Adam Serwer
speaker
105 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 22 Jun
Adam Serwer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So you think about today's discourse about birthright citizenship and these, you know, sometimes veiled, sometimes overt assertions that America is a white man's country.
You know, the people who wrote the 14th Amendment did not believe that.
They insisted that that was wrong and they inscribed the equality of man into the Constitution in a much more sincere way than the original founders.
So birthright citizenship is a centuries-old principle in Anglo-American law, which is obviously from where the American system is designed.
But the specific aim of the 14th Amendment was to make real the promise of the Declaration of Independence...
that all men are created equal.
And, you know, obviously prior to the Civil War, Roger Taney and the Taney Court decide Dred Scott v. Sanford, where they say that black people can never be citizens of the United States.
But this was a longstanding argument.
You know, there were people like John Calhoun who said, obviously in the Declaration of Independence, all men did not refer to black men.
When I was in middle school, I had a teacher who explained to me that
that all men in the Declaration of Independence meant all white men with property.
And that is a very narrow interpretation, but in effect, that's how it worked in the beginning.
But the author of the 14th Amendment, or one of the authors of the 14th Amendment, John Bingham, he said, the purpose of this is to get rid of the horrid blasphemy that America is a white man's country.
So you think about today's discourse about birthright citizenship and these, you know, sometimes veiled, sometimes overt assertions that America is a white man's country.
You know, the people who wrote the 14th Amendment did not believe that.
They insisted that that was wrong, and they inscribed the equality of man into the Constitution in a much more sincere way than the original founders.
But the purpose of birthright citizenship was to make America, as Frederick Douglass might have put it, right with itself.
He used to say that all that is needed to fix America is for America.
the country to get right with itself, to fulfill its own lofty ideals.
And that was what the 14th Amendment was meant to do.
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