For Family and Property

When using the courts to protect their family, people of color relied on and deployed a well-used model for litigation and claims-making—a model set by fellow black litigants. This model included several tactics for appealing to the bar: they exploited the language of property and law, rhetoric that was recognizable to their audiences and thus usable and effective. They found ways to make others accountable to them: with their stories and reputations and through their networks. They bound people in relationships of obligation to them—bonds that sometimes upended the southern racial hierarchy. They used property ownership and its associated presumptions about independence and reliability to make their claims and to legitimize and safeguard their families. In so doing, they served as their own advocates, registered their voices in an official, public forum, and laid claim to civic inclusion. This chapter examines how well the model worked. It follows the formation of one family from Iberville Parish, the Belly family, and their efforts to form a family before the law and through property ownership.

Custer’s Sins: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Settler-Colonial Politics of Civic Inclusion

While “inclusion” has been seen as a central mode of redressing ongoing injustices against communities of color in the US, Indigenous political experiences feature more complex legacies of contesting US citizenship. Turning to an important episode of contestation, this essay examines the relation between inclusion and the politics of eliminating Indigenous nations that was part of a shared policy shift toward “Termination” in the Anglo-settler world of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reading of Indigenous activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), it demonstrates how the construction of what I call the “civic inclusion narrative” in post–World War II American political discourse disavowed practices of empire-formation. Widely considered a foundational text of the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement, the work repositioned Indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization. Deloria’s work provides an exemplary counterpoint to the enduring thread of civic inclusion in American political thought and an alternative tradition of decolonization—an imperative that continues to resonate in today’s North American and global Indigenous struggles over land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.

‘Jewish Genetics’ and the ‘Nature’ of Israeli Citizenship

In 2013, the Israeli state announced that it may begin to use genetic tests to determine whether some prospective immigrants are Jewish or not. If implemented, the state would be enshrining Jewishness at the level of DNA, rendering “Jewish genes” legally legible, and making DNA signatures a basis for decisions on basic rights and citizenship for the first time in its history. Herein, I examine the Israeli context of “Jewish genetics,” and I situate this contingent historical moment within the diverse political philosophy of Zionism, particularly as it relates to configurations of Jewish ethnicity and modes of citizenship. At issue is the possibility of a novel application of genetics in distributing citizenship, entailing a unique application of Jewish political thought, an articulation of a secular Zionism that foregrounds biology in determinations of civic inclusion.