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The history of the United States reveals deep ambivalences in our attitudes toward, and perceptions about, citizenship as both a social concept and legal status. We seem to be forever engaged in a tug-of-war between our impulse to expand rights and to welcome newcomers, on one hand, and to exclude and deny privileges of citizenship to those we deem “unworthy” on the other. This fissure in the national psyche has created a pattern of “give and take” in which certain individuals are granted new rights and benefits, only to have those same opportunities subsequently revoked or diminished. As Americans we have not yet resolved several central questions that lie at the heart of this contradictory narrative: Are we an open, welcoming, expansive society or a closed, restricted one? Is government’s role to expand rights and privileges of citizenship, or is it mainly in the business of limiting such rights and privileges? Perhaps it is our nation’s unique fate to adjust perpetually our position between these two extremes.
Today, these questions resonate with extraordinary potency, given the multiple challenges we face from the unprecedented wave of recent immigration, the continuing threat of terrorism, and lingering racial inequalities. Despite significant advances in the quality of life offered to many African Americans as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, there remain vast disparities in income and wealth, access to quality jobs, health care and education, and treatment by the criminal justice system. At the same time, we are transforming into an increasingly multi-racial society and must grapple with how and even whether to incorporate and accommodate growing numbers of foreign-born residents—few of whom are white--into our society. At this critical juncture, we need to consider where we have been, where we are now, and most importantly, where we might go in the near future.
In the spring of 2008, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at the Harvard Law School (CHHIRJ) will convene a major conference on the “State of Citizenship” in the United States. Using four broad indicators: (1) political participation; (2) the courts and criminal justice; (3) the workplace; and (4) public education, the conference will assess and examine the state of citizenship in this country for people of color and foreign-born residents. We will explore how our country’s proud history of welcoming new immigrants and expanding opportunities under the law has co-existed with our equally strong tradition of excluding, marginalizing, and disenfranchising certain populations. We will consider how recent trends, policies, and laws, along with subjective assumptions about “deservedness,” continue to drive persistent inequalities that dilute the full expression of citizenship and humanity for millions of people in American society.
We will gather thinkers from a wide array of academic disciplines, activists from a variety of settings, leaders of faith communities, litigators, policy analysts, filmmakers, creative voices, and educators to present papers and thought pieces related to each indicator. These will be discussed and debated at the conference, which will feature nationally prominent keynote speakers and will be widely promoted to a general audience, students and members of the broader Harvard and Boston communities. We will pay particular attention to uncomfortable and far too frequently avoided questions about the relationship between continuing inequalities for African Americans and the challenges facing recent immigrants—issues that we view as deeply related. We will consider how African Americans and Latinos, in particular, might find common ground around struggles for equal access to a quality education, for fair treatment by the criminal justice system, and for rights and privileges in the workplace, voting and political representation.
The conference will produce a series of papers and articles that we will publish, and use as the foundation for the Institute’s continuing focus on citizenship and equal opportunity in this country. We will seek out opportunities to widely disseminate our findings through public forums, media outreach, and a variety of publications geared toward general, academic, legal and policy audiences. |
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