Hey, United States: Your Racism is Showing.
King said the arc of history bends toward justice. In the context of American politics, the arc of history bends towards racism.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are kidnapping people from our streets every day. We cannot get used to this. In just eleven months under this administration, the government has arrested hundreds of thousands of our neighbors. ICE is currently holding roughly 65,000 people in detention centers, stripped of nearly every constitutional protection and rendered, in practice, property of the state. An unknown number of people have been shipped to labor camps in countries they’ve never been to before, and many more remain unaccounted for. Seven out of ten people detained have no criminal record. Hundreds are U.S. citizens.
Most have families and are deeply rooted in their communities they are being abducted from. More than 18 million children in the United States have at least one migrant parent.
All of this is blatantly unconstitutional. Birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection under the law were enshrined after the Civil War through the 14th Amendment. Alongside the 13th Amendment, which (almost) abolished slavery, and the 15th Amendment, which (sort of) granted Black men the vote, these Reconstruction Amendments were designed to stop former slave states from continuing their racial subjugation after losing the war. These amendments guaranteed federal constitutional protections to Black people and, by extension, to all of us, from abusive state powers. Today, the federal government is reneging on these federal guarantees, working relentlessly to dismantle them.
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to review a landmark case on birthright citizenship, an issue constitutionally settled for more than 150 years. Outrageously, but to the surprise of no one, the Roberts Court is poised to determine whether the Constitution still means what it plainly says: that anyone born on American soil is a citizen. The consequences of a ruling that undermines birthright citizenship are staggering. It would introduce profound uncertainty into the lives of millions of families, leaving entire communities vulnerable to government overreach, selective exclusion, and abduction to countries people have never known.
More than 50 million people living in the United States are immigrants, most of them nonwhite. Millions more are second-generation Americans whose families came seeking safety, stability, or opportunity. Forty-eight million Americans are Black. And no one is safe. The president is urging the court to move on birthright citizenship so he can assert the power to strip us, any of us, of our constitutional protections. If he succeeds, every baby born to any of these communities could face questions about citizenship, despite being born on U.S. soil. If the court overturns part of the 14th Amendment, the government would have license to restrict where Black and brown people live, what they can own, which jobs they can hold, and who gets to participate fully in public life. That is not hyperbole. It is the architecture of apartheid.
But we also know this: killing us, caging us, and using the machinery of government to exploit and dehumanize us has never broken us. This is our America, too. We are still here despite slavery, despite Wounded Knee, despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, despite the Japanese Internment Camps, despite Jim Crow. And we will be here after all of this, contributing, creating, thriving, and, in about twenty years, becoming the majority anyway.
The Zapatistas, quoting the Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos, said, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” Today, our civic responsibility is to be seeds. To contain in ourselves the potentiality of what is possible, and to sow that. Like the founders, we find ourselves in a moment when the regular order of things is unraveling. We are responsible for holding on to us and building what gets built next.
This is the time to ask yourself: Do I believe we are all created equal? If so, what actions are you willing to take and what risks are you willing to make to get us there?
Maria Perez is the cofounder of Democracy Rising, a national nonprofit working toward a more functional, representative democracy for all of us.
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Thank you very much for calling out the racism that, sadly, has always underpinned America. It's cruel, inhumane, deadly, destructive and the absolute wrong way to go. It is crushing our entire country.
It is waaay past time for more of us who are called 'white' to stand up for our neighbors, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers and say ENOUGH. NO!!!!
Being both white and Latina, I am profoundly disturbed and profoundly conflicted by my privilege and others' oppression. Leading by example is my way of restoring civility in this country. Everyone gets respect until proven otherwise... Trump.