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Our second-class treatment is not just unfair; it is un-American. More than 3.5 million Americans are denied the right to vote in presidential elections, because they live in one of five U.S. territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and my home, the U.S. Virgin Islands. That number is equivalent to the population of the five smallest states combined. More than 98 percent of these territorial residents are racial or ethnic minorities like me—a fact that cannot be a mere coincidence as our continuing disenfranchisement extends well past the century mark.

Our nation’s Founders never intended our country to work this way. Many of them, including Alexander Hamilton, who spent his formative years in my home of St. Croix, risked their lives to reject colonialism. They had experienced taxation without representation, and they wanted no part of it. They understood that governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

America has from its inception included U.S. territories, and the people who lived in those territories knew that the Constitution protected their rights. Those same people also believed in the promise of full political participation through eventual statehood.

That promise was broken after the United States began acquiring island territories in 1898. Bending to political pressure from President William McKinley and others who supported American imperial expansion overseas, the Supreme Court turned its back on our country’s founding ideals. In a series of highly fractured and controversial decisions known collectively as the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court invented an unprecedented new category of “unincorporated” territories, which were not on a path to statehood and whose residents could be denied even basic constitutional rights. Which territories the Court determined were “unincorporated” turned largely on the justices’ view of the people who lived there—people they labeled “half-civilized,” “savage,” “alien races,” and “ignorant and lawless.”