Racism Behind the Attack on Birthright Citizenship

Mac Clayton offers this perspective on KQED radio:

In 1951, before Brown v. Board of Education and before Martin Luther King gave voice to his dream, my grandfather, Philip Davidson, integrated the University of Louisville. As president, he merged a small black college into the university and gave tenure to a first black professor, the first at an all-white university south of the Mason Dixon line. Until his death at 98, my grandfather called that his proudest achievement.
. . .
I can’t help wondering how my grandfather would feel today about his old university’s ties to one of its notable alums, Senator Mitch McConnell, in whose honor the university houses the McConnell Center for Political Leadership. The leadership the senator has shown most recently is to call for reconsideration of the 14th Amendment’s grant of citizenship to anyone born in this country.

A half-century after the Civil Rights Act, we are plunging afresh into a national struggle over race. The skins are not as dark this time, but the prejudice is as black and hateful. Instead of George Wallace demanding “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” we face more subtle and insidious calls from the United States Senate for “reconsideration” of the citizenship of Hispanic children. click here for the rest of the piece and a podcast.

bh