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Preface and Acknowledgments
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| ix Preface and Acknowledgments I have long waited to undertake this project, and in fact it took more than a decade to complete. This apparently exceedingly long time frame was due in part to the fact that I needed such time to fully understand the scope and depth of this undertaking. It is a project that in various forms I have touched upon throughout most of my tenure as a legal academic, in a series of law review articles, book chapters, and a prior book entitled The Other American Colonies: An International and Constitutional Examination of the United States’ Overseas Conquests. In many respects, this project began well before I first entered law school. It was inspired by a freshman English teacher at Hofstra University. Though I unfortunately have not been able to recall or uncover her name, like millions of unnamed educators around the world, she is an unnamed hero and was instrumental in encouraging me to have faith in my intellect. This confidence allowed me to question dominant and popular narratives. As I developed, I took inspiration from writings that questioned the ethos of American democracy as it applied to ethnic and racial minorities. I first was motivated to write about my own people. Specifically , I had always been troubled by the fact that my relatives who resided in an island that was part of the United States—Puerto Rico—did not enjoy the same rights I enjoyed living in New York City. While both they and I considered ourselves Puerto Rican, we were also American, but we enjoyed different rights associated with being American. Indeed, my family in Puerto Rico seemed less American because they could not vote to elect the leader of our land—the president of the United States—and they were without any representation in the legislative body of our land—the United States Congress. They also seemed in some respects to be part of a foreign land with their own Olympic team and national anthem. After some preliminary research during college and then in law school, I came to learn that there were special rules—or, more accurately, laws— that applied for certain U.S. citizens. For some, the U.S. Constitution did not apply in the same way as it did for other Americans, like me, who hap- x | Preface and Acknowledgments pened to live in a state instead of a U.S. territory. This discovery, though informative, was troubling in that I had always understood that a basic tenet of democracy was that all citizens were supposed to be treated equally. Yet my relatives were less than equal, simply because they lived off-shore from the mainland United States. My research uncovered the folly of my idealistic vision of citizenship. Over the years, I wrote several articles examining the anomalous status of the Puerto Rican people. These works touched upon other groups of outsiders within the American landscape, such as the inhabitants of the other U.S. overseas territories and even the first people of this land—the indigenous people of the continental United States, Hawaii, and Alaska. As I tried to reconcile the democratic ethos of equality and representative government with a repeated practice of exclusion, I uncovered more and more examples of groups that should have qualified as full citizens of this society but instead were denied such a privileged status. This, I learned, was a not-so-uncommon practice in other Western nation-states, and in fact it was a practice that was as old as the concept of citizenship itself. After exploring these injustices in several shorter writings, I decided to write a book about the history of American citizenship in order to critically examine whether the democratic ethos of equality actually applied to disfavored groups within U.S. democracy. What those studies, along with more recent examinations, unearthed was a history of a concept that seemed to extol the virtues of equality for all members within a given society but actually legitimated a millennia-long practice of forbidding many members of those societies from enjoying that equality. This work seeks to examine that history and in many respects the history of democracy within Western thought. This is done with the ultimate goal of developing a model of membership in a society—a polity—that is truly inclusive. If for one reason or another this effort fails to meet its lofty goals, my aim is to nonetheless provoke debate over whether such inclusiveness in diverse societies can...