Essays examine the historical and intellectual context for the modern debate about human rights, the racial implications of the war on terrorism, the intersection of racial oppression, and the national security state. Others look at the Pinkerton detective agency as a forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the role of Africa in post-World War II American attempts at empire-building, and the role of immigration as a human rights issue.
Essays examine the historical and intellectual context for the modern debate about human rights, the racial implications of the war on terrorism, the intersection of racial oppression, and the national security state. Others look at the Pinkerton detective agency as a forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the role of Africa in post-World War II American attempts at empire-building, and the role of immigration as a human rights issue.
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Overview
Essays examine the historical and intellectual context for the modern debate about human rights, the racial implications of the war on terrorism, the intersection of racial oppression, and the national security state. Others look at the Pinkerton detective agency as a forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the role of Africa in post-World War II American attempts at empire-building, and the role of immigration as a human rights issue.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870137501 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2008 |
| Pages: | 371 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Curtis Stokes is Professor of Political Theory and Black Politics in James Madison College at Michigan State University. He has edited and authored six books, including the award-winning Malcolm X’s Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies and The State of Black Michigan, 1967-2007.
Read an Excerpt
RACE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
By Curtis Stokes
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Michigan State UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-750-1
Chapter One
Enhancing Whose Security? People of Color and the Post–September 11 Expansion of Law Enforcement and Intelligence PowersNatsu Taylor Saito
Since September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration has unilaterally assumed the power to detain thousands of people, mostly immigrant men from Muslim or Middle Eastern countries, holding them indefinitely and incommunicado, denying them access to the courts, and interrogating them; and it has deported thousands more. It has convinced Congress to pass hundreds of new laws that give the executive branch dramatically expanded powers. In early 2003 the Justice Department's draft "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003" was leaked to the press. More commonly known as "PATRIOT II," it proposed expanding the already impressive list of powers given law enforcement and intelligence agencies by the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, which was hurriedly enacted by Congress in the weeks following the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
These bills dramatically curtailed the civil liberties of U.S. citizens as well as immigrants, in many cases legitimizing measures long sought and/or illegally used by law enforcement agencies to suppress political dissent. Particularly striking was a provision of patriot ii that, if passed, would have allowed the government to "expatriate" U.S. citizens, that is, strip them of their citizenship, for becoming members of or providing material support to any group deemed a "terrorist organization ... engaged in hostilities against the United States." The terms "material support" and "terrorist organization" were defined very broadly, and "hostilities" was left undefined. This proposal forces us to consider just who is an "American" under these circumstances. We are told that all of these measures are necessary to protect the American people, and the most basic "American values" of freedom and democracy. Yet the United States has a long history of race-based exclusion from citizenship, denial of constitutional protections to large groups of people identified as "Other," and repression of movements for social change and racial justice in the name of "national security." To understand just who and what are being protected by the "war on terror" today, we need to look at these measures in the context of the United States' long history of conflating race, "foreignness," and disfavored ideologies; its more general use of the criminal justice system to maintain social control; and its consistent use of law enforcement and intelligence powers to suppress movements of political dissent. This is a large subject, of course, and this essay provides only a brief sketch of some of the issues to be considered in such an analysis.
Who Is an American?
The United States is commonly described as a "nation of immigrants," a phrase evoking images of the Statue of Liberty holding out her beacon of freedom and opportunity to the "huddled masses" oppressed elsewhere in the world. In the aftermath of September 11, this image was invoked by President George W. Bush, who attempted to explain away the attacks on the grounds that "they" hate "us" because of our freedom and prosperity. It is also the image used to explain increasingly restrictive immigration policies because, according to this portrayal, everyone wants to come and partake of our freedoms, and we clearly cannot accommodate them all.
In reality, the United States has been anything but hospitable to immigrants since September 11. Both temporary visitors and permanent residents have been subjected to a variety of harsh measures, including thousands of expedited deportations, 12 the "disappearance" and detention of at least 1,200 people, interrogations in the form of "voluntary interviews" with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—now under the Department of Homeland Security—and a cumbersome new National Security Entry/Exit Registration System.
Most of these measures have targeted men from Middle Eastern or predominantly Muslim countries, and appear to violate fundamental constitutional protections (such as the right to due process and equal protection), which, at least in theory, apply to all persons in the United States, not just citizens. However, the government's actions are largely immune from constitutional challenge thanks to a long history of Supreme Court cases that have said that the "political branches" of government, that is, the executive and the legislature, have essentially unfettered power with respect to immigration. Called the "plenary power doctrine," this refusal to enforce otherwise applicable provisions of the Constitution in immigration matters dates back to the Chinese Exclusion Cases of the 1880s and 1890s, and has been invoked since then to allow, among other things, exclusions without hearings, deportations on the basis of secret evidence, and indefinite imprisonment when those deemed deportable have no country to accept them. The measures targeting immigrants since September 11 have been particularly severe, but are nonetheless quite consistent with the government's exercise of its plenary power over immigrants since the first federal immigration laws were enacted in 1875.
What does it mean, then, to call the United States a "nation of immigrants"? It is certainly not a call to the huddled masses, who have been effectively excluded by policies including national origin quotas and country caps, requirements of immediate family ties or employment, and evidence of economic support. It is accurate, however, insofar as it refers to the fact that most of those who consider themselves Americans today descend from peoples not indigenous to this land. In other words, this is a settler-colonial state, and the "nation of immigrants" descriptor is, perhaps, most accurately seen as a call for unity among the settler population, an opportunity to identify with the privileged "we" who claim a share of the disproportionate wealth controlled by the United States and to distance ourselves from the "they" who envy our well-being.
Describing the United States as a "nation of immigrants" sanitizes its history by focusing on those who immigrated voluntarily, initially from northern and western Europe and later from other parts of the world. It excludes American Indians as members of the polity, conveniently reinforcing the notion that they are "extinct," rendering invisible the genocidal practices that have accompanied the colonization of the continent since 1492, and justifying an occupation that even U.S. government lawyers have conceded is not, for the most part, justified by anything resembling valid title to the land. It is a characterization that disregards or, more accurately, attempts to eradicate the history of African Americans, brought to this land involuntarily—those who survived the journey forced into chattel slavery and excluded from all constitutional protection until after the Civil War. Likewise, the emphasis on "immigrants" obscures the forced annexation of the northern half of Mexico and the illegal overthrow and occupation of the Kingdom of Hawai'i, as well as the ongoing occupation of Puerto Rico and other "unincorporated territories." The history of most people of color now living in this country having thus been erased, we are left with the myth that this was an essentially uninhabited land made prosperous by the hard work of freedom-seeking European settlers.
The determinants of citizenship have both reflected and reinforced this myth. African Americans were not U.S. citizens until passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. As Supreme Court chief justice Roger Taney stated forthrightly in the Dred Scott case, until then persons of African descent, whether "free" or enslaved, were not only not citizens, but not even "persons" under the Constitution. Most American Indians only became U.S. citizens in 1924 when Congress, in an attempt to undermine Native sovereignty, unilaterally imposed citizenship on them, and the government continues to treat them as members of "domestic dependent" nations, sovereign only to the extent it is convenient to the "larger" interests of the United States.
The Constitution as originally draft ed did not specify who was to be a citizen, but it did direct Congress to "establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization." The first Congress, meeting in 1790, did so by limiting naturalized citizenship to "free white persons." Although modified after the Civil War to include "persons of African descent," the racial restriction on citizenship was not completely eliminated until 1952. Interpreting the law in 1923 to find a "high-caste Hindu" ineligible for naturalization, the Supreme Court summarized the initial understanding of who was to be an American:
The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of the day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to "any alien being a free white person" it was these immigrants—bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh—and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind.
As a result of this initial construction of who was truly "American" and the related racially restrictive immigration and naturalization policies, "foreignness" has become part of the racialized identity of Asian Americans, Latinos and Latinas, and those of Middle Eastern descent. One of the more obvious results of this imputed foreignness was the World War II internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. The U.S. military's justification for indefinitely incarcerating all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, U.S. citizens and noncitizens, men and women, children and old people, was that it could not distinguish the "loyal" from the "disloyal." This rationale, upheld by the Supreme Court in the Hirabayashi, Yasui, and Korematsu cases on the basis of "military necessity," presumes that disloyalty is a crime for which one can be imprisoned with no semblance of due process; that certain groups can be presumed disloyal on the basis of race or national origin (that is, persons of Japanese but not German or Italian descent); and that, at least for those groups, "blood is thicker than water," making citizenship irrelevant.
The perception that only Euro-derivative settlers are "real" Americans persists in many ways, despite the elimination of racial restrictions on the acquisition of citizenship. For African Americans, this is reflected in what is oft en called "second-class citizenship," though more accurately described as the consequences of internal colonialism—disparate treatment by the criminal justice system, persisting segregation in all aspects of life, and growing disparities in income, wealth, and access to education, housing, and health care. For other peoples of color, also plagued by these disparities, there is oft en a more straightforward presumption of "foreignness." Asian Americans and Latino/as are still commonly treated as "aliens" regardless of how long their families have lived in the United States. Arab Americans and South Asians have been subjected to a dramatic increase in hate crimes since September 11, as they have been "raced" in popular consciousness as not only foreign but as having terrorist sympathies as well. Ironically, even those truly native to this land are perceived as foreign, as illustrated by the murder of twenty-one-year-old Kimberly Lowe, a Creek woman killed in Oklahoma in September 2001, by young white men in a pickup truck who yelled, "Go back to your own country!" and proceeded to run her over.
While the examples are endless, we can see the significance that race, ethnicity, and national origin still have today in the social and legal determination of who is a "real American" by briefly comparing the treatment of John Walker Lindh and Yaser Esam Hamdi. Soon after September 11, the United States was engaged in an undeclared, if very real, war in Afghanistan, claiming that the country's ruling Taliban government was harboring Osama bin Laden and the al Quaida network believed to be responsible for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. After a massive bombing campaign, the United States succeeded in replacing the Taliban with a more U.S.-friendly government, in the process capturing over 600 men and boys of several dozen nationalities and transporting them to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo, Cuba, where most of them continue to be detained and interrogated. Two of those captured, Lindh and Hamdi, turned out to be U.S. citizens.
John Walker Lindh was immediately taken to Alexandria, Virginia, and charged with conspiring to kill Americans. As White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "the great strength of America is he will now have his day in court." And, in fact, he appeared in a civilian criminal court where, represented by counsel and supported by his family, he pleaded to reduced charges of supplying services to the Taliban and carrying an explosive during the commission of a felony, and received a twenty-year prison sentence. Yaser Esam Hamdi, on the other hand, was first taken to Guantánamo Bay, where it was discovered that he was a U.S. citizen, having been born in Louisiana. He was transferred not to a U.S. civilian court, but to a naval brig in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was held incommunicado for well over a year, labeled an "enemy combatant" by the government, and denied access to counsel and the courts. What distinguished Hamdi from Lindh? The only apparent difference in their cases was that Lindh is a Euroamerican and Hamdi of Middle Eastern descent. Tellingly, the media immediately began referring to Lindh as "the American Taliban," a moniker that has never been applied to Hamdi.
Maintaining Social Control through Law Enforcement
As briefly outlined above, race has played a very significant role in the definition of who is an "American." The restrictions on who receives the benefits of political participation and legal protection—available initially to "citizens" and, after the lifting of explicitly racial restrictions on citizenship, to those deemed "truly American"—have served not only the end of social exclusion but also a larger goal of preserving the economic and racial status quo. As illustrated by the use of racial repression to occupy the land and exploit the labor of people of color throughout U.S. history, racism is deeply intertwined with economic exploitation, and it is no accident that the poor are disproportionately people of color and people of color are disproportionately poor. In addition to restrictions on citizenship, another particularly significant way in which the legal system has maintained racial hierarchy and the concentrated control of wealth and resources has been through its enactment and enforcement of criminal laws. Drawing on examples from the "war on crime" and its subsidiary "war on drugs," this section focuses on how the law and law enforcement powers have been used to preserve the particular racial, economic, and political status quo that has been defined as "American," setting the stage for much of what is happening today in the "war on terror."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from RACE AND HUMAN RIGHTS by Curtis Stokes Copyright © 2009 by Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixPreface....................xi
Introduction Curtis Stokes....................xiii
1 • Enhancing Whose Security? People of Color and the Post–September 11 Expansion of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Powers Natsu Taylor Saito....................3
2 • The Pinkerton Detective Agency: Prefiguring the FBI Ward Churchill....................53
3 • Between Hegemony and Empire: Africa and the U.S. Global War against Terrorism Darryl C. Thomas....................119
4 • Latino Growth and Latino Exploitation: More Than a Passing Acquaintance Robert Aponte....................143
5 • Race, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship H. L. T. Quan....................169
6 • African Americans and Immigration: The Economic, Political, and Strategic Implications Robert C. Smith....................185
7 • Historicizing Affirmative Action and the Landmark 2003 University of Michigan Cases Pero Gaglo Dagbovie....................199
8 • A New Coalition: Reaching the Religious Right to Deal with Racial Justice George A. Yancey....................211
9 • Human Rights, Affirmative Action, and Development: An Agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean Jonas Zoninsein....................237
10 • The Whitewashing of Affirmative Action J. Angelo Corlett....................255
For Further Reading....................265
About the Editor and Contributors....................269