The Insular Cases

While preparing for the February Twitter round-up (which I should be able to post tomorrow), I re-discovered several tweets that I had meant to mention at greater length.

One was about this article from the ACLU, called The Most Racist Supreme Court Cases You've Probably Never Heard of. I had never heard of them.

They're called the Insular Cases, and they were a series of findings in the early 20th century that described the residents of U.S. territories as alien races and savage tribes. These precedents still stand today.

Up until the territories were occupied by brown-skinned people who weren't being killed and replaced by white setters, residents of territories like Florida and parts of the West had automatically been considered under the protection of the Constitution.

But once territories were farther away from the mainland and full of brown people who weren't killed or driven into reservations, suddenly the Constitution didn't apply.

The ACLU and a number of civil rights groups have called on the Department of Justice to renounce them — as it did earlier with Korematsu v. United States, the case that upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans — and stop relying on these precedents in its arguments. 

Like all previous administrations, it still does just that. It's time to stop.