Citizenship Is a Status like Whiteness; It Has to End
At least, as we know it
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Cancel citizenship. It has to go. Spread human rights instead. That’s not for shock value but for serious consideration. What’s radical can appear impractical. What’s necessary can appear inconvenient. Citizenship has a hideous history; it isn’t necessary, and it segments society.
Citizenship started as white in America, and the nature of citizenship remains fundamentally white. The suggestion that citizenship is a status like whiteness doesn’t hinge entirely on the color of America’s majority. And that a citizen can be of any color doesn’t change the whiteness of citizenship.
Citizenship is on the long list of social constructions. It’s a status of superiority relative to people without citizenship. In fact, some people insist citizenship is a privilege and not a right. That may be the case, but it’s also a case for interrogation. Like whiteness, citizenship confers privileges, rights, and immunities for arbitrary reasons. Like whiteness, those privileges, rights, and immunities come from violence, oppression, and the law. And like whiteness, citizenship defines and controls freedom and movement.
This comparison to connect race and citizenship is not novel. The legal scholar Dorothy Roberts describes race and citizenship as political categories and political systems. Initially, that sounds like a benign power of the state. It is not. A lack of citizenship is another way to criminalize, dehumanize, discriminate, exclude, exploit, and remove people. Underneath citizenship, there are categories with fewer privileges and rights. Both whiteness and citizenship derive their definitions and value based on what they are not — Black or undocumented.
In the book Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, Aviva Chomsky reviews the history of immigration, illegality, and undocumentedness. She makes comparisons between undocumentedness, labor for citizens, the New Jim Crow, and the freedom to move. As Chomsky points out, the inability for people to gain a legal status creates and sustains inequalities and exploitation. She also discusses the work undocumented people do which shows how citizens reap the benefits of labor by people with a lower status. Chomsky doesn’t say it, but it should be clear: That comfort for citizens, at the expense of people without citizenship, makes citizenship like whiteness again.
The purpose of Chomsky’s book is to challenge the notions of illegality and undocumentedness. That would be a good start for America. However, decriminalizing border crossings and granting legal status to people isn’t enough. By law, that would still enable tiers of people and maintain citizenship as the top tier. Any difference created by the government is enough for people to exploit and discriminate.
Even a “path to citizenship” is uneven. Paths have processes. Paths have cracks. People can obstruct paths. The United States went down several paths with civil rights. They were all forms of procrastination, and they all refused to end whiteness. If citizenship is like whiteness, the goal shouldn’t be to bring more people into citizenship or whiteness. As history shows, the new arrivals to “citizenship as whiteness” could later wield it as a weapon against future groups. That’s happening now. Both citizenship and whiteness are clubs that shouldn’t exist.
America forces people without citizenship into clubs with varying rights. The bare-minimum rights that some states provide still minimize people. If a person wants to work, let them work. If a person can drive, let them drive. If a person wants to run and vote, let them. If America can elect a president who is a natural-born racist, why can’t a naturalized citizen become president too?
The debate around the citizenship question is asking the wrong questions. Citizenship shouldn’t be a question for people, people should question citizenship. An answer to the citizenship question is to end citizenship as a meaningful category. Ending citizenship would collapse the categories and disperse the privileges, rights, and immunities formerly reserved for the highest level of citizenship.
Given the racism and xenophobia in America, people should examine every aspect of life and that includes the concept of citizenship. For many people, ending citizenship is a nonstarter as much as ending whiteness is a nonstarter. In both cases, humanity remains stuck and stalled. Citizenship whitewashes and hoards what should be human rights. Without extending full rights to everyone here, America creates and sustains different statuses of people.
Being a human is a status too. It should be a prevailing and enduring one. The status of being a human extends beyond the border. The status of being an immigrant must stop past the border. For that to begin, citizenship — at least as we know it — has to end.
