Perpetuating Racism By Denying Minorities Social Citizenship

We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.[1]

Maya Angelou.

Citizenship entails more than the rights and privileges granted by the United States Constitution (“Constitution”); citizenship encompasses civil, political, and social contexts. Arguably, minorities and immigrants have failed to acquire not only social citizenship, but parts of civil and political citizenships, due to historical racism and discrimination that defines the United States (“US”).

The terms civil, political, and social citizenships were first coined by British sociologist, T.H. Marshall (“Marshall”), in his essay collection “Citizenship and Social Class,” published in 1950.[2] According to Marshall, citizenship is a “status bestowed on all those who are full members of a community,” where those members share rights, duties, and protections of a common law.[3] Although Marshall’s essays were presented with Britain in mind and through the lens of economics, his theory, and the concerns entailed, are applicable to other perspectives; in particular, the minority perspective.

Civil citizenship encompasses the rights necessary for individual freedom, including liberty of the person; freedom of speech, thought and religion; the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts; and the right to justice.[4] The civil element of Marshall’s theory is most directly associated with the courts of justice because to defend one’s civil rights, she must proceed through the judicial system under due process of law. Arguably, civil citizenship was not afforded to African-Americans until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Act”). The Act outlawed segregation in public establishments and banned discriminatory practices in employment.[5]

Almost two centuries before the Act was passed, African Americans were not intended receive civil citizenship status when the Constitution was drafted at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The 55 all-white male delegation incorporated three provisions to assure the perpetuation of slavery, the Three Fifths clause (see Art. 1, sec. 2, cl. 3), the Importation clause (see Art. 1, sec. 9, cl. 1), and the Fugitive Slave clause (see Art. 4, sec. 2, cl. 3). In actuality, the delegates produced a document providing no substantive justice for African Americans — free or enslaved. The Scott v. Sanford (also known as the Dred Scott) decision, through unsound and illogical arguments, judicially confirmed the Framers’ intentions by ruling that African Americans, whether slave or free, were not citizens and therefore not entitled to Constitutional protections, specifically the right to bring a civil suit against another person in the federal court systems.[6]

The Emancipation Proclamation (“Emancipation”), a presidential proclamation and an executive order issued in 1863, which declared that all slaves in the southern states were free, did not actually free any slaves.[7] Instead, the Emancipation was produced because the Union needed more men to fight against the Confederacy and the most effective way to weaken the South was to deprive them of their most valuable property — slaves. The issuance of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime; 14th Amendment, which granted every citizen privileges and immunities, due process, and equal protection; and the 15th Amendment, which prohibited federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote based on race, color, or previous conditions of servitudes, did not afford African Americans civil citizenship because the South enacted Jim Crow Laws, which declared “Separate but Equal” as legal.[8]

With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African Americans, and other minorities, were afforded the full protections of the Constitution, but with a caveat. Today, judicial institutions perpetuate one form slavery — involuntary servitude as a form of punishment — which disproportionately affects African Americans more than any other group of persons.

Political citizenship is the right to participate in the exercise of political power, “as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body.”[9] The corresponding institutions are local, state, and federal governments. Although the 15th Amendment prohibited state and federal governments from denying any person the right to vote based on race, states have continued to expel African Americans and other minorities from the polls through other means. In its history, states have created voting requirements such as literacy tests and proof of official identification; single voting stations, which requires voters to travel many miles to vote; poll taxes, which requires voters to pay a fee before voting; and gerrymandering, which is the manipulation of boundaries by drawing voting lines based on party affiliation. Most often, those lines directly correlate with race. These tools have been used to prevent African Americans and other minority communities from voting.

Social citizenship comprises of a myriad of rights, from the right to economic welfare and security to the right to cultural well-being.[10] The institutions linked to the social dimension are welfare systems, such as public education and health care. In Marshall’s theory, social rights are intended to “mitigate inequalities generated by market economies without abolishing markets.”[11] As opposed to Britain’s welfare state, a lack of social rights in the US perpetuates enormous economical inequalities between minorities and their majority counterpart. These inequalities are bred from the majority group’s unwillingness to afford African Americans social citizenship — a key component to becoming a complete citizen.

Slavery was, arguably, the first and most devastating institution that propelled racism against African Americans. Slave labor was the back bone of the South’s agricultural industries. It was also the South’s most protected right. Unlike the Indigenous Tribes of North America, Africans were resistant to European diseases and were separated from their home country by the Atlantic Ocean, so escaping was nearly impossible. Through the Three Fifths, Importation, and Fugitive Slave clauses, the Framers of the Constitution legalized slavery and granted slave owners a federal constitutional right to buy, sell, and possess slaves. In its legality, slaves were property, not humans. Although northern states had abolished slavery, discrimination ran rampant through every street. No African American, slave or free, was protected from racial discrimination.

Even after the abolishment of slavery in 1865, racial discrimination persisted through the enactment of Jim Crow Laws. Jim Crow Laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the southern states of the US from the 1870s into the 1960s.[12] The most common laws forbid intermarriage (see Kinney v. The Commonwealth, where a Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the Virginia law prohibiting interracial marriage in 1878)[13] and required business owners and public institutions to keep black and white persons separate.[14] Despite the ratification of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in 1868, providing that “no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it wasn’t until 1967 in Loving v. Virginia that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were deemed unconstitutional.[15] These “separate but equal” laws maintained the belief that African Americans, and other minorities, were inferior to white persons.

Similar sentiments of the Jim Crow Laws are visible today. At its core, mass incarceration is the baseline for social inequalities afflicting African American and minority communities. The effects of the government movement, War on Drugs, is a mirror image to the effects of Jim Crow Laws. The War on Drugs disproportionately affects African Americans. The theory that African Americans commit more crimes, especially drug related crimes, is a fallacy. The US Department of Health and Human Services studies, of over a decade, have found that white and black persons use illegal drugs at nearly an identical rate.[16] However, African Americans are 6 times more likely to be arrested on a drug charge.[17] Arguably, drug laws are enforced in a racially discriminatory manner. An overt example is police officers racially profiling citizens and stopping vehicles with nonwhite drivers (see Whren v. United States in which the Court noted that “selective enforcement of the traffic code based on race is inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”[18]). Although unconstitutional, racial profiling in the law enforcement context occurs at a grotesque rate, leading to the phenomena “driving while black.”[19]

Higher rates of incarceration and convictions among African Americans leads to less opportunities to become educated and employed. Thus, standards of living for minority communities are often subpar to the majority communities. Other collateral consequences of criminal convictions include denial of access to government benefits, including student loans and housing.[20]

War on Drugs is the new era of segregation laws; continuing the belief that African Americans and minority communities are inferior to whites. Additionally, mass incarceration is modern slavery. The majority population is maintaining social control over minority communities by denying them social rights to equal education and equal opportunity of employment. Despite receiving civil and political citizenship through ratifications of Constitutional Amendments, African Americans still do not possess social citizenship because of racism and racial discrimination.

[1] Vi-An Nguyen, 20 Inspiring Quotes About Equality for the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, Parade, Living Well (last visited Feb. 18, 2018) https://parade.com/311401/viannguyen/20-inspiring-quotes-about-equality-for-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-civil-rights-act/.

[2] Jeff Manza and Michael Sauder, Inequality and Society, W.W. Norton and Co. (2009) referencing T.H. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class http://delong.typepad.com/marshall-citizenship-and-social-class.pdf.

[3] Id. at 149–50.

[4] Manza, Inequality and Society, 148.

[5] Civil Rights Act (1964), Our Documents (last visited Feb. 12, 2018) https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=97.

[6] Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

[7] History.com Staff, Emancipation Proclamation (last visited Feb. 12, 2018) http://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/emancipation-proclamation.

[8] Jerrald M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow, St. Martin’s Press (2002).

[9] Manza, 149.

[10] Id.

[11] Mitchell Cohen, T.H. Marshall’s “Citizenship and Social Class”, DISSENT (last visited Feb. 16, 2018) https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/t-h-marshalls-citizenship-and-social-class.

[12] Jim Crow Laws, National Park Services (last visited Feb. 17, 2018) https://www.nps.gov/malu/learn/education/jim_crow_laws.htm.

[13] Kinney v. the Commonwealth Encyclopedia Virginia (last visited Feb. 18, 2018) https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Kinney_v_The_Commonwealth_October_3_1878.

[14] Jim Crow Laws.

[15] Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).

[16] Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, NAACP (last visited Feb. 18, 2018) http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/.

[17] Id.

[18] 517 U.S. 806 (1996).

[19] David Harris, Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on our Nation’ Highways, ACLU Special Report (last visited Feb. 17, 2018) https://www.aclu.org/report/driving-while-black-racial-profiling-our-nations-highways.

[20] Sarah Benson, Beyond the Sentence -Understanding Collateral Consequences, National Institute of Justice, NIJ Journal №272, https://www.nij.gov/journals/272/Pages/collateral-consequences.aspx.