The Racist Assault on the 14th Amendment

The Racist Assault on the 14th Amendment

Shooting Cans
By KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY

One of the many racist jokes I heard in the 70s during my time in the military starts with two white soldiers on the rifle range. One soldier asks the other how he learned to shoot so well. “I like shooting cans right off the fence," the other soldier says, "Af-ri-cans, Por-to-ri-cans and Mex-i-cans.”

The joke came to mind when I heard Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina saying, “birthright citizenship is a mistake,” followed by his GOP cohorts’ claim that immigrants have “anchor babies” as a way to tie themselves to the benefits of U.S. citizenship. Graham says he’s considering introducing a bill to rescind Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which generally guarantees U.S. citizenship to those who are born within U.S. borders.

That is not all it does. The section reads:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Also called the "due process" clause or the "equal protection" clause, this part of the 14th Amendment is the very foundation of U.S. civil rights law. The new nullifiers who talk of getting rid of it thus signal the nature of their purpose and the intrinsic unity of those they hold in contempt, like so many cans on the fence.

"Anchor babies" makes for better headlines, and it's diverting. “People come here to have babies,” says Graham. “They come here to drop a child. It's called, 'drop and leave.' To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case.”

“Drop a child.” It’s as if he were talking about animals.

Graham is not up for re-election, but his child-dropping potshot is designed to appease a right wing that is angry because he's “too liberal,” he’s “no Jim DeMint,” saddled up with the Tea Party and the likes of Ollie North and Tom Tancredo. A Greenville County Republican committee even voted to bar Graham from future meetings and events, censuring him “for his cooperation and support of President Obama and the Democratic Party’s liberal agenda.”

So Graham, once a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, has taken to sounding a lot like South Carolina Republican Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, who while running for Governor in a losing bid, said about the poor:

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."

Graham's tack to the farther right concisely illustrates the recent trajectory of politics in South Carolina. Not so long ago, when Fritz Hollings was Senator, there was an unspoken deal that a state delegation of one liberal and one conservative represented. It still left the poor and black mostly behind, but the balance it struck indicated an accommodation to competing views, at least within the pinched terms of mainstream politics. Once Hollings was replaced by Jim DeMint that deal was off. But the forces DeMint represents are not content with a conservative Republican monopoly on the Senate delegation, so ordinary conservatism becomes the new "liberal" and Graham is on the run.

And what better place to run than into the warm ooze of race politics, where South Carolina has led the nation for more than 200 years? As point man for the Senate assault on the 14th Amendment, Graham is also cover for his friend and onetime “moderate” John McCain. McCain’s home state of Arizona is now ground zero in the immigration fight. He’s facing a tough re-election battle, so echoing the call for hearings on the “birth tourism” issue is the shot to fire. The farther right is happy to fall in line. Iowa Senator Charles Grassley said the amendment ought to be “reconsidered.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, “I think we ought to take a look at it -- hold hearings, listen to the experts on it.” Jon Kyl of Arizona said that the only point of such “hearings” would be to consider the repeal of the provision: “The 14th Amendment [has been] interpreted to provide that if you are born in the United States, you are a citizen no matter what. So the question is, if both parents are here illegally, should there be a reward for their illegal behavior?”

Read the Full Essay @ CounterPunch

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Kevin Alexander Gray is a civil rights organizer in South Carolina and author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike! The Fundamentals of Black Politics, published by AK Press / CounterPunch Books. He can be reached at kagamba@bellsouth.net.

The Katrina-Politans

The Katrina-Politians:
A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and the Katrina Generation
by Mark Anthony Neal

Can “niggas” be cosmopolitan? The answer was emphatically no, two years ago, as we all witnessed the drama(s) of misery and suffering unfold in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast region. To be cosmopolitan suggests an access to economic resources and the leisure time to travel the world unfettered by the demands faced by everyday folk. But those black bodies that that made themselves visible in the days after Hurricane Katrina made its landing were not “everyday folk”—they were “niggas” and “niggas” is perhaps apropos for a nation that struggled to name the landlocked and waterlogged black bodies that encroached upon the casual comforts and carefree expectations of our tiny little worlds. We called them “looters,” “refugees,” “unfortunate,” “sinners,” “animals,” “hapless” and “helpless”—anything but citizens. And it is in this context that I’d like to offer yet another linguistic reference: “Katrina-Politans,” a term that obviously references notions of cosmopolitanism, but more so draws from Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s decidedly classed concept of Afro-Politians—those Africans who live in the world. What is to be said about the humanity, desires and survivalisms of those black bodies that bore witness to Katrina’s fiercest moments, even as they are deemed expendable, and dare continue to think themselves citizens of the world?

What I am suggesting here is a form of cosmopolitanism, that speaks to the relationship between those black bodies so many observed two years ago—bodies that were rendered visible, yet invisible at the same time—and the State. This is a type of cosmopolitanism marked, in part, by a symbolic homelessness from notions of mainstream American morality, political relevancy and cultural gravitas; a cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the “Katrina Generation”—those black bodies that were deemed as little more than “refugees” by mainstream corporate media. In this regard the evoking of the term, “refugee” duly reinforced the inhumanity and foreignness of this population. In the early moments of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the evoking of “refugees” also cast illegitimacy on those so called “refugees” who might view themselves as national subjects—citizens—deserving of relief in a moment of national crisis. The term “refugee” also cast aspirations on the desires of the “Katrina Generation” to seek citizenship in whatever locale they chose—or likely were forced—to relocate.

When Walter Mosley makes the point, as he recently did in The Nation, that “not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age,” he captures the tragic irony of Katrina’s aftermath: many Americans and dare I say the State, have never deemed those black bodies as legitimate citizens. In her book Black Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that efforts to deny black bodies access to the resources of the State, are historically related to fears among whites that blacks might view themselves as cosmopolitan subjects.


Read the Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com