You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers

by Amanda Frost

Overview

Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize

Citizenship is invaluable, yet our status as citizens is always at risk—even for those born on US soil.

Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American”—whether due to their race, ethnicity, marriage partner, or beliefs. Drawing on the narratives of those who have struggled to be treated as full members of “We the People,” law professor Amanda Frost exposes a hidden history of discrimination and xenophobia that continues to this day.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of Black citizenship in Dred Scott was among the first and most notorious examples of citizenship stripping, but the phenomenon did not end there. Women who married noncitizens, persecuted racial groups, labor leaders, and political activists were all denied their citizenship, and sometimes deported, by a government that wanted to redefine the meaning of “American.” Today, US citizens living near the southern border are regularly denied passports, thousands are detained and deported by mistake, and the Trump administration is investigating the citizenship of 700,000 naturalized citizens. Even elected leaders such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are not immune from false claims that they are not citizens eligible to hold office.

You Are Not American grapples with what it means to be American and the issues surrounding membership, identity, belonging, and exclusion that still occupy and divide the nation in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807051429
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	01/26/2021
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Amanda Frost is a professor of law at American University, and she writes and teaches in the fields of constitutional, immigration, and citizenship law. Her work has been published in numerous academic journals, as well as The Atlantic, the New York Times, The American Prospect, the Washington Post, and Slate. Connect with her on Twitter @amanda_frost1.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
The Significance of Citizenship

CHAPTER 1
Citizen Slave

CHAPTER 2
Confederate Citizen

CHAPTER 3
Birthright Citizen

CHAPTER 4
Citizen Suffragist

CHAPTER 5
Citizen Stateswoman

CHAPTER 6
Blut Citizen

CHAPTER 7
Suspect Citizen

CHAPTER 8
Expelled Citizen

CHAPTER 9
Twenty-First-Century Citizen

Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Image Credits
Index

Editorial Reviews

A sharp history that shows the precarious nature of American citizenship.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“A highly informative work that gives depth and humanity to an often-overlooked issue.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review

“This troubling investigation of American exclusionism hits the mark.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A sobering chronicle of the US government’s attempts—both successful and unsuccessful—to expatriate its citizens, and in so doing, define itself by exclusion.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“Dana Stoutenburg provides a well-paced delivery as he relates the personal stories, historical references, cultural implications, and present-day challenges. Timely and relevant, the audiobook asks vital questions about identity, connection, and power.”
—AudioFile Magazine

“Beautifully and engagingly written, Amanda Frost’s You Are Not American describes the disturbing history of citizen stripping in the United States through the eyes of those involved in the country’s most important court cases on the topic. Frost shows how the manipulation of the rules for losing citizenship reflected some of this country’s most gripping political struggles—over slavery, women’s suffrage, communism, immigration, and world wars—and how far we have yet to go to assure the promise of birthright citizenship enshrined in the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. A must-read!”
—Richard L. Hasen, author of Election Meltdown

“You Are Not American could not be more timely in its exploration of ‘citizenship stripping’ in American history. Through lively chapters exploring particularly illuminating examples, Frost exposes how the US government has used the power to expatriate those it considers not fully ‘American’ to discriminate and exclude based on race, religion, marital status, or viewpoint. Compelling reading.”
—Caroline Fredrickson, author of The Democracy Fix

“Amanda Frost powerfully analyzes repeated instances in US history when US citizenship was stripped—or was attempted to be stripped—to achieve a combination of racial and political ends. Amanda Frost outlines how African Americans, Latina/os, women, Japanese Americans, and others suffered the loss of citizenship and the rights that all US citizens possess. As the nation faces a racial reckoning, You Are Not American should be required reading lest these deplorable racial episodes are forgotten.”
—Kevin R. Johnson, dean, University of California at Davis School of Law

“As the debate over immigration and citizenship grows more corrosive, Amanda Frost has provided a useful and highly readable corrective to misinformation. ‘Birthright citizenship’ and its role in building American democracy are under assault in the twenty-first century. At such a time, reading You Are Not American is an important act of citizenship.”
—Garrett Epps, author of Democracy Reborn

“This book reads like a dream; not only is the reader absorbed by each story, but the author has skillfully woven those stories into a fabric to show the big picture. Cumulatively, the reader gets an appreciation for the hard-fought legal battles to achieve that condition that many of us take for granted: American citizenship.”
—Lea S. Vandervelde, author of Redemption Song

“One of the defining struggles of the American experience has been over who gets to claim the rights and opportunities of citizenship. In You Are Not American, Amanda Frost clarifies the stakes of these battles in a moving, masterful, and deeply humane account of why we keep fighting about issues that test our core commitment to liberty and equality for all—our very capacity for democracy.”
—Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of Thunder in the Mountains

From the Publisher

★ 12/01/2020

From the Dred Scott decision in 1857 to the present day, what it means to be an American—and, most important, who gets to be a citizen—has been debated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. That debate, which continues today, also influences political and cultural dynamics in the United States, especially when considering who has the power to decide questions of citizenship. Frost (law, American Univ.) thoroughly explores these issues and more in this incisive work. As Frost reminds readers, challenges to race and citizenship often overlap, and race-based citizenship and laws and practices, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Jim Crow segregation laws, had a lasting impact on American society. Frost succinctly notes that the idea of citizenship stripping runs counter to the idea of the United States as an open democracy, yet denaturalization still continues. Illustrating cases of people were who denaturalized and deported, sometimes mistakenly, the narrative depicts how history often repeats itself. Frost's accessible writing will draw in a variety of readers, from high school and college students to scholars looking to learn more about this complex history. VERDICT A highly informative work that gives depth and humanity to an often-overlooked issue.—Jacob Sherman, Univ. of Texas at San Antonio

Library Journal

★ 2020-11-18
A sharp history that shows the precarious nature of American citizenship.

As law professor Frost demonstrates in this crisp, concise book, the revocation of citizenship from native-born or naturalized individuals often stems from the desire to deprive individuals and/or groups of their political and civil rights, with an eye toward deportation. The overarching intention is to shape society to the prevailing ideological moment, to ensure that anti-establishment forces don’t “taint” the nation’s “purity” or challenge the hegemony of White leadership. Frost uses the stories of individual actors, from Emma Goldman to Robert E. Lee to Dred and Harriet Scott, to fill out the bigger picture of the government’s assault upon—or at least selective reading of—the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It’s a sorry tale that Frost narrates engagingly, digging into the ever shifting racial boundaries of citizenship as well as the unconstitutional deployment of denaturalization initiatives. Frost explores how a wide range of factors, including race, ethnicity, and religious and political preferences, have sparked the state to intervene to maintain the status quo. “Denaturalization is most often associated with totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union,” writes the author. “But by the end of the twentieth century, the US government had denaturalized at least twenty-two thousand people—more than any other democracy before or since. The effect of the denaturalization campaign was to silence those who might otherwise have taken on leadership positions in politics, journalism, and the labor movement. By publicly targeting [certain] men and women…the government hoped to intimidate into silence tens of thousands of foreign-born citizens who were similarly vulnerable.” In the 21st century, the citizenship debate continues to be heated and controversial—but still revolves around the state’s power to deny the rights of “undesirables.” The takeaway is that citizenship is conditional, a fact that is hardly news for Dreamers across the U.S.

Significant legal history with lessons for all citizens.

Kirkus Reviews