Welke Core Concepts

Barbara Welke, author and Associate Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota discusses the makings of a citizen in her book, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States. Throughout the book, Welke explains her core concepts as to how she defines the borders of belonging. Borders of belonging, in this case, refers to the ability to create an exclusive environment based on the credentials of race, gender, and ability through law and society. Henceforth, the additional core concepts surrounding that foundation are legal personhood and citizenship. Legal personhood is the ability for an individual to have legally recognized self-ownership. The ability for someone to say, …show more content…
Fundamentally speaking, Lopez’s book, although it speaks dutifully towards the power and position that legal actors such as judges and policy-makers have in society, enforces that those legal actors are constructing the borders and boundaries of inclusion/exclusion, legal personhood, and citizenship. The author clearly states that the law manifests the borders and boundaries to which individuals are accepted or not. Especially when speaking towards the issue of race within the borders of belonging, “legal rules and decisions construct races through legitimation, affirming the categories and images of popular racial beliefs and making it nearly impossible to imagine nonracialized ways of thinking about identity, belonging, and difference” (p.87). Just as Welke argued, the borders and boundaries of identity are based on the ability for an individual to create their own environment, but the law, just as Lopez stated, makes that almost impossible when everything is …show more content…
Race constitutes citizenship because as shown in several of the historical pre-requisite cases that the author introduces, “this common knowledge, like all social beliefs, is unstable, highly contextual, and subject to change. Although the prerequisite cases directly address the racial identity of relatively few nationalities, they are relevant to our understanding of the racial identity of every “white person” in this country” (p.75). The process for determining and granting citizenship in the United States has always been formulated around what was considered white at the time. Therefore, because Welke’s concept of citizenship deals with the ability for any individual to have equal access to their rights, Lopez supports that argument as he argues that racialized minorities do not have equal access to