The Exception to the Rule

Abstract

The unjust internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans and the detainment of Arabs and Muslims are representative of larger structures of racism in the United States. The state's task is to manage, maintain and, at times, sustain the racial other. As the racial other becomes viewed as outside the nation, the state can enact harsh measures of punishment, control, and surveillance with the support of the public. 9/11 reconfigured the racial hierarchy of the United States, which allowed the nation-state to dictate the behavior of its communities of color, informing communities about the proper ways of racialized citizenship. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, those perceived to belong to Arab and Muslim communities became transformed into an ideological, racial subject and are placed outside the concept of formal citizenship. Those who are construed as outside formal membership have their ability to perform citizenship reduced and the state sees it as its responsibility to detain the foreign insider/outsider.

Notes

1. Edward Said's Orientalism (1994[1978]) defines Orientalism as the

distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philosophical texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series ‘interests’ which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do). Indeed my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ World. (p. 12)

2. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2002) states that citizenship is

not just a matter of formal legal status; it is a matter of belonging, including recognition by other members of the community. Formal law and legal rulings create a structure that legitimates the granting or denial of recognition. (p. 52)

For Nakano Glenn, racialized and gendered citizenship is created when ‘theoretically universal citizenship rights are differentially enforced’ (p. 53). This is important to demonstrate that regardless of formal citizenship status that in moments of national crisis race becomes more important than the concept of citizenship. The racialized enemy threat becomes antithetical to the ‘universal’ principles of citizenship and nation-state and must be removed, but in reality they must be included to construct a concept of citizenship that reflects the state's political stance.

3. ‘Transnation’ designates cross-border collectivities and identity formations, according to Kandice Chuh (2003, p. 62).

4. The concept of Orientalism tells us more about those who use the concept than about those who are constructed as Orientals.

5. All of President Bush's speeches analysed are from this URL address: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html. And all subsequent speeches will be cited by the date given by President Bush.

6. This distinction designates the supreme degree of intensity of a union or division, of an alliance and dissociation (Schmitt, 1996, p. 26). The enemy is the other, the stranger; ‘and it is sufficient for his nature that he is … different and alien’, so that in the severe situation conflicts with him are possible (p. 27). The enemy only exists when one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. Schmitt stipulates that the criterion of the friend-and-enemy distinction in no way suggests that a particular nation must forever be the friend or enemy of another nation or that the state of neutrality is not possible or could not be politically reasonable, for neutrality is subject to the friend-and-enemy grouping as well (pp. 34–35).

7. US laws have been unsure on the question of the rights afforded to noncitizens. The status of alienness affects the allotment of rights and benefits in US society, and the law is severely divided about the significance of that status. The Supreme Court has held that some constitutional protections apply to ‘aliens’, but in other contexts, the Court has treated the concept of being foreign or alien as an appropriate basis for establishing a range of rights. The government has provided an ‘ascending scale of rights [to the alien] as he increases his identity in our society’; for the Court this in harmony with the government's sanction as a sovereign nation to defend the honor of its national borders (Moore, 1999, p. 90). The Court has made differential treatment the right of the nation.

8. In The Arena of Racism, Michel Wieviorka (1995) argues that

war and conquest disseminate a strong, robust image of the community, provide coherent frames of thought which dissolve the previous, more fragmented ones of many of the participants in the action; they shape and communal movements just as much as—if not indeed more than—they arise out of them. (p. 110)

He claims:

such action favours a differentialist logic and a total racism as soon as it becomes subject more to a logic of war than to one of economic development and expansion … the scope for inegalitarian racism narrows in time of war within the society concerned, insofar as previously racialized groups are either transformed into scapegoats and treated in terms of a differentialist logic or are incorporated into the collectivity much more than they were before. (pp. 110–11)

9. Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act in the early days of the Cold War. The act focused on immigrants’ political beliefs as the basis for making judgments about suitability. It was devised to obstruct the entry of communists but contained a provision that allowed for the expulsion of an alien without a hearing on the grounds of confidential information. Rights of aliens against deportation were more tapered than the rights after they had acquired American citizenship. The Act allowed for the deportation of an alien at any time after a prohibited act, such as membership in a subversive group, had been committed. Expulsion or expatriation of naturalized citizens required the government to show proof of objective intent that the individual voluntarily relinquished citizenship by engaging in acts of treason or subversion. Acts that can justify deportation are belonging to blacklisted radical organizations, advocating the violent overthrow of the federal government, naturalizing in a foreign country, serving in the military in another country, or swearing allegiance to a foreign country (Moore, 1999, p. 89). In 1987 the McCarran-Walter Act was crucial in its role in justifying the case against the ‘LA 8’.

US Immigration officials arrested and sought to deport seven Arabs and the Kenyan wife of one of the men. The alleged charge was that these individuals were involved in illegal activities, in particular that they belonged to the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). INS maintained that the ‘aliens’ did not have the same rights of free speech as citizens. Arab-American organizations challenged this claim by stating that their communities were intentionally targeted in an attempt to silence its members from speaking about issues concerning the Middle East.

In regards to the case of the ‘LA 8’, former FBI Director William Webster told Congress in April and May 1987 that if the defendants had been US citizens, ‘there would not have been a basis for the arrest’ (Moore, 1999, p. 87). In the final disposition of this case, Reno v. ADC (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee), the Supreme Court delivered an opinion crippling the rights of immigrants. Regarding First Amendment rights, Justice Scalia (writing for the Court in Reno v. ADC) wrote, ‘As a general matter … an alien unlawfully in this country has no constitutional rights to assert selective enforcement as a defense against his deportation’ (p. 87). Kathleen Moore states that the Court's

holding bars anyone who is subject to deportation from trying to defend herself by asserting that she is being targeted for her controversial political beliefs that any legal citizen would be free to embrace. (p. 87).

Correspondingly, new anti-terrorism acts make legal the means to exclude based on political beliefs and affiliations of a group of people. Instead of actions, judgments are based on the identities of individuals (p. 87). The act was repelled in 1991, but new catastrophes have brought about new laws implementing similar philosophies.

10. An example of this kind of patriotism occurred on October 4, 2001 with the murder of Vasudev Patel, an immigrant from India who had worked at a gas station near Dallas, Texas. Mark Stroman was sentenced to death for the murder in April 2002. During his sentencing Stroman held a small American flag and showed no reaction. In a television interview given in February, Stroman stated, ‘I'm not a serial killer. We're at war. I did what I had to do. I did it to retaliate against those who retaliated against us’. Since the events of 9/11 have been construed as an act of war, Mark Stroman said he believed he was doing his part by murdering the racial other to defend the state from terrorism. However, Stroman fell victim to the state he was trying to protect. The state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and anyone who breaks this code is subject to execution. Stroman was killed more for his defiance against the state by his use of force than for his murdering of an innocent victim.