On Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022, the Effron Center for the Study of America hosted Princeton University’s 2022 Constitution Day observance. The annual event commemorates the September 17, 1787, signing of the United States Constitution and explores permutations of constitutional law historically and contemporarily. This year, Associate Professor of History Rosina Lozano; Rhacel Parreñas, the Florence Everline Professor of Sociology and professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Southern California; and political analyst Rich Benjamin shared remarks. Patricia Fernández Kelly, associate director of the Effron Center for the Study of America and professor of sociology, served as moderator for discussion among panelists and with the audience on the theme of “Citizenship and Its Discontents in Our Evolving Democratic Republic.”

Rosina Lozano

Lozano offered insight into historical efforts to expand constitutional protections to include groups who were not considered in the original document. With a special focus on contests to broaden the scope of the historic 1975 Voting Rights Act to include the Latine community, Lozano revealed the connection between identity, language, bureaucratic learning processes and the law. The 1975 Voting Rights Act was a major legacy of the African American Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Hearings debated the inclusion of provisions to ensure voter participation from marginalized ethnic and linguistic communities. The questions animating the debates were complex. Would Spanish speakers be best served by identifying as a racial minority so that they could invoke the 15th amendment to lobby for inclusion or, would it be advantageous to identify as a language minority so that they could use the 14th amendment to argue for their inclusion?

Ultimately, the hearings resulted in Congress recognizing the Spanish-speaking community as a named category of federally recognized minority. Congress would go on to mandate that election materials such as ballots and registration forms be offered in languages other than English. The implications of the legislation were manifold. For one, this marked a language protections precedent that not only increased access to the vote for many, but also placed renewed interest on the Hispanic and Latine community as a group deserving of its own attention, legally and otherwise. Second, it marked a federally recognized national multiethnic citizenry, suggesting that language assimilation was not a precondition for inclusion in democratic processes. Further, it created an identity based on language for Spanish speakers to lobby behind when advocating for other forms of inclusion. The legal and cultural debate over whether Spanish speakers constitute a race and have legal protection under the 15th amendment continues.

Rhacel Parreñas

Parreñas explored how the United States’ continued reliance on migrant labor makes the enforcement of the 13th and 14th amendments a present-day issue. Parreñas argued that the Constitution has enabled the United States government to shift attention from human trafficking through U.S. points of entry to instances of human trafficking in the global south. By asserting standing for identifying, moderating, and eradicating human trafficking in other countries, Parreñas argued, the United States reinforces a widespread belief that human trafficking afflicts only other countries.

Human trafficking refers to the relocation of a person or group by force, fraud or through coercion for the purpose of subjecting them to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. In the United States, human trafficking undergirds the recruitment of labor migrants. Labor recruiters abuse the desperation of individuals to migrate to the United States to coerce them into working in environments with poor and often inhumane labor conditions. Parreñas explained that labor arrangements such as the H2B visa program for temporary workers and the au pair program can function as forms of debt peonage and indenture, vestiges of practices made illegal by 13th and 14th constitutional amendments, which abolished slavery and other forms of unfreedom in the 19th century.

Parreñas demonstrated how labor migrants have been exempted from the protections of those amendments. The result is the hierarchization of membership in the United States, where some groups are granted full protection as provided in the Constitution, and other groups, comprised of those deemed undesirable members of the body politic, find their rights selectively suspended. This uneven application of the Constitution’s protection is hardly a historical accident, Parreñas contended, and would be better understood as part of a broader racial project of limiting the membership of non-whites in the United States.

Rich Benjamin

Political analyst, cultural anthropologist and author Rich Benjamin examined how the crisis of whiteness animates the meaning of freedom and the idea of America. Benjamin argued that the fact and the dogma of the Constitution furthers a white racial crisis, a democratic crisis, and a faux and real epistemic crisis. Beginning with an explanation of “The White People Deadline,” a forecast 2042 moment when white people will no longer be the racial majority in the United States, Benjamin argued that the perception of whiteness being under attack engenders angst for many about its implications for white people’s political power and position in the country’s sociopolitical hierarchy.

The resultant democratic crisis has a range of observable manifestations, many of which contribute to an intense sense of political decline in the United States. Benjamin cited electoral and policy domination by moneyed elites, partisan gerrymandering, race- and age-based voter suppression, foreign interference in elections, executive branch corruption, and the attempted dismantling of the U.S. postal system as key features of democracy’s dissolution. Such ongoing attempts to undermine democracy combined with the breakdown of legal infrastructure for redress bolsters autocracy. He further argued that compromised digital infrastructure through social media helped manufacture an epistemic crisis, complicating the dissemination of knowledge. The question of how we know what we say we know has implications for election administration, voting, civil liberties, separation of powers, campaign law, civic participation and more, Benjamin argued. In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the question of white racial anxiety and the support and maintenance of whitopias (growing white racial enclaves throughout the United States) is inextricably linked to questions of democracy and the Constitution.

Moderator Patricia Fernández Kelly noted that the panelists’ remarks on the Constitution provided important insights into the country’s capacity for transformation, and its limitations. Lively and generative discussion followed, with the audience in conversation with the panelists about topics including education and voting as forms of citizenship, and the impact of state constitutions.