Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West by Julie Carr

Author:Julie Carr [Carr, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO006000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical, HIS036090 HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI), POL010000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory
Publisher: Nebraska

Jus Soli / Jus Sanguinis

Blood was the symbolic marker of value (class, race, and strength), but blood in its propensity to spill and pour from the cut or wound is also a sign of bodily vulnerability. Menstruating people are, of course, especially bloody; blood flows without even a breach of skin. The menstruating or maternal body provides proof of how porous our boundaries are. And so, while contaminated blood was the dominant metaphor for genetic mixing, because the vehicle for contamination was thought to be heterosexual sex, racism and sex hysteria often go hand in hand (as we see today).

As racial others “invade the land,” land that had only recently been invaded by the very people now defending it, their supposedly overactive birthrate (if women) or sexual virility (if men) will lead, nativists and white supremacists fear, to an intolerable demographic shift. For this reason, many eugenicists of the 1920s advocated so-called positive eugenics—or pro-natalism—as well; they urged white middle-class women to produce more babies and were often against birth control for this reason.51 (Pro-natalism was also a favored ideology/policy of European fascism.)52 Today’s far-right obsession around birth-right citizenship and so-called anchor babies is just another iteration of the fear that as non-worthy immigrants “flood” our shores and borders, they’ll flood our maternity wards too.

The Nazis, inspired by the American effort, replaced birthright citizenship (jus soli) with citizenship based on blood or race (jus sanguinis).53 Many Americans now, like the “legal scholar” John Eastman—who was a key player in Trump’s effort to turn back the 2020 election and who was employed in 2020–21 by the University of Colorado, where I work—are promoting a similar project. Just after Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate, Eastman published an op-ed in Newsweek in which he questioned Harris’s citizenship, though she was born in Oakland, California. Eastman’s controversial and long-held opinion is that people who are the children of “merely temporary visitors” do not qualify as citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment (at the time of Harris’s birth, her parents were in the United States on student visas).54 In his op-ed as elsewhere, Eastman argues that the Fourteenth Amendment, despite stating “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” meant to exclude children born on U.S. soil whose parents, for one reason or another, still “owe allegiance” to a foreign government and so are not exclusively “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. (The logic is immediately skewed—the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” applies to the child and not its parents—but no matter, Eastman has built a career on this sleight of hand.) At the end of a 2019 talk sponsored by CU Boulder’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, Eastman bragged that President Trump, having read his articles on the subject, was prepared to revoke the citizenship of all U.S.-born children of “illegal immigrants” by executive

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