The power to harm: Institutional risk, political development and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in the United States.

摘要

America's commitment to the egalitarian norms of liberty, equality and democracy, conflict with the inequality and stratification derived from capitalism, ascriptive hierarchies and anti-state individualism. Together these conflicting norms of freedom, equality, and inequality are filtered through the rights, entitlements, and obligations of citizenship. Citizenship is often thought of as a condition that universalizes individuals, giving citizens equal procedural and substantive rights and protections by and from the state. Yet historically in America, citizenship has done much to harm groups with unequal access to the rights and protections of citizens. Citizenship in the U.S. has been paradoxical, on the one hand promoting inclusion, liberty, and equality of opportunity for white males, on the other grounded in the oppression, exclusion, coercion, slavery, and violence of groups marginalized because of their race or ethnicity, sex, or class. Recognizing the identities, rights and properties of certain persons in the polity also meant withholding these same rights and protections from groups excluded or marginalized. The ascriptive status of race, ethnicity and sex, isolated these groups from the rights and protections of citizenship as well as the spaces where the activities proper to citizens were enacted. Citizenship ensured that property ownership, voting, and later free earning were protected for white males. However, over time, the inequality of protecting property, voting and earning as the substantive entitlements of citizenship for white males, harmed, on a systemic and institutional level, the life chances, the material well-being, and the psychological dignity of women and people of color in the U.S.