Michele Goodwin: Citizenship, Personhood, and American Legal History

The Evolving Definition of Citizenship

• 💡 The Webster's dictionary definition of a citizen as one owing allegiance to a government and entitled to protection is contrasted with the complex reality of belonging to a city, state, or country, especially for indigenous peoples and those displaced globally.
• 🌍 The concept of citizenship is tested worldwide, citing examples like Sudan with 13 million displaced and Congo with 30 million internally displaced due to resource extraction.
• 🇺🇸 In the United States, debates about citizenship and belonging trace back to the Civil War era and continue today, with instances of people being "disappeared" despite claiming citizenship.

Historical Legal Frameworks of Dehumanization

• 📜 American enslavement involved a "body politic" where people were capitalized, with auctions of men, women, and children lasting for centuries, a reality often dismissed or romanticized.
• 💔 The practice of matrilineality was purposefully instituted in US law, ensuring that children born to enslaved women inherited their mother's status, thus exploiting them and their offspring.
• ⚖️ Legal cases like Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson are often misremembered; Dred Scott sought freedom for his family, and Plessy had an exception for Black wet nurses in white train cars, highlighting the inscribed bodies of women.

Women's Personhood and Reproductive Rights

• 🚫 The Dobbs decision of 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade, is linked to historical legal theories like coverture from Blackstone and Hale, which subsumed women's legal rights under their husbands and denied marital rape.
• ⚠️ Historical laws, including the "rule of thumb," permitted violence against wives, reflecting a society where race and sex hierarchy served as architecture for American life.
• 🤰 The 13th Amendment, while abolishing slavery, also implicitly addressed the "reproductive servitude" inherent in the system, aiming to prevent stories like Sojourner Truth's, who saw 13 children snatched from her arms.

Challenging Injustice and Eugenics

• 🕊️ Margaret Garner's story illustrates the extreme measures taken to escape enslavement, where she killed her child to prevent re-enslavement, leading to a legal debate over whether she was a person or property.
• 🧬 The 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case upheld Virginia's eugenics law, allowing compulsory sterilization for "manifestly unfit" poor white individuals like Carrie Buck, based on Justice Holmes's infamous "three generations of imbeciles are enough" statement.
• ✊ Cases like Ozawa v. United States and Thind v. United States showed people of Asian descent attempting to challenge Jim Crow by petitioning for whiteness, revealing the racialized nature of legal rights in the US.