Paradoxes of Sovereignty and Citizenship: Humanitarian Intervention at Home
Paradoxes of Sovereignty and Citizenship: Humanitarian Inter vention at Home
Hawa K . Allan 0 1
Recommended Citation
0 Hawa K. Allan, Paradoxes of Sovereignty and Citizenship: Humanitarian Intervention at Home, 20 CUNY L. Rev. 389 (2017). Available at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/clr/vol20/iss2/5
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Mark Barenberg, Olati Johnson, Ted Shaw, Kendall Thomas, Patricia Williams, as well as
Sherally Munshi, Jeremy Pam and Joanna Cuevas Ingram for their helpful comments. I am also indebted to
members of the Columbia Associates-in-Law Workshop, and attendees of panel presentations of this article at
the conferences at both the Associations for Law, Culture and Humanities and Law and Society.
This article is available in City University of New York Law Review: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/clr/vol20/iss2/5
PARADOXES OF SOVEREIGNTY AND
CITIZENSHIP: HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION
AT HOME
Hawa K. Allan †
† Hawa K. Allan, Careers-in-Law-Teaching Fellow, Fellow at the Center for the
Study of Law and Culture, Columbia Law School, J.D. I am grateful to Mark
Barenberg, Olati Johnson, Ted Shaw, Kendall Thomas, Patricia Williams, as well as
Sherally Munshi, Jeremy Pam and Joanna Cuevas Ingram for their helpful comments.
I am also indebted to members of the Columbia Associates-in-Law Workshop, and
attendees of panel presentations of this article at the conferences at both the
Associations for Law, Culture and Humanities and Law and Society.
INTRODUCTION
“If I invoked the Insurrection Act against her wishes, the world
would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a
female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a
largely African American city. That would arouse controversy
anywhere. To do so in the Deep South, where there had been
centuries of states’ rights tension, could unleash holy hell.”
—George W. Bush, Decision Points1
“George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”
—Kanye West2
“I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that we allowed American
citizens to suffer because they were black. As I told the press at the
time, ‘The storm didn’t discriminate, and neither will the recovery
effort. When those Coast Guard choppers, many of whom were
first on the scene, were pulling people off roofs, they didn’t check
the color of a person’s skin.’ ”
—George W. Bush, Decision Points3
“. . . and the fiction of the facts assumes randomness and
indeterminacy.”
—Claudia Rankine, Citizen4
In the days after Hurricane Katrina breached critical levees
and submerged most of New Orleans under water, news reporters
1 GEORGE W. BUSH, DECISION POINTS 321 (2010).
2 See, e.g., Lisa de Moraes, Kanye West’s Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC, WASH. POST
(Sept. 3, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/
03/AR2005090300165.html [https://perma.cc/Z46B-QUKQ] (“West: I hate the way
they portray us in the media. You see a Black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see
a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And, you know, it’s been five days
[waiting for federal help] because most of the people are Black. And even for me to
complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I’ve tried to turn away from the TV
because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before even giving a
donation, so now I’m calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest
amount I can give, and just to imagine if I was down there, and those are my people
down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help — with
the way America is set up to help the poor, the Black people, the less well-off, as slow
as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a
lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way — and they’ve
given them permission to go down and shoot us! . . . George Bush doesn’t care about
Black people!”).
3 BUSH, supra note 1, at 325.
4 CLAUDIA RANKINE, CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC 85 (2014).
referred to the city as a “third world country”5 and to its
mostlyBlack residents stranded in attics and other makeshift shelters as
“refugees.”6 Commentators condemned these labels, which they
said betrayed a persistent perception of Black citizens as foreigners
in their own country.7 While corrective monikers surfaced—such
as internally displaced persons, a term for persons dislocated within
their country by, say, civil war or natural disaster8—newscasters
posed more troubling questions, their cameras rolling at home and
minds wandering abroad. “Why no massive airdrop of food and
water?”9 CNN news anchor Soledad O’Brien asked on a broadcast
aired five days after the hurricane hit. “In Banda Aceh, in
Indonesia, they got food dropped two days a (...truncated)