#CITIZENSHIP

[incognitopolls]

Include vacations, study abroad, living there permanently or semi-permanently, etc. If you LATER became a citizen of any of those places, include the time up until you became a citizen.

Anon has spent a lot of time living in places where they're not a citizen, and they're curious how many people share this experience!

–

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[bfpnola]

original instagram post

[eretzyisrael]

[newyorkthegoldenage]

A window card from 1920, proclaiming that a newly-enfranchised woman had registered to vote.

Photo: NYC Municipal Archives

[alwaysbewoke]

To @porshaolayiwola thank you for this. Our names are sacred. Our names are songs. Our names are declarations and prayers. This is one of those micro-aggressions that ain’t so micro. It needs to stop. As @uzoaduba said when she told a story about wanting to shorten her name, her mother replied “if they can learn to say Tchaikovsky or Dostoyevsky,” they can learn to say your name.

[mapsontheweb]

Countries Where You Cannot Give Up Your Citizenship

by dailyworldmaps

Lighter colour indicates countries where it is technically legal to relinquish your citizenship, but doing so is practically impossible. In Malaysia, Pakistan & The Bahamas, you must be older than 21 to relinquish your citizenship.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 2, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 03, 2024

Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act, which declared that “all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.”

That declaration had been a long time coming. The Constitution, ratified in 1789, excluded “Indians not taxed” from the population on which officials would calculate representation in the House of Representatives. In the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the Supreme Court reiterated that Indigenous tribes were independent nations. It called Indigenous peoples equivalent to “the subjects of any other foreign Government.” They could be naturalized, thereby becoming citizens of a state and of the United States. And at that point, they “would be entitled to all the rights and privileges which would belong to an emigrant from any other foreign people.”

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, established that “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.” But it continued to exclude “Indians not taxed” from the population used to calculate representation in the House of Representatives.

In 1880, John Elk, a member of the Winnebago tribe, tried to register to vote, saying he had been living off the reservation and had renounced the tribal affiliation under which he was born. In 1884, in Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court affirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution did not cover Indigenous Americans who were living under the jurisdiction of a tribe when they were born. In 1887 the Dawes Act provided that any Indigenous American who accepted an individual land grant could become a citizen, but those who did not remained noncitizens. 

As Interior Secretary Deb Haaland pointed out today in an article in Native News Online, Elk v. Wilkins meant that when Olympians Louis Tewanima and Jim Thorpe represented the United States in the 1912 Olympic games in Stockholm, Sweden, they were not legally American citizens. A member of the Hopi Tribe, Tewanima won the silver medal for the 10,000 meter run. 

Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, and in 1912 he won two Olympic gold medals, in Classic pentathlon—sprint hurdles, long jump, high jump, shot put, and middle distance run—and in decathlon, which added five more track and field events to the Classic pentathlon. The Associated Press later voted Thorpe “The Greatest Athlete of the First Half of the Century” as he played both professional football and professional baseball, but it was his wins at the 1912 Olympics that made him a legend. Congratulating him on his win, Sweden’s King Gustav V allegedly said, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”  

Still, it was World War I that forced lawmakers to confront the contradiction of noncitizen Indigenous Americans. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, more than 11,000 American Indians served in World War I: nearly 5,000 enlisted and about 6,500 were drafted, making up a total of about 25% of Indigenous men despite the fact that most Indigenous men were not citizens. 

It was during World War I that members of the Choctaw and Cherokee Nations began to transmit messages for the American forces in a code based in their own languages, the inspiration for the Code Talkers of World War II. In 1919, in recognition of “the American Indian as a soldier of our army, fighting on foreign fields for liberty and justice,” as General John Pershing put it, Congress passed a law to grant citizenship to Indigenous American veterans of World War I. 

That citizenship law raised the question of citizenship for those Indigenous Americans who had neither assimilated nor served in the military. The non-Native community was divided on the question; so was the Native community. Some thought citizenship would protect their rights, while others worried that it would strip them of the rights they held under treaties negotiated with them as separate and sovereign nations and was a way to force them to assimilate. 

On June 2, 1924, Congress passed the measure, its supporters largely hoping that Indigenous citizenship would help to clean up the corruption in the Department of Indian Affairs. The new law applied to about 125,000 people out of an Indigenous population of about 300,000.

But in that era, citizenship did not confer civil rights. In 1941, shortly after Elizabeth Peratrovich and her husband, Roy, both members of the Tlingit Nation, moved from Klawok, Alaska, to the city of Juneau, they found a sign on a nearby inn saying, “No Natives Allowed.” This, they felt, contrasted dramatically with the American uniforms Indigenous Americans were wearing overseas, and they said as much in a letter to Alaska’s governor, Ernest H. Gruening. The sign was “an outrage,” they wrote. “The proprietor of Douglas Inn does not seem to realize that our Native boys are just as willing as the white boys to lay down their lives to protect the freedom that he enjoys." 

With the support of the governor, Elizabeth started a campaign to get an antidiscrimination bill through the legislature. It failed in 1943, but passed the House in 1945 as a packed gallery looked on. The measure had the votes to pass in the Senate, but one opponent demanded: "Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?"

Elizabeth Peratrovich had been quietly knitting in the gallery, but during the public comment period, she said she would like to be heard. She crossed the chamber to stand by the Senate president. “I would not have expected,” she said, “that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights.” She detailed the ways in which discrimination daily hampered the lives of herself, her husband, and her children. She finished to wild applause, and the Senate passed the nation’s first antidiscrimination act by a vote of 11 to 5. 

Indigenous veterans came home from World War II to discover they still could not vote. In Arizona, Maricopa county recorder Roger G. Laveen refused to register returning veterans of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, including Frank Harrison, to vote. He cited an earlier court decision saying Indigenous Americans were “persons under guardianship.” They sued, and the Arizona Supreme Court agreed that the phrase only applied to judicial guardianship.  

In New Mexico, Miguel Trujillo, a schoolteacher from Isleta Pueblo who had served as a Marine in World War II, sued the county registrar who refused to enroll him as a voter. In 1948, in Trujillo v. Garley, a state court agreed that the clause in the New Mexico constitution prohibiting “Indians not taxed” from voting violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments by placing a unique requirement on Indigenous Americans. It was not until 1957 that Utah removed its restrictions on Indigenous voting, the last of the states to do so.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Native American voting rights along with the voting rights of all Americans, and they, like all Americans, are affected by the Supreme Court’s hollowing out of the law and the wave of voter suppression laws state legislators who have bought into Trump’s Big Lie have passed since 2021. Voter ID laws that require street addresses cut out many people who live on reservations, and lack of access to polling places cuts out others. 

Katie Friel and Emil Mella Pablo of the Brennan Center noted in 2022 that, for example, people who live on Nevada’s Duckwater reservation have to travel 140 miles each way to get to the closest elections office. “As the first and original peoples of this land, we have had only a century of recognized citizenship, and we continue to face systematic barriers when exercising the fundamental and hard-fought-for right to vote,” Democratic National Committee Native Caucus chair Clara Pratte said in a press release from the Democratic Party.

As part of the commemoration of the Indian Citizenship Act, the Democratic National Committee is distributing voter engagement and protection information in Apache, Ho-Chunk, Hopi, Navajo, Paiute, Shoshone, and Zuni.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[wiirocku]

Philippians 3:20 (NKJV) - For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ,

[x-heesy]

𝙻 𝚘 𝚟 𝚎 📷

New York and London 60-80s in the photo by Evelyn Hofer 🇺🇸 🇬🇧

Evelyn Hofer (* January 21, 1922, Marburg an der Lahn; † November 2, 2009 in Mexico City) was a photographer of German descent who later took on Mexican and American citizenship. Over decades, Hofer created a body of work that independently developed the tradition of August Sander's conception of images and also used color photography early on. Hilton Kramer, art critic for the New York Times, called Hofer "America's most famous 'unknown' photographer."

#photography #photooftheday #photo #photographer #photoshoot #nature #picoftheday #love #naturephotography #travel #photographylovers #beautiful #travelphotography #art #landscape #godsowncountry #portrait #photos #portraitphotography

Matter of Time by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings 🎧

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Weird Al renounced his US citizenship in protest of gun violence. England agreed to take him.

I woke up thinking this was absolutely true.

[zerofuckingwaste]

Zero waste isn't just about trying not to create extra waste, it's about not wasting the things you have.

If you live in the United States and are of majority age, you have the right to vote.

Don't fucking waste it.

#VoteKamala

[wahroh]

Documented.

[nodynasty4us]

From the June 13, 2024 item:

One of the Republicans' key election tactics is voter suppression. They know that suppressing the vote in Democratic areas always helps their cause. Some of the ways of suppressing the vote fall under the category of dirty tricks, like sending people text messages the day before the election saying that due to technical problems, the election has been postponed until Wednesday. One of the most effective ones, though, is just enforcing the law. Only U.S. citizens have the right to vote. But it turns out that, according to a new survey, something like 9% of all eligible voters do not have proof of citizenship. Proof could include a U.S. birth certificate, passport, certificate of naturalization, and other documents. But millions of people have none of these. If a county or state announced a week before the election that everyone had to bring proof of citizenship, millions of people could not do it and could be denied the right to vote. There would be instant lawsuits demanding that any voter without proof be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, but at the very least, some people who don't have proof might be discouraged from even trying to vote. That could affect the outcome.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Vivek Ramaswamy wants to end birthright citizenship—a longstanding American policy codified in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution—and take away young people’s right to vote, all in one fell swoop.

The presidential candidate made the call Thursday night on CNN, after being asked about his opponents, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, vowing to end birthright citizenship. “For a period of time, I think it’s going to be necessary,” Ramaswamy said.

But the young gun was not satisfied just being in agreement with the leading duo in the Republican race-to-the-repressive-bottom.

“I’ll actually go one step further on this, Abby, is that I don’t think someone just because they’re born in this country, even if they’re a sixth generation American should automatically enjoy all the privileges of citizenship until they’ve actually earned it,” Ramaswamy told CNN’s Abby Phillip. “So one of the things I’ve said is that every high school student who graduates from high school should have to pass the same civics test that every immigrant has to pass in order to become a citizen of this country.”

Surveys in the past have shown that most people would likely fail a basic multiple choice citizenship test; one survey found just 36% of respondents actually passing such a test. And given Republicans’ all-out assault on public school education, it’s unclear what their plan would be to up those numbers.

After publishing, Ramaswamy senior adviser Tricia McLaughlin said the proposal refers “to civic duty voting via constitutional amendment.”

According to Ramaswamy’s website, this would mean raising the voting age to 25, while still generously “allowing all Americans to vote at age 18” only if they serve at least six months in the military or as a first responder, or pass the citizenship test.

Yet another successful pair of Republican talking points: seizing the right to vote from young people, and forcing people to join a military that has used trillions of American dollars to wreak carnage across the world, and leave its foot soldiers out to dry upon their return.

Anyhow, Ramaswamy’s brilliant proposal to seemingly strip citizenship from so many Americans came after Phillip noted that both of Ramaswamy’s parents are immigrants, and so birthright citizenship “was in play” for him when he became a citizen.

Yet, instead of making the citizenship process easier to navigate, Ramaswamy instead wants to make it harder for anyone to be a citizen. More than that, the presidential candidate’s formulation lays out tiers of citizenship—a matrix in which, until one passes this test, they would be a second-class citizen. While this country already treats scores of people—immigrants, LGBTQ people, laborers, the homeless, and young people—as such, Ramaswamy thinks that unfair treatment should be legally bound.

[harukadrawsthings]

I try my best not to bring up political issues here, considering that it is a topic that can quickly escalate and it's not this blog's focus. However, I excepcionally feel the need to address this issue today given the circumstances in which we live in our present time.

Since I gained the right to vote, I strongly believe that the next European elections on June 9th are the most important ever. It's not just about funds. It is, above all, the safety of all of us, millions of people spread across the old continent. To affirm and continue to defend human rights that so many people gave their lives and fought for. That we can be who we are. To be sovereign.

I'm worried about the unconsciousness of some people who do not intend to spare even 15 minutes to go to a polling station and vote even though they know the chaos the world is in. Knowing that hatred, discrimination, violence and misinformation increasingly divide society and that a certain ideology that I thought would never return to the surface is once again gaining strength and lurking for the best opportunity to achieve power. We must look to History as lessons so as not to repeat mistakes made in the past in the future. Freedom cannot be taken for granted.

So I'll be very straightforward:

There were so many people who fought for democracy and the right to vote and I think it's disrespectful towards our ancestors (reinforcement: women) and towards younger generations (and future ones) who don't intend to vote because they think it doesn't make a difference. It does.

Or they won't vote because they won't be in their area of ​​residence (and it's not for work reasons). At least on my country's case this time it is possible to vote anywhere in the national territory thanks to the digital system that will be applied to the electorate's books.

Or because "it's annoying". Voting only takes 15 minutes, not 15 hours of your day.

Please be civil and go vote this Sunday if you're a EU citizen with legal age to vote. Voting is an act of citizenship. Don't let others decide your future and your rights for you. Think about your siblings, children, grandchildren, partners, everyone you have in your life and care about. There are no excuses.

THERE. ARE. NO. EXCUSES.

[alwaysbewoke]