Beyond “Racialized Citizenship”: A Historical Materialist Approach to the Study of Race and Citizenship

Analyses of citizenship and race commonly treat them as independent axes of domination which somehow influence one another, leading to a proliferation of scholarship on “racialized citizenship” or “racialized illegality.” A historical-materialist approach instead situates both within the capitalist social totality and treats them as shifting apparatuses for organizing exploitation and legitimating inequality. In the United States, race-thinking emerged to naturalize slavery and to fragment an initially heterogeneous laboring population; citizenship later generalized and refined this work through liberal-legal forms that sought to reconcile formal equality with class domination. This paper analyzes how what I term the race regime prepared the terrain on which the citizenship regime could emerge. The result is a dialectical account of citizenship as a mechanism of capitalist accumulation that cannot be reduced to race, yet cannot be understood apart from it.