Earning our equality

As Columbia undergraduates, your lives spin around your daily web of study, work, play, and, in moments of sheer boredom or exhaustion, sleep. I suspect that the prospect of my article, the Fourteenth Amendment, has your eyes wandering across the page to a cartoon or advertisement, anything of relevance and hence, importance.

Alas, most of you who are U.S. citizens have not earned that status, which was given to you by birth. And if you subscribe to and claim equality under the law, a guarantee you might want to possess, the Fourteenth Amendment assures you that protection. I have a personal regard for the Fourteenth Amendment; please indulge me.

The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) of the U.S. Constitution is back in the news—a welcome development. Its equal protection under the law is a bulwark for civil rights, which were routinely denied to people of color, women, queers, aliens, and others deemed unworthy of the constitutional guarantees of life, liberty, and property.

But the Amendment’s newsworthy appearance emerges from its assault sired by a Supreme Court justice’s reading of the U.S. Constitution and the debate around immigration. In an interview published in the January 2011 issue of California Lawyer, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the Constitution does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex (gender), contrary to past Supreme Court rulings against gender discrimination rendered on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

And, according to commentator Andrew Zarowny from www.rightpundits.com in his polemic against “anchor babies,” politicians like Representative Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) agree that “simple birthright should not be the standard for U.S. citizenship.” Zarowny goes on to charge that China issues visas to women in advanced stages of pregnancy to visit the U.S. to have their babies there to acquire citizenship by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision that persons born on U.S. soil are U.S. citizens. China, feared in the West historically and in the present for its large population, is the familiar villain in Zarowny’s allegation, which was once called a “peaceful invasion” by those who warned of a “yellow peril” or inundation by Asian hordes.

Precious for all Americans are the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and its citizenship by birthright. Since 1790 to the 1940s and ’50s, the U.S. denied Asian migrants citizenship by naturalization, and the only means by which Asians attained that status was through the Fourteenth Amendment. I am indebted to that provision and its allies, the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery and ensured voting rights in disregard of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

My grandparents migrated from Japan (my father’s side) and Okinawa (my mother’s side) to Hawai’i in the early twentieth century. They could not become U.S. citizens because of the 1790 Naturalization Act, which restricted naturalization to “free white persons.” Both sets of my grandparents were recruited by and labored for sugar plantation masters, mainly white Americans who had illegally seized power from a formerly independent Hawaiian kingdom.

My grandmother on my mother’s side­, Kakazu Kame, like most of today’s undocumented, worked in her home and sweated in the cane fields for a pittance. She committed no crimes, as far as I know, except for brewing awamori, an Okinawan liquor, during Prohibition. To concoct her brew, my grandmother built a still, which federal agents smashed.

My grandmother was like the lehua blossom, which is the body of Hi’iaka, patron of the hula and protector of the people.

But U.S. law prohibited her citizenship until 1952, when Japanese migrants finally received the right of naturalization. My grandmother refused that late gift though her husband, my grandfather, swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution on a hot summer’s day I recall vividly. Unlike my grandfather, I gained U.S. citizenship by virtue of birth.

And now, some have proposed removing that part of the Constitution, which was read in its entirety by the new majority in Congress this month. I am opposed to that proposal, both as an individual and as an American in solidarity with “anchor babies” and those classed as “illegal.”

Having to earn and justify my citizenship has particular meaning to me as a person of color in the U.S. During World War II, Japanese Americans were denied equal protection under the Constitution and were directed to prove their loyalty to earn their civil liberties, while in the West some 120,000 of them were forcibly confined in concentration camps and Hawai’i was subjected to martial law. My father and tens of thousands of his comrades, men and women, shed their blood on battlefields in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific to earn what their fellow white citizens possessed by birth.

The Fourteenth Amendment as currently constituted, I know, was and is a vital instrument of civil rights and an emphatic declaration of our common humanity as women, as migrants, as Americans.

Gary Y. Okihiro is professor of international and public affairs and the sole member of the department of social formations.