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Statehood
for American territories - colonies of a so-called “democratic
nation” - is a civil rights issue. And while the U.S. has 50
states, this number is not written in stone. All people are entitled
to self-determination and equal rights under the Constitution,
including those people of color who live in the nation’s
capital and the country’s five occupied Pacific and Caribbean
island territories - American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana
Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Products of
America’s legacy of colonialism with BIPOC populations, these
territories do not enjoy the rights that the states enjoy, cannot
elect the president, and have no voting representation in Congress,
even as their residents - with the exception of American Samoa - are
U.S. citizens.
Two
recent events indicate the issue of statehood is ripe, relevant, and
in the public conscience. On Nov. 3, Puerto Ricans supported a nonbinding
referendum for statehood,
reflecting similar votes in 2012
and 2017,
to which Congress has not acted. The U.S. House of Representatives
had voted previously in June to approve statehood for the District
of Columbia,
a measure requiring passage by the Senate and president.
The Admissions
Clause
of the U.S. Constitution allows new states to enter the union with
“the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as
well as of the Congress.” Statehood is intertwined with racial
politics, which should not be the case if we agree that all Americans
deserve equal rights, representation, and the right to vote. However,
statehood has emerged as a partisan issue, with Democrats generally
in favor and Republicans
generally opposed,
under the assumption that new senatorial and congressional seats from
newly formed states with predominantly BIPOC populations would
benefit Democrats.
“After
they change the filibuster, they’re going to admit the district
as a state. They’re going to admit Puerto Rico as a state.
That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity,” said
Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell,
calling statehood “full-bore
socialism”
and part of the Democrats' “radical
agenda.”
Republicans’ concern over statehood comes amid demographic
changes, in which America is becoming a browner and blacker country,
and traditionally red states such as Georgia and Arizona have turned
blue, while the GOP has become a white
supremacist party.
Republicans solidify white minority rule through voter suppression,
racial gerrymandering, and the undemocratic, malapportioned
structures of the
Senate
and the Electoral
College
- both of which, by design, have amplified white power, the former
slave states and Jim Crow segregation. New states threaten to offset
the unfair advantage the Republicans require to maintain power.
With
a
BIPOC
majority
and Black plurality, Washington, D.C. has a population of over
700,000 -
more than Wyoming and
Vermont. In 1961, the
23rd Amendment
allowed D.C. to vote in presidential elections and participate in the
Electoral College. “I will not yield, sir!” yelled
non-voting
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton
on the House floor in 2007, as she advocated for Washington, D.C.
statehood as a colleague interrupted her. “The District of
Columbia has spent 206 years yielding to the people who would deny
them the vote! I yield you no ground!”
Puerto
Rico, with a population of over 3
million people,
is larger than 21
states,
and would have five
representatives
in Congress in addition to two senators. The people of Puerto Rico
gained citizenship
in 1917,
three years after their house of delegates voted for independence,
which Congress ignored. Federal government negligence
and its failed response to Hurricane Maria in 2017 - which claimed as
many as 4,645
lives
- reflected the long legacy of poor treatment and second-class
citizenship of the island. The image of Trump throwing
out paper towels
at a relief event at a Guaynabo church became a symbol of official
callousness, indifference, and racism toward the island.
Bottom
of Form
The
origin of American territories is steeped in racism and conquest. The
U.S. acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines - with Cuba as a
U.S. protectorate - from the Spanish-American
War.
American expansionists were driven by manifest
destiny
- the belief in inevitable territorial expansion, steeped in American
white racial superiority. Supreme Court rulings in the 1901 Insular
Cases solidified the second-class
status
of the Caribbean territory, and are the reason why no territory has
become a state since Alaska and Hawaii were admitted in 1959. The
same court that upheld racial segregation in Plessy
v. Ferguson
only five years earlier ruled that America’s new possessions
were not entitled to full constitutional protections because they
were “foreign
in a domestic sense.”
In Downes
v. Bidwell,
the court focused on the governing of “savages” and
“uncivilized” people America has conquered, saying, “If
those possessions are inhabited
by alien races,
differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation,
and modes of thought, the administration of government and justice
according to Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible.”
Guam,
American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands are on the United
Nations’ list of 17
Non-Self-Governing Territories,
which are “territories whose people have not yet attained a
full measure of self-government,” and should be decolonized.
Settled
by the Chamorro
people
4,000 years ago, Guam, which has a population of 167,000,
is located in the northwest Pacific Ocean. Guam is located in the
Mariana Archipelago, along with a separate U.S. territory, the
Commonwealth of th Northern
Mariana Islands,
which the U.S. once administered as part of the post-World War II-era
UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.
American Samoa,
located in the South Pacific, is the only territory whose inhabitants
are denied U.S. citizenship at birth. Those who are born in American
Samoa are noncitizen U.S. nationals
who must undergo the standard naturalization process to gain
citizenship, unless they have a parent who is a citizen. Some in the
territory of 55,000 are concerned that statehood could result in, like
Hawaii, a loss of native land rights.
America
bought the U.S.
Virgin Islands,
once known as the Danish West Indies, from Denmark in 1917 for $25
million in gold coin, marking the only time America purchased a
territory from another imperialist nation. U.S.V.I. has a
predominantly Black population of 106,000, descendants of
enslaved
African people
who forcibly produced the sugar cane that built the economy of the
islands.
A
nation built on stolen land through genocide and enslavement requires
justice for millions of victims of colonialism. The racist legacy of
U.S. territories, their poor treatment and precarious standing
without democratic representation, demonstrate the need to make them
states if they choose, or allow an independence vote.
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