President Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to abolish birthright citizenship is unambiguously and profoundly racist. We can conclude only that this is the whole point.

The order plainly violates the Constitution and seeks to overturn crystal-clear Supreme Court precedent. In those affirmations of the principle that anyone born in this country is automatically a citizen, race was the central issue — a fact that Trump and his advisers must know. This history makes Trump’s order an act of performative racism that tells us, quite clearly, what kind of U.S.-born Americans he wants to exclude.

The saga begins before the Civil War with the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in 1857, which denied citizenship to people of African descent even if they were not enslaved. “A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a ‘citizen’ within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States,” the ruling held.

After the war, the race-based Dred Scott theory of citizenship was overturned by the very first sentence of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the........

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