I knew right off-the-bat, as it were, that the harebrained attempt to revoke the 14th Amendment of the Federal Constitution of the United States of America by President Donald John Trump, the Second-Generation Half-Scottish and Third-Generation Bavarian (German) American, vis-a-vis the statutory policy of Birthright Citizenship, was hopelessly bound to fail for obvious reasons. In commonplace clinical parlance, the ineffably scandalous and morally benighted and cranially bankrupt Trumpian Executive Order was decidedly and unarguably Dead-On-Arrival (DOA) – (See “Clarence Thomas Claims Birthright Decision ‘Devalues’ US Citizenship” The Independent 6/30/26).

Still, but for the seismic expression of shock, horror and anger, and rationally so, by Harvard University Law School Professor Emeritus Laurence Henry Tribe, the morally and the scholastically disturbing razor-thin 5-4 Decision by the Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr-led SCOTUS – that is, the august Supreme Court of the United States – this bizarre judicial outcome would not have hit home to the overwhelming majority of us bona fide American Citizens, both by birth and the voluntary choice of naturalization, as “Tsunamistically” as it did.

For the nationally renowned and revered Professor Tribe, a former Constitutional Law Professor of the distinguished and erudite likes of Chief Justice Roberts, Jr., and former President Barack Hussein Obama, for just two of the most obvious examples, the “Real News” or the true import of this skin-of-teeth Apex Court Decision by the Roberts Court or Bench, precariously inhered in the fact that approximately 50-percent or a full-half or a moiety of the highest and the most powerful Court of the Land, as it were, was actually of the same morally unenlightened mindset as the putative cognitively unhinged Pontiff of the so-called Make America Great Again (MAGA) Faux-Christocentric Jihadists.

For the 84-year-old Shanghai, China-born Professor Tribe, on the staff of Harvard Law School since 1968, where Yours Truly was barely a toddler, the abysmally narrow 5-4 margin decision by the Apex Court, in regard to just who qualifies to be envisaged as a bona fide American Citizen, was in great danger of being upended by the faux-revanchist occupants of The White House, who have made absolutely no secret of their inexorable attempt to return the African-Descended Seminal Makers of Contemporary American Civilization back to Bataan, as it were, or the Boondocky Days of the Infamous Black Codes (See A. Leon Higginbotham;s historiographical classic titled “In the Matter of Color”).

Recent criminal attempts by the Trump-led MAGA-”Rapepublicans” to completely erase the Slavocratic African Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial America ought to make those of the grossly misguided view of the steely immutability or the ineradicability of Postcolonial and Post-Emancipation American Democracy think twice about such scandalously cavalier presumption. Anyway, for Professor Tribe, the one great trepidation here is that it is increasingly becoming obvious that the United States Supreme Court may, after all, no longer be what it has for most of the duration and the history of its institutional establishment and operation been routinely envisaged to be, namely, a Veritable Beehive of the Finest and the Most Brilliant and Respectable Legal Minds in the Country, much less to be ranked among the best of its kind the world over.

And as was all to be refreshingly expected, it was Associate Justice Kitanji Brown Jackson, the very first African American Woman and only the third of her race to be seated on the Court, who unimpeachably homed in on the fact that as the most unspeakability violated and wantonly exploited species of humanity in the United States of America and, to be certain, the entire global community at large, the crafting and the promulgation of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution marks the definitive legislation of the inviolable equality of all the residents and the inhabitants of the United States of America without exception, thereby effectively and authoritatively both contradicting and irredeemably crushing the characteristically nihilistic and self-negating and morally and philosophically regressive “Brain-Dead Reading” of the far-reaching implications of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868, by Senior Associate Justice Clarence Thomas who, at 78 years old, is also the oldest sitting Justice of the SCOTUS and only the second among his race to have been so appointed or named to the highest bench of the land.

It quaintly appears that Justice Thomas’ main and sole rationale for so blindly and staunchly siding with the Ultra-Right-Wing MAGA “Rapepublicans” inheres in a dubious and a patently morbid sense of “African American Civic Entitlement” of a kind that gratuitously seeks to discipline or punish the proverbial family dog, ironically, in a manner that is diametrically opposite of what such a measure really seeks to achieve, which is the implicit redemption of our long and far gone erstwhile chattel-enslaved Indigenous Continental African Ancestors.

In other words, for Associate Justice Thomas, invidiously and selectively precluding Non-Aryan Species of Humanity – that is, predominantly Negroid of Africoid – and purely on ideological grounds, elite Chinese and Russian oligarchs from a highly coveted American Citizenship, somehow, rectifies the temporally perennial and nightmarish denial of Birthright Citizenship to Indigenous Continental Africans. How unspeakably absurd!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]