Citizens derive belonging from non-citizens’ eviction from law

Evidence

In Mansour’s case, there is no pretense of exploring reasonable accommodation of a religious practice. Her status as a member of a stigmatized population stalls any thinking about accommodation, even though this option may still be available to her under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Hers is a case of a social rather than a fully legally authorized expulsion. The full weight of the law may not be far behind, however, as was the case for girls prohibited from wearing the hijab in public schools in France. In the case of the child in detention, I have argued in this book that we come to accept the eviction of immigrants and refugees from the law through race thinking, the belief that there are two levels of humanity and two corresponding legal regimes. Citizens sharing territory and the right to punish strangers may not seem like ideas that are automatically embedded in race thinking. Modern nations have long preserved spaces for non-citizens that might be characterized as the antecedents to the camp, spaces of indefinite detention where, as Bauman describes for today’s refugees, ‘time is suspended; it is time but not history.’ If we, those of us marked as normative citizens, are able to accept, and even more, to derive comfort from the fact that non-citizens have fewer rights, if, as Mosse shows, ‘the foreigner outside the tribe has never been welcome,’ it is only because we require the distinction between those inside and outside the tribe to mark our own belonging. In this project of modernity, like all such projects, race has a stellar role to play. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 406