The Color Of Citizenship

Looking to the way that race has been conceived through the tradition of Latin American political thought, The Color of Citizenship examines the centrality of race in the making of modern citizenship. It posits race as synthetic, dynamic, and fluid - a concept that will have methodological, historical, and normative value for understanding race in other diverse societies.

* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry * * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . . A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

This book explores the politics of race, censuses, and citizenship, drawing on the complex history of questions about race in the U.S. and Brazilian censuses. It reconstructs the history of racial categorization in American and Brazilian censuses from each country’s first census in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up through the 2000 census. It sharply challenges certain presumptions that guide scholarly and popular studies, notably that census bureaus are (or are designed to be) innocent bystanders in the arena of politics, and that racial data are innocuous demographic data. Using previously overlooked historical sources, the book demonstrates that counting by race has always been a fundamentally political process, shaping in important ways the experiences and meanings of citizenship. This counting has also helped to create and to further ideas about race itself. The author argues that far from being mere producers of racial statistics, American and Brazilian censuses have been the ultimate insiders with respect to racial politics. For most of their histories, American and Brazilian censuses were tightly controlled by state officials, social scientists, and politicians. Over the past thirty years in the United States and the past twenty years in Brazil, however, certain groups within civil society have organized and lobbied to alter the methods of racial categorization. This book analyzes both the attempt of America’s multiracial movement to have a multiracial category added to the U.S. census and the attempt by Brazil’s black movement to include racial terminology in census forms. Because of these efforts, census bureau officials in the United States and Brazil today work within political and institutional constraints unknown to their predecessors. Categorization has become as much a "bottom-up” process as a "top-down” one.

Citizenship is a central concept in political philosophy, bridging theory and practice and marking out those who belong and who share a common civic status. The injustices suffered by immigrants, disabled people, the economically inactive and others have been extensively catalogued, but their disadvantages have generally been conceptualised in social and/or economic terms, less commonly in terms of their status as members of the polity and hardly ever together, as a group. This volume seeks to investigate the partial citizenship which these groups share and in doing so to reflect upon civic marginalisation as a distinct kind of normative wrong. For example, it is not often considered that children, though their lack of civic and political rights are marginal citizens and thus have something in common with other marginalised groups. Each of the book’s chapters explores some theoretical or practical aspect of marginal citizenship, and the volume as a whole engages with pressing debates in law and political theory, such as the limits of democratic inclusion, the character of social justice, the integration of migrants, and the enfranchisement of prisoners and children. This book was published as a special issue of the Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy.

This book presents a clear and comprehensive overview of citizenship, which has become one of the most important political ideas of our time. The author, an experienced textbook writer and teacher, uses a postmodern theory of citizenship to ask topical questions as: * Can citizenship exist without the nation-state? * What should the balance be between our rights and responsibilities? * Should we enjoy group as well as individual rights? * Is citizenship relevant to our private as well as our public lives? * Have processes of globalisation rendered citizenship redundant?