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7 RACE,GENDER,AND UNEQUAL CITIZENSHIP IN THE UNITED STATES  Evelyn Nakano Glenn IN ITS FOUNDING documents, the United States declared its dedication to ideals of universal freedom and equality. Today, after more than two centuries of struggle to realize these ideals, race, gender, and class inequality remain pervasive and deeply entrenched in American society. Their very persistence indicates that rather than being either surface imperfections or deviations from the principles of American society, they are inherent and deeply embedded in our philosophical traditions and institutions. In this chapter, I examine citizenship as one of the principal institutions through which unequal race and gender relations have been constituted and also contested in the United States. Citizenship has been key to inequality because it has been used to draw boundaries between those included as members of the community and entitled to respect, protection, and rights and those who are excluded and thus denied recognition and rights. First, I examine the ideological and material roots of exclusion in Western concepts of citizenship. I then explore shifting boundaries of exclusion, showing that there has not been a linear process of increasing inclusiveness, but rather a much more uneven and contested process. Third, I examine various approaches to understanding and explaining race and gender exclusion in American citizenship despite its framing in the rhetoric of universal rights. I argue for an approach that views ascriptive exclusion and stratification as central to, rather than a deviation from, American conceptions of citizenship. Finally, I develop a concept of citizenship that considers not only the definitions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution, laws, and court decisions, and other formal documents but also localized practices in which local officials as well as members of the public enforce and challenge the boundaries of citizenship and the rights associated with it. ROOTS OF EXCLUSION: INDEPENDENCE-DEPENDENCE AND PUBLIC-PRIVATE DIVIDES Since the earliest days of the nation, the idea of whiteness has been closely tied to the notions of independence and self-control necessary for republican government . This conception of white masculine citizenship was rooted in the history of the United States as a white settler nation that grew out of the conquest and seizure of territory from indigenous peoples. Its economy was developed to provide raw materials for the European market and relied on various forms of coercive labor, including chattel slavery. Imagining non-European “others” as dependent and lacking the capacity for self-governance helped rationalize the takeover of their lands, resources, and labor. The extermination and forced removal of Indians and the enslavement of blacks by European settlers therefore seemed justified (Horsman 1981). This formulation was transferred to other racialized groups, such as the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos, who were brought to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as low-wage laborers. Often working under coercive conditions of indenture or contract labor, they were treated as “unfree labor” and denied the right to become naturalized citizens (Cheng and Bonacich 1984, chs. 1 and 2; Lopez 1996, 44; Salyer 1995; Melendy 1977, ch. 2). It was not just whiteness but masculine whiteness that was being constructed in the discourse on citizenship. Indeed, the association of republican citizenship with masculinity had even more ancient roots than race. As the American colonists struggled to articulate their cause in the struggle for independence from England, they harked back to classical conceptions that associated patriotism and public virtue with masculinity. As Rogers Smith (1989, 244) argues, “American republicans identified citizenship with material self-reliance, participation in public life, and martial virtue. The very words ‘public’ and ‘virtue’ derived from Latin terms signifying manhood.” The equation of masculinity with activity in the public domain of the economy, politics, and the military was drawn in explicit contrast to the equation of femininity with the activities of daily maintenance carried out in the private domestic sphere. Those immured in the domestic sphere—women, children, servants, and other dependents— were not considered full members of the political community. Given these discourses, it is perhaps not surprising that until the late nineteenth century full citizenship—legal adulthood, suffrage, and participation in governance—was restricted to “free white males.” How did citizenship come to be constructed as a white masculine category? To what extent have movements for inclusion succeeded in transforming the race and gender meaning of citizenship? And finally, how do we best describe and account for the raced and gendered nature of citizenship? The modern Western...

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