How Citizenship Matters

By SETH SANDRONSKY

Citizenship has meaning. How so is instructive. Consider a recent commentary by Ben Boychuk, managing editor of American Greatness, in the Sacramento Bee.

He focuses on the US Supreme Court hearing arguments over the legality of the US Census Bureau including or not a citizenship question in the 2020 survey. Will asking people as to their citizenship status be a Census requirement?

“Citizenship matters.” That is a true statement, but in the opposite sense of what Boychuk means. Let me unpack his rhetoric.

America began as a slaveholding republic with the coerced labor of Africans on stolen land of native people. The former were forced migrants, three-fifths of a living human being during the early years of the republic. A labor system of enslaved Africans is in no small way the origin of the nation, now the world’s superpower militarily, but economically losing the race to China. Boychuk sidesteps such history.

However, we need not bury our heads in the sand as he does. US history has impacts on many levels today. Consider the Electoral College. Let me be clear. I do not consider voting every four years for president as what makes the US a democracy.

Democracy, to paraphrase the late historian Howard Zinn, is more about what people do outside the voting booth. Who is sitting in the halls of power and the streets to disrupt elites from pursuing more power and wealth, e.g., Adam Smith’s “vile maxim of the masters, everything for us and nothing for other people,” is key. In other words, movement politics is what drives democracy.

Still, who sits in the White House means much for who lives and works in the US. Just ask minorities who lack power and wealth. In an era when the one percent’s pie slice grows and the 99 percent’s slice shrinks, shaping the politics of widespread discontent looms large. Trump’s white nationalist scapegoating of minorities and Muslims is proof of that. He blames them, not the system that puts profits before people first, last and always. Fear rules.

So of course, citizenship matters. The arena of electoral and judicial governance is part of that calculus. A national foundation of forced labor and land theft that Boychuk ignores in effect perpetuates a mythic past for some.

Its heavy weight continues to shape the US polity, sad to say. Think of the phrase “MAGA.” It resonates for millions of Americans, economically weakened, living lives of downward mobility. They are in part Trump’s base.

Boychuk continues: “As a practical matter, however, knowing who is a citizen and who isn’t shapes the way policies get made and resources get allocated.”

Note the passive voice. It blurs the interests of social classes, men and women workers, and the employer class whose power and wealth depends on the bosses’ control of the workplace.

Accordingly, in Boychuk’s commentary, there is no downstairs and upstairs, just them and us. The former are nonwhite labor who do the lowest paid and most dangerous work. Thus, US employers adore politically powerless migrant workers, ripe for super-exploitation.

The same workers are scapegoats for white nationalists such as Trump to blame as the cause of what ails the US, economically and politically. Citizenship does matter for those whose forced and superexploited labor created and sustains the for-profit system. Here, a kind of consciousness-raising that defined the women’s movement back in the day is in order now.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2019

Populist.com