But will is very likely to raise its ugly head again and again,
until it is finally defeated.
When we think about legally mandated and customary practice of racial subordination,
marriage is one way to gauge it as well.
Citizenship opens up a window
to so many ways in which race became part of the very foundation of American society.
The question of intermarriage is another way to look at it.
It was Virginia in 1662 that made slavery,
that based slavery on race and heredity.
But it was also in the same year that Virginia enacted a statute
banning any white person from intermarry with a colored person.
And so, that was then 1662.
Now a hundred years later and 1762 nine of
the 13 colonies ban intermarry based upon social perceptions of race.
And that included Massachusetts,
and Pennsylvania, and Maryland,
North Carolina Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi.
So, it was not just limited to the Southern states.
It also included states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
You move forward in time and that is another 200 years.
Those bans are still there in 1865 at
the time that the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished.
And so even then you had 32 of the states still
had laws banning interracial marriage and placing
restrictions on not only colored versus white,
but they had actually expanded
the definitions to include things like: persons of Negro descent,
or Mongolians, or members of the Malay race or Mulattoes.
And so the restrictions on interracial marriage expanded over
the years to include so many segments of American society.
And even as late as 1962 there were still
21 U.S. states that had laws making interracial couples illegal.
And these 21 states including states outside of the South: like Indiana,
Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming.
And then in 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that in the case of: Loving versus Virginia.
And there's a movie out about that this year.
Which ruled that state bans on interracial marriage
violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Thus ending 300 years of racial subordination in the area of interpersonal relationships.
And the fact that both local ordinances and State Laws could
enter into interpersonal relationships in such intimate way,
again reminds us of just how fundamental race was in shaping the identity,
the social relationships, laws and customs in our country.
If we only understood the formal and legal aspects of race.
We were have a good grasp of just how fundamental it is to the economic,
political and social foundations of our society.
Because the law covers only so much of it.
For every law, every written law, every congressional act,
every state statute there were literally hundreds of unwritten laws that
really shape customary practices around issues of race and racial subordination.
And, some of those,
and there are many of them,
for instance: a black male cannot offer his hands to
shake the hands of a white male because it implies equality.
That's not law, it's simply a customary practice.
Even the way in which individuals refer to each other: titles of respect,
which may not have been legal,
but certainly were practices that were prevalent and pervasive throughout society.
That black people were to use courtesy tolerance when referring to whites.
Whites did not really allow them to call them by their first names for instance.
Another example was a black person should never lay
claim or overly demonstrate superior knowledge or intelligence.
And the former leader of the Urban League Vernon Jordan.
The title of his book is Vernon Can Read because he
lives in Jordan a place where this was something that he was supposed to do.
And so when when people discover that he
could read it also meant that he was out of his place.
And so there's a lot of instances in which
people make judgments based upon perceptions of
race that you had gotten out of your place.
And they have terms like uppity.
Uppity. And a term that was used even during
the Obama administration when a Georgia congressman referred to him as uppity.
A black person should never appear more wealthy and prosperous than a white.
Was another one of those customary rules.
And that reminds me of the autobiography of Bill Russell,
who was a famous NBA player,
and when he was a young man living in Texas his father actually
owned the truck and when he would drive it the police would stop him and say,
well whose truck are you driving?
And he would just say Mr. Russell which was his father.
But they assume that Mr. Russell was a reference to
a white person and therefore was okay.
If they had understood that it was his father's truck that would be a lot of questions.
Because how could he appear to be more wealthy than whites who were not so well-to-do?
A white person no matter how poor,
was considered to be superior to a black person.
And also there were a lot of inter-personal rules about:
whether black men could shake the hands of a white person?
Whether they can actually even shake the hands particularly of a white woman?
Whether there could be any kind of touch whatsoever?
These were extra legal customary practices that deepen race and race subordination in
our society in ways that in day-to-day living people operated on grounds of race.
James D. AndersonEdward William and Jane Marr Gutsgell Professor of Education
