Like most of my friends and family, last November 8 I watched in horror as Hillary Clinton went from being the favorite to realizing that Donald Trump would win the presidency, and that his party would have control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. I felt betrayed by my fellow citizens and fearful for all the racial, sexual, and ethnic minorities and women who would undoubtedly suffer from the fallout of these election results. Slowly I began to recognize the source of my pain: I had fallen prey to the seduction of citizenship. Even though my career is partly defined by my intellectual interest in the dark side of citizenship, my heart is always vulnerable to its saccharine promises. I am surrounded by these promises, by those who trumpet the potential for citizenship reform, the necessity to expand citizenship, and the noble hope of an inclusive society.  

On the other hand, the technical capacities of citizenship to control the political, economic, and cultural fields make it not simply a tool of inclusion but a weapon that can be wielded with great precision against racial and ethnic others, particularly those marked by immigration. People like me.

This dark side of citizenship—injurious, painful, exclusionary—is not an aberration or a glitch in the mechanism of liberalism that can be fixed with policy adjustments and a tweaking of our political culture. This darkness is inherent in citizenship as a tool of government, a shadow that has grown alongside citizenship’s more Enlightened sides. This is why explaining the significance of Trump’s election is partly about explaining citizenship and its history.

Citizenship in Classical times possessed all the elements that would be necessary to function as a tool for domination and emancipation during the eras of colonialism and the Enlightenment, respectively. This included a list of great publicists, from Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybios, Plutarch, Sallust, Livy, Cicero, and Tacitus, who would influence John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau and would be mandatory reading at the time of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The virtues of equality, broadly debated by the Classical authors, were indeed understood much better by Enlightenment thinkers than citizenship’s capacities to enact racial nativism. Nowhere is this more evident than in how Jefferson’s clarity of vision on equality contrasts with his intellectual contortions when he discussed slavery. How can the writer of the Declaration of Independence be the same man who argued that emancipation would have to be democratically chosen by slaveholders?

Moreover, the egalitarian capacity of citizenship has been credited by some historians and theorists of the nation-state with providing the affective ground for the emergence of the nation form. Benedict Anderson famously notes that monarchic and religious ways of organizing the political were substituted by new sets of secular ideas about politics and kinship and new ways of experiencing the social. Some of these secular ideas about politics we now recognize as nationalism, and some of the new ways of experiencing the social included new kinship structures, which Anderson calls “imagined communities,” made possible by modern ways of experiencing kinship. Yet, Anderson fails to reconcile the horizontal camaraderie that nations seem to engender with the hierarchical organization of life and systems of inequality inherent to all nations, the dark side of citizenship. Others, however, are better at explaining de facto national vertical arrangements and the nativisms on which these are based.

Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the emergence of the nation-state was linked not simply to the rise of the bourgeoisie, central in capitalist societies, but to the fact that capitalism is rooted in what Wallerstein has been calling since 1974 the “world-economy.” Balibar and Wallerstein believe that this world economy “is always already hierarchically organized into a ‘core’ and a ‘periphery,’ each of which have different methods of accumulation and exploitation of labour power, and between which relations of unequal exchange and domination are established.” This means that, as Balibar would restate it, “every modern nation is a product of colonization: it has always been to some degree colonized or colonizing, and sometimes both at the same time” (Balibar 1991, 89). The core-periphery basis of capitalism helps Balibar and Wallerstein theorize racial and ethnic difference as seminal to nation-states, for it is the core-periphery ethno-territorial hierarchies that culturally legitimize and give legal form to racial and ethnic hierarchies.

Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo have expanded on the implications of the Wallersteinian “world-economy” for the Americas, and have used the term “coloniality” to refer to the way colonial domination between the European core and the American periphery was concretized through law and administrative processes. Just as relevant, these Latin American thinkers also argue that racialized colonial law and administrative processes survived independence movements to become part of the legal and policy frameworks of nation-states. Hence, according to scholars of coloniality, racialized law has been as important a legal foundation for the U.S. nation-state as has, for instance, Jeffersonian liberal ideals of equality or Madisonian republican ideas of civic virtue.