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Preface
I don’t want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty…It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen. He is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty…[W]e must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map. Lieutenant General John L. De Witt (1942).
—Lawrence H. Fuchs, The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity and the Civil Culture 227 (1991)
The framing and ratification of the United States Constitution aimed “to form a more perfect union.”1 Several decades later, when the republic fractured, it was evident that the outcome was not perfect enough. The loose thread of the Constitution, which caused the original fabric to unravel, was slavery. This outcome reflected an initial miscalculation with respect to the political system’s capacity to bridge differences in the absence of any middle ground. Even when the union was reconstructed, new systems of racial management emerged and challenged whether the Constitution said what it meant or meant what it said.