Ink Tea Stone Leaf

It has been a long while since I gently laid aside my hope that, once certain malignancies growing upon the body politic had expired, the United States would be able to resume its long march toward freedom as if nothing had happened. Too many things have been broken that must be repaired; too many people who have embraced a culture of naked chauvinism must be persuaded to relearn the value of an open society. While there has never been a time in history when everything has really been “OK,” the present time has gone a long way in betraying many moments of progress. Our hopes for the future will have to account for the consequences of that betrayal.

Nevertheless, on Independence Day I find myself thankful for one recent victory in particular. It was hard fought, and the outcome rested on a knife’s edge, but it was a victory all the same: the United States remains a nation where every child born therein is constitutionally entitled to the rights of citizenship. If this victory had not been won, I’m not sure there would have been anything to celebrate at all.

To quote the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:

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

There has been a vicious minority opinion in this country for many years, to the effect that either these words either do not mean what they mean, or that they ought not to mean it, and should therefore be ignored. In their ruthless contempt for what they do not understand and their perverse obsession with uniform cultural conformity, they have been blind to the righteousness of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee. They do not understand that this guarantee is not only a positive good, but probably the greatest single sentence of good in the entire Constitution.

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that the words mean what they mean, the opponents of jus soli citizenship will have to live with that good, even if they have to choke on it.

The decision on Constitutional grounds was far too close, only five votes against four. The larger right-wing movement has in fact spent decades attempting to engineer a Supreme Court that is amenable to this kind of mayhem, turning a blind eye to the letter and spirit of the law for the sake of right-wing policy goals. Still, as close as it was, it seems the enemies of citizenship (and the president they worked so hard to elect) picked this fight just a bit prematurely, and as bad as things have gotten and are likely to get, their miscalculation is our blessing.

I was born in the United States, and I have never regarded my own moral claim to citizenship as being founded upon any other fact. The length of time my ancestors have lived here is immaterial—it has nothing to do with anything I have ever done to “deserve” my citizenship—and I stand in legal equality with the children of first generation immigrants. My rights are the same as theirs, without exception. And unlike those on the right, I have never regarded this state of affairs as cheapening or diminishing my own rights. I have never regarded the innovations of their parents’ cultures as a threat to the traditions of mine. I have never resented those parents for wanting to raise their children in my neighborhood. I am not jealous of the privileges of my nationality.

The United States has always been multicultural, and every region lives and speaks and celebrates in distinctive ways that have been shaped by inhabitants from all over the world. The fact that some white people are still willing to assert that their culture (or what they imagine is their culture) is entitled to dominate, marginalize, or exclude the others on the basis of conquest, past hegemony, or innate superiority, is a national embarrassment, a failure of our education, and a profound betrayal of our people.

Traditionally, the Fourth of July looks backward to the founding of the United States, the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…”), and the legacy of the American Revolution. This year, it also looks back upon a full two hundred and fifty years of the debate, compromise, and turmoil that has shaped who we are. It was our greatest historical crime, the institution of slavery, that made necessary the unequivocal language of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Dred Scott decision had made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that American citizenship was for America’s white inhabitants. Fashionable opinion of the day had it that the only viable alternative to keeping Black people in slavery was to ship them to Africa, where most of them had never lived, rather than to accept them as “real” Americans. This naked racism required an absolute refutation, an abolition of all but the most fundamental criteria. “Conservatives” have hunted for grounds to nullify this guarantee ever since, but as long as it stands we are a better nation for it—no child born on this land may be stripped of their rights by arbitrary policies.

Enough with the mindset that the rights of citizenship are only worthwhile if they are exclusive and inaccessible—the United States of America is not a country club. I look forward to the day when slurs like “anchor baby” are universally recognized as unacceptable. This Fourth of July, I look forward to an America that, having at last exhausted its will to curtail freedom, will finally learn what it looks like.