In the 1980’s, we social studies teachers in New York State taught a class that was called “Minorities and Foreign Policy.” I thought of it as a curriculum of colonialism, because we could look at conquests within and without the continental US: Indians and the Philippines, Black people and Vietnam, Mexican Americans and the Dominican Republic. Do you see the parallels?
But many of my colleagues chose to devote the bulk of the course to foreign policy, largely because they didn’t know anything about the history of ethnic minorities in the United States. They had learned about the Monroe Doctrine and the War of 1812 and the Spanish American War. Everything else was a mystery to them. In fact, one egregiously racist senior teacher insisted that the story of all people of color was discrimination: in housing, in schools, in public accommodations. How much could you keep saying about this? he asked.
I did try to answer this, but most of them weren’t particularly interested. It was really a rhetorical question. Where I could respond to this was in my own classroom. I made every effort to give my students plenty to think about. But I think this is a subject that is poorly understood, even by people who are anti racist. And I think it is worth visiting.
One way of thinking about the trajectories of African American, Native American, and Mexican American people in this country is through the lens of Supreme Court decisions that subjugated them, particularly at the turn of the 20th century. I choose to look at these three cases:
- Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896)
- Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock 187 US 553 (1903)
- United States v. Sandoval 167 US 279 (1897)
I think most readers are familiar with Plessy v. Ferguson. The majority held that US anti-discrimination law was unconstitutional! They ruled that segregated train cars for African American riders did not violate the 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal treatment. In fact, they made the scandalous argument that if there was any “badge of inferiority” associated with forced racial separation, it was because “the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.” The sole dissenter, Justice Harlan, correctly predicted that this decision would eventually be seen to be just as “pernicious” as Dred Scott. The Plessy decision was the judicial basis for the entire edifice of Jim Crow: separate and unequal public accommodations, disfranchisement of African American voters, and the exploitation of sharecrop labor.
Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock addressed the forced allotment of tribal land to individual Native Americans. Lone Wolf, a Kiowa, argued that Congress had no right to unilaterally abrogate the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, which – in return for surrendering their claim to other lands – reserved territory for the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache, and barred white people for that reservation. Congress acted unilaterally to distribute pieces of that reservation to members of the tribes as personal property, a policy known as “allotment.” The Court decided that allotment was a violation of the treaty, but that Congress had the right because Native Americans were “an ignorant and dependent race!” The actual result of allotment was that Kiowa-Comanche-Apache land was reduced from 2.9 million acres to 3,000 acres. Yes. That is roughly one-tenth of one percent. You can fairly categorize that as theft.
U.S. v. Sandoval was a case arising from the Spanish land grants that created the communities of the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada and Utah. These were all part of Mexico until the United States seized them in 1848. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the residents of those lands were guaranteed that their property would not be disturbed and that they could remain where they were living as citizens of the United States. In this particular suit, the people of San Miguel del Vado argued that the United States had illegally seized their communal forest and pasture lands, leaving them only with their houses and gardens adjacent to the Pecos River. The Court decided that those common lands never belonged to the community, but instead to the Spanish king, and therefore now belonged to the United States.
There is much more to be said about all of these communities than is present in these court cases. Sandoval doesn’t address the issue of disfranchisement or segregation of Mexican Americans. Plessy doesn’t address debt peonage or disfranchisement of African Americans. Lone Wolf only tangentially addresses citizenship for Native Americans. But what these cases point to is the profound difference between the relation between each of these communities and the U.S. government.
Plessy is a case about second-class citizenship. Already in Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. 393 (1857) the Court had ruled that African Americans were not citizens. In the memorably-repellent words of Chief Justice Taney, they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Plessy essentially reinstates that judgement, despite the adoption of the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery), the 14th Amendment (guaranteeing citizenship to African Americans), and the 15th Amendment (guaranteeing the right to vote to African Americans). The importance of these cases, which are widely considered to be the worst the Court has ever made, shows that white supremacy in this country relied on inventing some special legal category for African Americans and denying them the ordinary legal rights of human beings.
Lone Wolf is a case about treaty rights. It reminds us that Native Americans were sovereign peoples whose relationship with the United States was similar to that of any foreign nation. Each indigenous nation has its own set of treaties with its own history and so the rights of the Mohawk differ from those of the Lakota and those of the Navajo. They include territorial sovereignty in reserved lands along with hunting and fishing rights outside those “reservations.” Despite the Court’s decision in that case that Congress could legally break treaties, Native Americans still possess many treaty rights that are separate from their individual rights since being made citizens by Congress in 1924.
The Sandoval case is a reminder that Mexican Americans are not all immigrants. In the Southwest there is a saying: “We never crossed the border. The border crossed us.” Pretending that people snuck across the river just yesterday when, in fact, their families have lived here since before the American Revolution is a big lie. And it reminds us of so many other ethnicities whose relationship to this country is not so simple. Puerto Rico was taken by the United States in the Spanish American War of 1898. Puerto Ricans are citizens, not immigrants. The Dominican Republic was invaded three times by the U.S. during the 20th century and ruled by U.S. governors, too. Haiti was governed by the U.S. from 1915-1934, then invaded again in 1994. The fact that these last two countries were never formally annexed amounts to a legal pretext for treating their peoples as if we never met them before.
I don’t mean to claim that this is a comprehensive discussion of the history of minorities in the U.S. I only want to use these cases to point out that there is more to this than fair housing or employment discrimination.
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