..declared Ron Teehan, a resident of Guam who was active in the Chamorro rights movement, and may as well have been speaking of Puerto Rico's fight against the U.S. policy of alien-citizen-status of subjugation (Last modified on July 05, 2014)
John Oliver champions voting rights for U.S. territories on 'Last Week Tonight'
Written up by Andrea Reiher March 09th, 2015
The main issue "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" tackles Sunday (March 8) is the fact that actual American citizens are being denied voting rights (among other things) because they live in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa or any number of other U.S. territories.
"More than 4 million people live in U.S. territories. More than 98 percent of them are racial or ethnic minorities. And the more you look into the history of why their voting rights are restricted, the harder it is to justify," says Oliver. He notes that the main reason for these people being denied their rights is because of a court decision from 1901 that calls them "alien races, differing from us in...customs...and modes of thought "
That 1901 court decision was one amongst a number of
insular cases
The Insular Cases are a series of opinions by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1901 about the status of U.S. territories acquired in the Spanish–American War. The Supreme Court held that full constitutional rights do not automatically (or ex proprio vigore—i.e., of its own force) extend to all places under American control.
- emphasis added
Included was
Downes v. Bidwell and
DeLima v. Bidwell - an opinion authored by Henry Billings Brown, which was:
(1901) one of a group of the first Insular Cases decided by the United States Supreme Court
Justice Henry Billings Brown was also the author of
Plessy v. Ferguson:
a landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal"
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Many residents of these American owned territories like American Samoa and Guam serve in the U.S. military
And how often have we witnessed this racist refrain from members of the GOP?:
"'Alien races can't understand Anglo-Saxon principles.' I find that condescending and I'm British! We basically invented patronizing bigotry,"
- John Oliver
Some things are complicated; some are just made to seem that way - imo
Oliver concludes, "There are a lot of complicated issues [here] ... but surely, when it comes to denying Americans the right to vote, we have to find a better reason than citing a 100-year-old legal decision written by a racist that was always supposed to be temporary."
These "unincorporated territories" and their peoples are essentially possessions of the U.S.
This shit is broken. An oppression put upon non-white Americans that America has a long history of ignoring, and when ignoring this brokenness is no longer tolerated by activists, real solutions have been painfully and often deliberately slow.
We should fix this systematic disenfranchisement, or drop the imperialistic "ownership" and subjugation by corporate colonialism altogether.
- At least that's the way it seems to me
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- Kudos, John Oliver
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Note: the term "unincorporated territories" seems particularly ruthless, almost contemptuous of the people, when considering the history of corporate colonialism and the long list of human rights violations that come with corporate exploitation of these people and their lands.
Some additional sources of information:
Voting rights of United States citizens in Puerto Rico, like the voting rights of residents of other United States territories, differ from those of United States citizens in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. Residents of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories do not have voting representation in the United States Congress, and are not entitled to electoral votes for President. The United States Constitution grants congressional voting representation to U.S. states, which Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories are not, specifying that members of Congress shall be elected by direct popular vote and that the President and the Vice President shall be elected by electors chosen by the States
THE ALIEN-CITIZEN PARADOX AND OTHER CONSEQUENCES OF U.S. COLONIALISM | EDIBERTO ROMáN | Copyright © 1998 Florida State University Law Review
In the past, the story of the people of Puerto Rico fell squarely within this traditional relegation. This Article attempts to end this invisibility[336] and specifically seeks to bring to light how the people of Puerto Rico have not been made part of the American political community. Indeed, despite being U.S. citizens for almost a century, few in America recognize or acknowledge the second-class citizenship status of the Puerto Rican people. During the course of the century-long colonial relationship, the people of Puerto Rico have repeatedly been denied equal citizenship rights and have been relegated to the inferior alien caste.[337] As non-whites, the Puerto Rican people have faced the intersection of racial and ethnic-based discrimination. They have faced racial discrimination because they are of mixed African, Arawak Indian, and European blood, which simply made them not white enough for equal citizenship status. They have faced ethnic-based bias[338] largely because of their different language and culture. These people of color reside in a distant land in the Caribbean, and they speak Spanish. These two characteristics alone may have been enough to make them too foreign under American scrutiny.[339] As was the problem in Hawaii prior to the adoption of the English-language, the people of Puerto Rico remain alien "not only in their race but also their language."[340]
VI. CONCLUSION
The ideal of equality is at the center of America's self-conception, and equal citizenship is at the core of that ideal. As Karst noted, "The chief citizenship value is respect; the chief harm against which the principle guards is degradation or the imposition of stigma."[341] It is "the denial of equal status, the treatment of someone as an inferior, that causes stigmatic harm."[342] The people of Puerto Rico are separate and unequal.[343] They have subordinated rights, are treated as separate from the rest of the body politic, and consequently have been stigmatized.
Despite the U.S. conquest of the territory, Puerto Rico became a formal part of the United States political scheme only through novel legal fictions. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Puerto Rico was declared an unincorporated U.S. territory, which means "belonging to . . . but not a part of the United States . . . ."[344] With this proclamation, the Supreme Court sanctioned the discriminatory treatment of the inhabitants of the United States' colonial acquisitions. Congress later named Puerto Rico a commonwealth, but all along it has been a possession—a colony of the United States.[345] As such, the territory is under the plenary power of Congress under the jurisdiction of the Territorial Clause of the U.S. Constitution.[346]
As other works on the colonial nature of this relationship have demonstrated, the United States, the self-professed leader of the free world, has refused for 100 years to fully accept or free nearly four million people of color that make up part of its empire.[347] Though eventually being granted a form of citizenship, when the issue turned to fully incorporating the people of Puerto Rico into the American political community, America subordinated legal principles of citizenship and their significance to social inclusion in an effort to retain a perceived Anglo-Saxon national identity.[348] In other words, the construction of race has determined the Puerto Rican people's economic prospects, permeated their politics, altered their electoral boundaries, shaped their disbursement of federal funds, and fueled the creation and collapse of political alliances.[349]
The question then remains: why has the United States, with all its power, its equally important vision of greatness, and its integral role in declaring the need for people to be emancipated, refused to fully incorporate Puerto Rico and its people? While there are no easy conclusions that can be drawn from this question—and obviously prejudice is not the exclusive reason for America's failure—some observations are in order. Although after a century of colonization some feelings of moral obligation may arise, that obligation has never been sufficient for America to make millions of native Spanish-speaking people of color citizens of the fifty-first state. In fact, recent developments may make the goal of full incorporation and equal citizenship unlikely, particularly given the United States' current fiscal woes.[350]
Over the course of a century, when the issue of fully incorporating the Puerto Rican people into the American body politic arose, fears were expressed from Congress to the Supreme Court concerning the color and culture of the Puerto Rican people. But if equality is not merely rhetoric for the dominant culture to profess, and is indeed a moral axiom, then the United States must end the Puerto Rican people's alien-citizen status.
The United States, through the United States-Puerto Rico Political Status Act, or through some similar vehicle, must initiate a process that will end these people's subordinated status. This process must lead to the full attainment of self-determination for the Puerto Rican people. Only through statehood or independence can an equal and unsubordinated status be achieved.
While statehood is an option, it may be an illusory one. Over a period of 100 years, the United States has essentially rejected the Puerto Rican people. From using words such as "unreadable genealogical tree" in 1901[351] to the not-so-thinly veiled but equally bigoted words as "blend" or "separate culture" in 1991,[352] the message is the same. In an era of "English-only" language requirements and Proposition 187,[353] the United States is arguably even more intolerant of people of color who speak a different language. It is therefore unlikely that the United States will soon accept four million voters, who happen to be non-English speaking and non-white. The United States-Puerto Rico colonial relationship, therefore, further establishes that racism has been a powerful ideology of the United States' imperialistic policies.[354]
Despite the recent efforts in Congress to create a plebiscite process purportedly to resolve the Puerto Rican status problem, the United States has an ugly and largely ignored history of racist and nativist practice. In an era when the United States no longer views Puerto Rico as strategically important, it is questionable whether the United States will ever free or fully incorporate the people of Puerto Rico and end their alien-citizen status.[355] Ron Teehan, a resident of Guam, who is active in the Chamorro rights movement, may as well have been speaking of Puerto Rico when he declared: "The giant taught us the principles of democracy . . . when do we get to practice them?"[356]
Upheld by court decision:
The Foraker Act enacted April 12, 1900, officially known as the Organic Act of 1900, is a United States federal law that established civilian (albeit limited popular) government on the island of Puerto Rico, which had recently become a possession of the United States as a result of the Spanish–American War
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One last note on taxation: Taxation in Puerto Rico minus equal representation