The Road Not Taken: A Critical Juncture in Racial Preferences for Naturalized Citizenship

In The “Free White Person” Clause of the Naturalization Act of 1790 as Super-Statute, Gabriel Jack Chin and Paul Finkelman argue that racist results in naturalization have arisen despite, or maybe because of, the race neutral interpretation. This happened in a manner that could have been predicted by the federal government’s attitudes toward non-White persons in the Naturalization Act of 1790 and the nearly unbroken chain of legal developments. This leads them to think of the law as a “super-statute.” While I agree that this is the path actually taken in history, I view the mid-1960s civil rights era as a “critical juncture” when the U.S. government could have taken a counterfactual path that was less racist. The counterfactual path would have required legal interpretations of Constitutional equality and statutory nondiscrimination that remained cognizant of racial implications of purportedly race neutral laws, which was briefly captured in language rights and voting rights statutes in the late 1960s to 1970s.

But the egalitarian interpretations unraveled due to contradictions within the liberal national ideology that permitted a post-racial pragmatism about colorblindness that stalled the political incorporation of some non-White immigrants—Asian, Latino/a, Arab—due to their racialization as perpetual foreigners (racialized foreigners).