Tag Archives: civil rights

Proposals: Delegates to Congress from Native American Tribes and from Americans Abroad

Politics, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

I have two ideas for better representation in Congress:

A Delegate for Native American Tribes

For several years, the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetowah Band of Cherokee Indians have both pursued the goal of sending a delegate to the U.S. House. The Treaty of Hopewell (1785) and Treaty of New Echota (1835), signed between the Cherokee and the United States, promised a delegate for the Cherokee to Congress, but it was never acted upon until Cherokee Nation President Chuck Hoskins appointed activist Kimberly Teehee as a delegate in 2019. Despite this appointment, Teehee has not yet been seated in any session of Congress.

Similarly, the Choctaw Nation, who received a promise for a delegate in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830), has never pursued sending a delegate, although the nation did send an ambassador to represent them before the general U.S. government throughout the 19th century. The Lenape Delaware Nation also signed a Treaty of Fort Pitt (1778) with the U.S. government, which encouraged them to form a state that would have representation in Congress, but never pursued either idea.

The issue here is that if the Cherokee (which are split between three tribes) and Choctaw deserve representation, that still leaves over 570 tribes which did not receive such a promise and do not have representation in Congress.

Their political concerns may be better represented by an at-large delegate who is popularly elected by enrolled voters from all the federally-recognized tribes in U.S. territory.

This idea, which may either provide for at-large or perhaps at least two districts on either side of the United States, more equitably support the representation of Native Americans in the federal level of government beyond the bounds of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The idea also passes the smell test of the 14th Amendment, as this would be limited only to enrollees of sovereign nations within the United States, including the 1 million who reside on reservations.

A Delegate for Americans Abroad

More countries in the 21st century, including France, Italy, Tunisia and more, have created electoral districts or reserved seats in their national parliaments to allow citizens who live abroad to vote for their own member/representative. This is often a recognition of the diasporas of citizens who keep their nationality and citizenship even as they live abroad for a long duration of time.

As of 2016, there were at least 4.8 million U.S. citizens who live abroad, including Armed Forces personnel, diplomats, businesspeople, expats, their families, and even accidental Americans who were born on U.S. soil to temporary workers or tourists but who have been raised for most of their lives in another country.

Suffrage for U.S. citizens has greatly increased since 1986, when the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) was passed. But what overseas U.S. voters are allowed to vote on varies between their state of formal residence, with some only allowing them to vote in federal elections, or some states barring their overseas residents from voting in any election if they have never resided in their formal state of residence.

Furthermore, expecting all overseas Americans to know about the candidates who are running for office on home soil is a tall order.

At the very least, those Americans who reside abroad should have more competent federal representation in Congress from U.S.-citizen candidates who may also reside closer to or on the same continent as themselves and share similar concerns as other U.S. expats.

Similar to France, this arrangement could create more than one district, but that may get into the weeds of reapportionment and how to draw lines to ensure equal population in order to comply with law, at least unless this delegation is exempted from the equal population requirement.

Finally, creating an overseas constituency for one’s parliament is an example of projecting soft power to a country’s diaspora which goes beyond just mere diplomacy, business networking or cultural promotion:

  • It creates a “legislator-diplomat” who liaises and and advocates for policy between the home country and its citizens in other countries, albeit more in the legislative branch more than in the executive.
  • If a foreign ministry executes the policies developed in the legislative branch which impact overseas citizens, it stands to reason that overseas citizens ought to have a direct say in the legislative branch.
  • Even when the policies from the legislative branch don’t directly affect foreign policy, overseas citizens also have an interest in domestic policies of a country to which they may return at some point for as long as they keep their citizenship.

ADOS and Caste discrimination

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

Progress is being made on SB 403, a California bill to prohibit caste discrimination, despite the protests and opposition of upper-caste people of South Asian descent. However, I’d argue that African Americans who are descendants of U.S. enslaved people should find a stake in this legislation.

There is an argument to be made for African Americans who are descendants of antebellum slaves to claim a stance against caste discrimination. The slave status had a unique impact upon the immediate generations of those enslaved as well as their descendants, even to the present. Those who are descended from antebellum slaves cannot claim descent from willful immigrants who switched their prior nationalities to embrace that of the U.S. citizen. They also cannot claim to be indigenous, aboriginal or autochthonous in their historical ties to the land claimed by the United States. Instead, their ties to this nation are rooted exclusively in the enslavement of their ancestors on this land. 

Race, including biases and prejudices along such lines, cannot and does not explain this status and its implications upon this community. The ADOS movement correctly claims that “lineage” from the enslaved entitles this community to specific legal consideration distinct from more recent immigrants of African, Afro-Caribbean or Afro-South American origin. 

But the word lineage, arguably, does not exactly entail the historic socio-economic, political, environmental, ethical and institutional treatment of those who are of said lineage. Isabel Wilkerson’s thesis of the distinct position of the American descendant of slaves within an hierarchy of submission and exclusion as a “caste” position goes further to encompass this status position. 

It is therefore of interest to those who seek continued structural transformation to eliminate and undermine this system, to allow for more race-neutral avenues to enable total socio-economic mobility for African-Americans, to embrace the legal prohibition of discrimination against perceived lower castes of society in the United States. 

It would be in the interests of advocates for racial justice to also tackle discrimination on the basis of caste against the descendants of freedmen. By treating descendants of freedmen as a socio-economic caste parallel to an ethnic group, legal discussion of race can become divorced somewhat from the specific conditions visited upon these descendants as opposed to others who faced lesser acts of institutional discrimination. 

Prison Abolition

I think abolishing both police and prisons is a gargantuan undertaking. It will mean having to reshape everything we know about property, what we value, and how far we will go to retaliate against violations of property. It will mean decriminalization and legalization of a number of felonies and misdemeanors. It will mean unlearning our learned, acculturated emotions about each other.

If this alternative structure for law and justice can be built, it will be about as important of a change in history as Costa Rica’s abolition of it’s standing armed forces in 1948.

If rights belong naturally to us, then why are laws containing rights subject to a popular vote for repeal or approval? If rights belong naturally to us, why were the Bill of Rights and other parts of the 1787 constitution subject to votes by two-thirds of state legislatures? If rights belong naturally to us, why is it that we’re realizing new rights at the state and local levels which are not contained in the federal constitution and are ballyhooed as “I don’t see a right to x in the constitution”? Are those rights really inherent? Or are they really the result of claims which are militated, resisted and negotiated before they are enshrined? My “natural” rights had to be validated by white people. Women’s rights had to be validated by men. Your right to vote without a property requirement was validated by old-money landowners. Maybe this idea that rights are “inherent and natural” is an ahistorical crock.

On “moving beyond LGBT”

Uncategorized, ,

OK, someone posted an earlier post that I had made on future rights movements to the Aspies for Freedom forum, and the response was interesting. After a few holes in my post were identified, I was going to make a few addendi to the bottom of the post, but it got a bit too long.

So anyway, the reason why I mentioned the stereotyping of the Autism rights movement is possibly because of a portion of the relevant Wikipedia article that had once contained a(n opnionated) mention of the anti-psychiatry movement. Consequently, it may have since been edited from the article for either neutrality or lack of citations (particularly since, from the view of the public, anti-psychiatry is a very contentious issue to take on; I would understand if the autism rights movement organizations would readily dispute any ties with it). Sorry to the Aspies for Freedom forum if the post made any inaccurate insinuations concerning the aims of it or any other autism rights organizations.

Also, I would like to know if the Aspies for Freedom organization is more pro-acceptance or anti-cure. Not that either stance would invalidate the importance of the other or make the organization anti-psychiatry, of course.

Finally, in response to the questions from the AfF forum, I think that it would take another post to expound on the idea of fetish and furry rights. The links that I had provided for such topics may not even cover the basics: since “civil rights” as a political concept has historically involved two major (and evolving) components – prevention of historical abuses against, and inclusion into the political process of a group and similar groups – it is, indeed, very complex to encapsulate what could be considered as a “right” for those who identify with their fetishes, be they sexual, spiritual or physical.

Maybe civil rights, as it evolves, will expand out of the political arena into the social, sexual, religiospiritual and other concerns that involve disenfranchized or unrecognized minorities who would otherwise contribute (directly or no) to society.

Moving beyond LGBT: looking at future civil rights movements

Uncategorized, , , , ,

So of course you’ve probably heard about the California Supreme Court ruling from Thursday that everyone’s going wild about. George Takei, Ellen deGeneres, and multiple others are finally taking the chance to test the murky, barely-tred waters of same-sex marriage in California.

However, even though this latest twist in a long battle to secure same-sex nuptial rights in a state that is already well-stereotyped as a bastion of LGBTdom is far from over, I’d like to take a look at three up-and-coming civil rights movements that will probably make waves later in the 20th century:

The first one should be obvious, considering that alot of people still look upon homosexuality or transgenderism as sexual fetishes that can be shrugged off or successfully repressed from manifestation like a drug addiction rather than as sexual identities that are just as valid as ethnoracial or religious identities that are given far more credence in the political spectrum. The problem is that those who identify with a particular fetish or fetish subculture are not as easily visible or identifiable in public as are those who espouse a religion (hijabs and yarmulkas), an ethnicity or race (don’t want to go there), or an obvious sexual orientation (don’t want to go there either); most fetishes are explored in either closed rooms, convention halls or internet forums and chat rooms.

Autism rights and neurodiversity, on the other hand, is different from other, more mainstream disability rights movements: instead of just accomodation and acceptance, the autism rights movement demands the de-classification of autism and Asperger’s as afflictions or mental disorders in favor of a re-recognition of the autistic spectrum as a merely “different” “natural” re-wiring of the brain’s synapses; it also advocates for the development of a distinct “autistic culture”. This stance has resulted, unfortunately, in the stereotyping of the autistic rights movement as an anti-psychiatry movement, which places it in the same boat as the infamous Church of Scientology.

Finally, the great debate of how us “highly-developed” humans must relate with the lowly animals that reside outside the periphery of human understanding. The talk of interspecies relations is almost unversally censored in order to exclude any serious, non-condemnatory mention of interspecies sexual relations, while any discussion of interspecies communication is laughed at or hosted simply for novelty purposes. But the fact that we homo sapiens only understand the communication of a paltry few other species at pre-school level, I think, keeps us from effectively reaching out to them in full-breadth initiatives that would allow us to incorporate them and their concerns into human society at levels above the classes of simple “pets” and “zoo animals”; as we continue with the building of facilities and technological contraptions to accomodate the continuous population growth that threatens natural, ecological and botanical systems in various parts of the planet, I think that advocacy for the incorporation of other species into our society’s infrastructures at humane, mutually-respectful levels will increase. To accomplish this, the creation of mutual communication enablements between species is priority #1.

Anyway, I think that these three rights movements will come to gain the public attention later on in the 21st century, primarily because they will force a public reappraisal of how we identify ourselves and how we think about and view the world around us, and those who dwell in it.