ACADEMIA Letters

Weaponizing Citizenship
Michael Bellesiles

On January 6, 2021, thousands of people stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.,
aiming to overturn a presidential election. These anti-democratic forces privileged their polit-
ical judgments over those of the majority of voters. Their side lost the election, but challenged
it in recounts and dozens of courts cases, all of which they lost. The actions of the incumbent’s
supporters reflect a belief that all people are not in fact created equal, that some—them—are
more deserving of rights than others. They weaponized citizenship by claiming a determina-
tive right as the “real Americans,” the embodiment of the “true America,” to place themselves
in a category of citizenship enjoying certain rights, even in defiance of the law.1 1 They view
all others who claim citizenship as holding a lower status, undeserving of a voice in the po-
litical process. In this way, citizenship becomes a weapon some people use to deprive others
of rights, and as a justification for physical violence. This approach is rooted in a traditional
division dating back to the nation’s founding, which viewed citizenship limited by ethnicity,
religion, and gender.2 2
Initially, the United States took a revolutionary stance on the role of a nation’s inhabitants.
Historically, people are born into subjectship, their legal identity fixed by birth. Anyone who
wanted to change nationality required the special intervention of a monarch or parliament.
By the early Nineteenth Century, as the historian James Kettner brilliantly demonstrates, the
United States had formulated a new concept of nationality, one of free choice: citizenship.
1
Hogan M. Sherrow. “Can Trump’s Followers be Called a ’Cult’?,” Psychology Today, Nov. 13, 2020;
Chinekwu Osakwe, “Madison Cawthorn says ’real Americans’ shouldn’t support Warnock,” Yahoo News, Dec.
15, 2020; Jonah Goldberg, “It’s a fallacy that Trump supporters haven’t been heard,” Charleston Post and Courier,
Jan. 9, 2021.
2
Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York:
Basic Books, 2000); Michael Bellesiles, Inventing Equality: Reconstructing the Constitution in the Aftermath of
the Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020).

Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Michael Bellesiles, InventingEquality@gmail.com

Citation: Bellesiles, M. (2021). Weaponizing Citizenship. Academia Letters, Article 591.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL591.

1
Those born in the United States enjoyed citizenship, though they could choose to abandon it.
More importantly, people born elsewhere could choose to be American citizens, generally by
just showing up and taking an oath of allegiance. The Americans of the founding generation
went even further, putting forth the people as the constituent power—people do not exist to
serve the state; rather, the state exists because of the people. We find this sentiment perfectly
expressed in the preamble declaring the Constitution to be the product of “We the people.”3 3
A citizenship of choice served as the theoretical foundation for legal identity in the United
States. However, from the start, the nation’s leaders found dangers in allowing theory to guide
practice. The first Congress set the tone for citizenship as a method of social control with the
Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited the right of naturalization to whites, though it left
the process entirely in the hands of local courts. The Congressional debate also clarified that
the act only concerned the right of admission to citizenship, the particulars of the rights en-
compassed by citizenship were left to the states, which enjoyed a “concurrent authority” and
continued to make use of their own laws of naturalization.4 4 It quickly became clear that if
citizenship is a choice, and many foreign Catholics come to the United States wanting citi-
zenship, then the very nature of the country could change and a Catholic might even become
president—and follow the Pope’s orders. From that perception grew the Know Nothing Party
and a long strain of nativist political action that prioritized the rights and needs of the native
born over immigrants. Their efforts to exclude Catholics and other immigrants from citizen-
ship had mixed results. The Supreme Court proved far more successful in creating barriers to
rights.5 5
The Dred Scott decision of 1857 set the standard of using citizenship as a weapon to expel
groups from the body politic. Black people, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared, could never
be citizens, for the Constitution was written by and for white men.6 6 The Supreme Court’s
3
James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 (Chapel Hill: University Press of
North Carolina, 1978).
4
The Naturalization Act of 1795 sought to improve the screening process to limit citizenship to a better class
of immigrants, while the Act of 1798 increased the waiting period to fourteen years to further limit the number
of eligible immigrants. Many Federalists wanted to go even further an establish a clear hierarchy of citizenship
and rights. The Act of 1802, which would be Congress’ last significant word on naturalization in the Nineteenth
Century, resembled the Act of 1795. Richard Peters, ed., The Public Statues at Large of the United States of
America (Boston: Little and Brown, 1845) 1: 103-04, 414-15, 566-69, 2: 153-55; Collett v. Collett, 2 Dall. 296
(U.S.C.C., 1792); Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 235-46.
5
Samuel F. B. Morse, Imminent Dangers to the United States Through Foreign Immigration (New York: E. B.
Clayton, 1835); Tyler G. Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the
1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
6
Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978); Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill, NC:

Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Michael Bellesiles, InventingEquality@gmail.com

Citation: Bellesiles, M. (2021). Weaponizing Citizenship. Academia Letters, Article 591.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL591.

2
creation of race-based citizenship played a major role in fomenting the Civil War, in the after-
math of which Congress sought to correct this error with the Fourteenth Amendment, creating
a uniform standard of citizenship which seemingly included everyone born or naturalized un-
der the full and equal protections of the law. It appeared that there could be no gradations to
citizenship.7 7
Once more, however, the Supreme Court stepped in to undermine the Fourteenth Amend-
ment, allowing full citizenship to be used as a weapon by elites against those who failed to be
born white men. Almost immediately, in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873) and Minor v. Happersett
(1875), they declared that women of course did not enjoy full citizenship rights because, well,
they are women. Any woman who tried to claim her equal rights by voting or attempting to
get a job traditionally reserved for men would be soundly beaten down as not enjoying full
citizenship. Throughout the Nineteenth Century, legislators, Congressmen, and judges used
the lesser citizenship status of women as an obvious justification for creating different legal
castes, including for Black Americans. With the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Fer-
guson (1896), the Supreme Court allowed states to establish different levels of citizenship,
with white men holding a sort of platinum status citizenship. Until the 1970s, white men en-
joyed all the rights and protections of citizenship while the rest of the country received some
lesser part of the benefits.8 8
The Fourteenth Amendment thus crumbled before the onslaught of inequality, as every
branch of government and the nation’s ministers and intellectuals found ever more creative
ways to undermine legal equality. But it still contained one significant problem for those
promoting citizenship exclusivity: its clear statement that all those born in the U.S. were
citizens. “Natural” limitations based on gender or the historic barriers between white and
Black might appear intuitive, but what about new arrivals who did not fit these categories,
like Chinese men?
White males traditionally use their full citizenship as a weapon against those lacking that
status. White men see citizenship as their right, but go even further in seeing it as their decision
who gets which rights of citizenship. When the railroads, manufacturing, and agribusiness on
the West coast determined that they needed cheaper labor, they turned to China. However, not
wanting Chinese workers to stay permanently, the U.S. and Chinese governments agreed to the
Burlingame Treaty of 1868, allowing unlimited Chinese immigration with the key proviso that
University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
7
Garrett Epps, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil
War America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); Kurt T. Lash, The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges and
Immunities of American Citizenship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
8
Bradwell v. State of Illinois, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 130 (1873); Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 162
(1875); Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Michael Bellesiles, InventingEquality@gmail.com

Citation: Bellesiles, M. (2021). Weaponizing Citizenship. Academia Letters, Article 591.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL591.

3
none of the arrivals could become citizens. But two years later, the Fourteenth Amendment
granted citizenship to anyone born within the nation’s borders. It seemed that the only way to
prevent any Chinese giving birth in the United States was to exclude them.9 9
Representative Edwin R. Meade of New York expressed the fear of many white Ameri-
cans in an 1877 speech envisioning an “Asiatic invasion” pouring forth “from their Asiatic
hive,” flooding into the United States, seeking “by force of numbers alone” to make America
“into a Chinese colony.” He called them the product of “fifty centuries of paganism, poverty,
and oppression, … a mere animal machine, … utterly incapable of any improvement.” Meade
listed the many ways in which they were unqualified to take an oath of citizenship: not being
Christian, immune to education, “devoid of conscience,” subservient to their masters, dishon-
est, and unreliable. They may pretend to admire our freedom, but secretly intend to take over
and establish an Asiatic despotism.
Meade acknowledged that the Chinese already in the United States could not become
citizens, but their children could. In a few years, the small number of Chinese workers could
produce an explosion of babies across America, in time abrogating the Burlingame Treaty and
enticing ever more Chinese immigrants. Meade warned that we must not deny our own beliefs,
such as no taxation without representation, and knew that white Americans’ sense of justice
would force them to change the naturalization laws to be “as liberal toward the Chinaman as the
wild African fresh from his native jungles.” There were already enough Chinese on the west
coast, he warned, to “control the politics of the Pacific states,” if they were allowed to vote—
an absurd statement given that there were just 105,465 Chinese in a country of fifty million
people. Meade felt that the United States had three choices: accept Chinese immigration and
lose control of the country, establish a caste system denying Chinese legal rights, or exclude
them entirely. As a Nineteenth-century liberal, Meade favored the last course.1 0 10 On May 6,
1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively ending Chinese immigration to
the United States. The law was not fully repealed until 1965. Historians have long focused on
this Act as a response to competition for scarce jobs during the long depression known as “the
Panic of 1873.” Yet Congress passed no comparable legislation to keep out any other foreign
workers also theoretically competing for those jobs. Most histories also ignore Section 14, the
Act’s briefest clause: “That hereafter no state court or court of the United States shall admit
9
Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-
Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 30-42; John Schrecker, “’For the Equality
of Men – for the Equality of Nations’: Anson Burlingame and China’s First Embassy to the United States, 1868,”
Journal of American-East Asian Relations 17 (2010): 9–34.
10
Bancroft Library, University of California, Text of the Treaty Between China & the United States (n.p.: San
Francisco, 1879); Delivered to the Social Science Association of America, in California State Senate, Chinese
Immigration: Its Social, Moral, and Political Effect (Sacramento: F. P. Thompson, 1878), 292-302.

Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Michael Bellesiles, InventingEquality@gmail.com

Citation: Bellesiles, M. (2021). Weaponizing Citizenship. Academia Letters, Article 591.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL591.

4
Chinese to citizenship.” The only way to save white citizenship was to bar Chinese citizens.1 1
11

The imposition of segregation after the violent end of Reconstruction is just the most
prominent of a long list of examples. The numerous efforts to keep women out of “men’s jobs,”
voter suppression targeting Blacks and Latinx, the denial of basic rights to Native Americans,
convict labor laws, the Japanese internment—all illustrate what amounts to a citizenship caste
system. The weaponization of citizenship operates on a daily basis depriving those lacking full
citizenship status of the full protection of the law. For example, when fascist rioters stabbed ten
people in Sacramento in 2016, the California Highway Patrol investigated the victims, working
with the fascists to identify those stabbed while labeling the fascists “victims.” The state did
not charge a single perpetrator, even while bringing criminal charges against a Black journalist,
Cedric O’Bannon, who was stabbed, for conspiracy, unlawful assembly, and assault. The law
applies only to Black people, who do not enjoy the same level of citizenship as whites.1 2 12
The establishment of a citizenship caste system has worked through a process of inter-
sectional bigotry; groups like the KKK and the Immigration Restriction League extend their
hatred to ever more groups, uniting those who might just hate Catholics with those focused
on Blacks, those disparaging the legal equality of women with anti-immigrant forces. Dan-
gling the lure of full citizenship rights has proven a useful way to bring former foes together
with white supremacists. In the twenty years before the Civil War, nativists prevented Irish
Catholics from enjoying the rights of citizenship. As the Irish American population increased,
many Irish found acceptance in the Democratic Party—which called itself “the White Man’s
Party” during the last half of the Nineteenth Century—by pivoting to deride other immigrants
and Blacks. With the expulsion of the Chinese, Western employers turned to Mexico for cheap
labor, and white supremacists turned their efforts to warning of the dangers inherent in allow-
ing such a large number of Catholics citizenship. In setting quotas from immigration based
on place of birth, the National Origins Act of 1924 established a clear hierarchy of worthiness
for citizenship, with those from western and northern Europe at the top, sliding down through
southern and eastern Europe to Africa and Asia.1 3 13
11
Chinese Exclusion Act, The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America 22 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1883): 58-61; Jia Lynn Yang, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle
over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 249-65. As a gesture to America’s
Chinese allies, Congress passed the Magnuson Act in 1943, allowing 105 Chinese immigrants per year; the gov-
ernment continued to hinder Chinese immigration until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
12
Sam Levin, “California police worked with neo-Nazis to pursue ’anti-racist’ activists,” The Guardian, Feb.
9, 2018.
13
Naijia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-
82 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Michael A. Bellesiles, 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently

Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Michael Bellesiles, InventingEquality@gmail.com

Citation: Bellesiles, M. (2021). Weaponizing Citizenship. Academia Letters, Article 591.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL591.

5
 The concept of equality shapes definitions of citizenship. If we think that some people
deserve more rights than others, then citizenship takes different forms for different groups.
The January 6 insurrectionists expressed a certainty that their opinions mattered more, re-
flecting a heritage that has long denied the full citizenship of non-whites. In some ways, their
perspective is accurate, since this inequality of citizenship rights is built into our political
system. The Senate and Electoral College ensure that some people always matter more than
others. For instance, Wyoming’s 575,000 people have the same representation in the Senate
as California’s 40 million. Put another way, 1 Wyoming voter has the same political power
as 69 California voters, while the 700,000 residents of Washington, D.C., have no political
citizenship in the Senate.1 4 14
The United States has always had at least three distinctive forms of citizenship: white
men, white women, and Blacks and other ethnic minorities. White supremacy rarely hides its
motives and methods. For instance, lynch mobs felt so justified enforcing their understand-
ing of American citizenship as exclusively white that they lynched openly in public places,
announcing lynchings in newspapers, gathering without any effort to disguise their identities,
allowing themselves to be photographed, with those photos often circulating through the mail
as postcards.1 5 15 That exact sense of entitlement protected by citizenship was on display on
January 6. Those who have campaigned for Black Lives Matters must have felt that a separate
standard had been applied to them while watching police step aside for the traitors attacking
our Congress. An alternate reality is in play when outrage is directed at Colin Kaepernick
for taking a knee while the President of the United States praises and expresses love for a
rampaging mob trying to overturn our democracy.1 6 16
We cannot hope to have a true democracy until we recognize that all American citizens
must enjoy the same rights. Knowingly or not, the January 6 insurrectionists followed the
historical example that ended Reconstruction. A minority of whites used violence and in-
timidation to destroy the multicultural democracy created in the aftermath of the Civil War,
weaponizing citizenship in claiming for themselves the authority to define who gets what
rights in order to suppress Black voices and control Black lives. For one hundred years white
supremacists did all they could to prevent the establishment of a true democracy in the U.S.
(New York: New Press, 2010), 21-61; Yang, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, 33-61.
14
Census.gov
15
James Allen, et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Pub.,
2000).
16
Eric Mack, “Outrage Mounts Over Refusal of NFL Quarterback to Stand for National Anthem,” Newsmax,
Aug. 28, 2016; “Donald Trump on Kaepernick: Find another country,” NFL.com, Aug. 29, 2016; Andy Kroll,
“Trump Responds to Attack on Capitol by Telling the Mob He ‘Loves’ Them,” RollingStone, Jan. 6, 2021; James
Walker, “45 Percent of Republican Voters Support Storming of Capitol Building,” Newsweek, Jan. 7, 2021.

Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Michael Bellesiles, InventingEquality@gmail.com

Citation: Bellesiles, M. (2021). Weaponizing Citizenship. Academia Letters, Article 591.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL591.

6
In the early 1970s, mass movements and federal action promoted democracy in the United
States. With the election of Barack Obama as President, white supremacists rose up against
this hated system of multicultural democracy, seeking to end birth-right citizenship for leading
to too many non-white Americans, charging without evidence that Obama had not been born
in the United States, and working to suppress the votes of non-white citizens.1 7 17 In 2016
this faction seized control of the federal government, banning some people based on religion,
putting some children in cages based on ethnicity, and rejecting the will of the majority. For
the next four years they attempted to claw back white man’s rule by wielding citizenship as
a weapon, only to be stymied by the election in November 2020. They could not accept that
result and dismissed the legitimacy of Democratic voters.1 8 18 In doing so they realized the
worst fears of the Framers that a corrupt electorate would elevate a tyrant to the presidency,
while also working to restore the original white male republic. In April, 1865, the Confeder-
acy surrendered to Union forces; in January, 2020, Confederate forces seized the Capitol—yet
again proving the accuracy of William Falkner’s observation: “The past is never dead. It’s
not even past.”1 9 19

17
Joseph W. Dellapenna, “Constitutional Citizenship Under Attack,” Villanova Law Review 61 (2016): 477-
507.
18
Republican Arizona State Representative John Kavanagh stated this view bluntly: “everybody shouldn’t be
voting” as the “quality” of the voters matters more than the democratic right to vote. Eric Bradner and Di-
anne Gallagher, “Arizona Republican lawmakers join GOP efforts to target voting,” CNN, March 11, 2021,
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/11/politics/arizona-republicans-voter-suppression-bills/index.html.
19
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage, 1994), 73.

Academia Letters, March 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Michael Bellesiles, InventingEquality@gmail.com

Citation: Bellesiles, M. (2021). Weaponizing Citizenship. Academia Letters, Article 591.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL591.