White Supremacy's Push to Rewrite the Constitution
[2]
by Timothy Benston, The Black Eye
Birthright citizenship in the United States was never a bureaucratic detail or an immigration loophole. It was a direct assault on white supremacy's original theory of this nation—that Black presence was permissible only as labor, never as belonging. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment sought to end that theory for good. Their language was meant to close the door on the idea that one's worth could be inherited from whiteness or revoked by power. If you are born here, you are of here. That amendment did not just welcome formerly enslaved Black people into the civic body; it attempted to inoculate the Constitution itself against the return of caste.
Yet white supremacy is relentless in its creativity. White supremacy, in every generation, finds new ways to renegotiate the boundaries of who counts as fully American. The current administration's attempt to rewrite the meaning of citizenship is the latest proof. By working to deny birthright citizenship to the children of non-citizen parents—overwhelmingly those of African, Caribbean, and Latin American descent—it signals that belonging is once again a privilege conferred selectively. This is not a misunderstanding of constitutional law. It is the restoration of racial hierarchy through legal strategy—white supremacy in constitutional form.
On January 20, 2025, the president issued Executive Order 14160, declaring that children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented or temporarily present would no longer receive automatic citizenship. The order seeks to turn birthplace into a technicality and lineage into the true basis of belonging. States and civil-rights organizations challenged the order immediately, and the courts blocked it as unconstitutional. But on December 5, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the consolidated case challenging these rulings—signaling that the highest court in the land is willing to consider whether the Fourteenth Amendment really guarantees equal birthright citizenship or whether whiteness may once again serve as the gatekeeper of America's future.
This is the reality we now inhabit.
What lies beneath this case is a deeper question: should the United States once again classify human beings by the circumstances of their birth? That is the essence of caste—a structure in which one's rights, dignity, and opportunities are determined not by where one is born but by the status of one's parents. When the administration claims that some children born here are nonetheless outsiders, it is insisting that ancestry overrides geography. And in this country, ancestry has always been a substitute for race—a coded way of saying whiteness belongs, and everyone else is subject to review.
If the Court upholds this logic, caste will return to the Constitution not as a metaphor but as a governing principle. It would allow the state to sort the population into hereditary categories: those whose births grant security and those whose births can be erased. This is precisely what the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to prevent.
African Americans understand this danger more than anyone. Legally, we are citizens. Historically, our citizenship has always been conditional. We are citizens until a police officer decides otherwise. We are citizens until a poll worker demands additional proof of who we are. We are citizens until an employer, or a landlord, or a stranger with authority decides our belonging must be verified. Our citizenship has been protected only when convenient for the state and violated whenever profitable for its power. It would be a profound mistake to believe that a constitutional rollback aimed at immigrants could not, in a different crisis, be aimed squarely at us.
What should alarm us most is not only the administration's intent but the Court's willingness to entertain it. The Court understands exactly why birthright citizenship exists—to ensure that non-white people could never again be cast outside the law. Its openness to reconsidering that guarantee reveals how easily institutions bend when whiteness demands it. Rights that once seemed settled suddenly become provisional. Thus, equality becomes a suggestion, not a principle.
History offers no comfort here. Before Germany built camps, it passed laws stripping Jews of citizenship and legal protection. Before Myanmar unleashed mass violence against the Rohingya, it declared them foreigners in the land of their birth. When the Dominican Republic erased the nationality of people of Haitian descent, it created a stateless underclass overnight. Legal exclusion is always the opening gesture. Violence follows only after the public has been taught that some lives are less entitled to protection.
Birthright citizenship is supposed to be the firewall that prevents a hereditary underclass from forming—a class of people defined as foreign even when they know no other home. Tear down that firewall, and the Constitution becomes a mechanism for preserving white dominance. The rhetoric surrounding this order—describing migrants from Africa and the Caribbean as "invaders," as "garbage," as "poisoning the blood"—is not incidental. Dehumanization always prepares the ground for oppression.
Those who support this effort are not defending America; they are diminishing it. They believe it is better to live in a smaller, whiter democracy than in a larger, multiracial one. They are trying to resurrect the very hierarchy the Fourteenth Amendment buried.
We cannot let them succeed. If this administration and this Court want to restore whiteness as the measure of full belonging, they must face resistance equal to the enormity of that threat. Our families, our communities, and our futures are not provisional. We will not allow our rights to return to the auction block of political convenience. If they intend to write caste back into the Constitution, they must understand this: the America they imagine cannot survive without our subjugation. The America we demand cannot exist without our liberation.
We are not going anywhere.
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Timothy Benston is an independent writer, social critic and photographer whose work confronts the ongoing erasure of Black life in America. Follow him on Substack at The Black Eye [3].
Image: PressBooks [4]
Related:
US Supreme Court agrees to consider the legality of birthright citizenship
JURIST [5], Dec. 6, 2025
From our Daily Report:
Trump vows 'reverse migration'
CounterVortex [6], Nov. 29, 2024
AGs challenge Trump bid to end birthright citizenship
CounterVortex [7], Jan. 23, 2025
Republicans lead fascist attack on Constitution (yes, really)
[8]CounterVortex [9], Feb. 26, 2011
Audio:
Podcast: Andrew Jackson and MAGA-fascism
[10]CounterVortex [11], Feb. 24, 2025
See also:
INVOKE INTER-AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC CHARTER FOR USA
by Henry 'Chip' Carey and Jennifer McCoy, JURIST
CounterVortex [12], January 2021
DONALD TRUMP: A FASCIST BY ANY OTHER NAME
by Bill Weinberg, Fifth Estate
CounterVortex [13], April 2017
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Reprinted by CounterVortex, Dec. 8, 2025
Used with permission.
