Content area
Full text
Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy By Cristina Beltrán. Forerunners: Ideas First. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 128 pp., $10 Paper.
This is a brilliant and important book. Beltrán packs a powerful critical analysis of U.S. racialization into a short work that will hold up well for many years. The central analytic insight of the book is embedded in its title, “cruelty as citizenship.” Building on Joel Olson's thesis (in The Abolition of White Democracy, 2004) that U.S. democracy has understood citizenship to be about superior white racial standing, rather than about political participation in self-governance, Beltrán suggests that the enduring meaning of white supremacy is the cruel debasement of people of color through performative public acts of superior power as well as through exclusionary social practices and structures. That is, the cruel denial of equal standing to people of color is enacted through the preserves and performances of whites-only democratic citizenship. And Beltrán argues that among the payoffs for many white citizens are the “pleasures” (p. 11) experienced by performing and witnessing cruelty toward members of despised groups. Thus, U.S. racialization, Beltrán insists, is a political project centered on cruelty inflicted through the exercise of white racial power.
Beltrán articulates this core argument through a well-informed historical political analysis of certain key events in U.S. political development, an analysis that integrates racialization experiences of the Indigenous and Black populations, as well as Latinx people. Drawing from an unusually wide range of political and historical scholarship, the book sketches the development of...