I recently heard on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s powerful concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case in Trump v. Barbara may be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of American History by the Organization of American Historians. If so, that would be more than fitting.
Justice Jackson’s opinion is not only legally rigorous; it is historically grounded. In defending what birthright citizenship means under the Fourteenth Amendment, she draws from a deep well of historical scholarship, including Isabel Wilkerson’s extraordinary book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Justice Jackson’s analysis reminds us that birthright citizenship was never a technicality. It was, and remains, a constitutional repudiation of hereditary caste, racial exclusion, and the denial of full personhood.
If you have not read Wilkerson’s Caste, I highly recommend it. The audiobook is excellent, too.
And yes, Justice Jackson’s opinion is also a searing response to Justice Clarence Thomas. Where Thomas narrows the meaning of citizenship, Jackson restores its Reconstruction-era moral and democratic purpose: to ensure that no child born on U.S. soil is rendered stateless, casteless, or less than fully human under law.
This is a deeply-researched constitutional interpretation anchored in universalist principles and moral clarity.
-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
#HistoryMatters
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| Listen to Lawrence O'Donnell, The Last Word here. |
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