Well, this is awkward. This month, five people from American Samoa—the only place in the world where babies born on US soil are denied US citizenship—argued in federal court that the government’s refusal to grant them birthright citizenship violates the Constitution. On the other side of the case is the Obama administration, which cited century-old Supreme Court decisions that spoke of “savage,” “uncivilized,” and “alien races”—and many legal scholars now see as outright racist—to justify continuing to deny citizenship to these US nationals.