Critical liberalism grows out of a theory of obligation that is rooted in the structural origins of groups rather than in the cultural difference of groups. The normative standing of indigenous peoples, other ethnic minorities, African Americans, women, immigrants, and so on, depends not on who they are, or on the extent to which they command human attachment, but on the historical record of exclusion and selective inclusion through which they have been constituted. The responsibility of states lies in the fact that states themselves have forged social groups, and the political identities they anchor, by using such markers as cultural practices, phenotypical traits, biological sex, sexuality, property-ownership, and wealth to organize access to power and delimit the boundaries of citizenship.