Jennifer M. Piscopo
WESTERN THOUGHT has traditionally defined citizens as Aristotle did in The Politics: “He who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be citizens of that state.” In other words, citizens have political rights, including the rights to vote and hold office. But who actually gets to enjoy these rights?
When the New World gained independence from Europe, republican constitutionalists defined political rights to exclude as much as to include. In the United States, for example, women, children, indigenous peoples, and the enslaved were cast out of the body politic; they received neither citizenship nor rights. After the Constitution was ratified in 1788, almost a hundred years passed before African American men received the right to vote, via the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870.