<
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/supreme-court-insular-cases-racist_n_634d7c5fe4b051268c4c6a17>
"The Supreme Court declined to take a case challenging its 100-year-old racist
precedents that continue to deny equal rights to the 3.6 million residents of
overseas U.S. territories on Monday.
Three American Samoans living in Utah and a Samoan nonprofit petitioned the
court in
Fitisemanu v. U.S. to overturn the Insular Cases, the court’s early
20th-century precedents that enabled the country’s colonial expansion by
allowing it to absorb overseas territories populated by non-white peoples while
denying them equal rights or a path to statehood.
“It’s a punch in the gut for the Justices to leave in place a ruling that says
I am not equal to other Americans simply because I was born in a U.S.
territory,” John Fitisemanu, the lead plaintiff in the case, said in a
statement. “I was born on U.S. soil, have a U.S. passport, and pay my taxes
like everyone else. But because of a discriminatory federal law, I am not
recognized as a U.S. citizen.”
The Insular Cases that deny people like Fitisemanu equal rights as citizens
were explicitly founded on racist premises. The cases, which occurred from 1901
to 1922, claimed that the people of the overseas territories the U.S. conquered
in the Spanish-American War came from “savage tribes” and “alien” and
“uncivilized race[s]” who were “absolutely unfit to receive” the rights
provided by the Constitution. The court invented a new legal class of
“unincorporated territory” for the colonial possessions taken from Spain that
denied them equal rights and statehood.
Today, the Insular Cases still govern the U.S. overseas territories of American
Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin
Islands. In each territory, Congress has negotiated different rules for
people’s access to their rights as Americans.
For example, unlike other territorial inhabitants, American Samoans are not
officially U.S. citizens, but American nationals. This means that even if they
move to a state or the District of Columbia, they will be denied the right to
vote. This was one of the chief complaints made by Fitisemanu and the other
plaintiffs in the case."
Via Frederick Wilson II.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
