CITIZENISM: RACIALIZED DISCRIMINATION BY DESIGN.

This Article advances the conceptual framework of "citizenism" to describe how citizenship is mobilized and weaponized to sustain structural racism. Citizenism transcends formal citizenship status because the construction of whiteness underwrites it as the only presumptively legitimate racial category for citizenship. A focus on citizenism provides a new framework for understanding an underlying layer of white supremacy that defines access to and shapes the civil and political rights of people of color. Citizenism is premised on the normative presumption that noncitizens should be excluded from full legal protections. Although their labor sustains economies across the globe, they are criminalized and dehumanized. In a racial state like the United States, this constructed illegality, in turn, further diminishes the rights of citizens of color who are racialized as presumptively "illegal." Citizenism functions as a legalized system of discrimination that uses citizenship status to perpetuate racialized outcomes for communities of color. Specifically, law and immigration enforcement make legally permissible presumptions about citizenship based on race, which delimits the fundamental rights of citizens of color. The legally constructed concepts of "speaking like an illegal" and "looking like an illegal" have reproduced a subordinate status that leads to unequal treatment under the law for both noncitizens and citizens of color. Citizenism, this Article posits, helps us understand how the intersection of race, Indigeneity, class, immigration, and citizenship status conspires to maintain and further exacerbate the existing racial order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]