Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law. Natsu Taylor Saito

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СКАЧАТЬ subjugation and racial domination began much earlier and have lasted much longer in North America than in Asia and Africa, the continents usually thought of as colonial prototypes.

      —Bob Blauner

      Indigenous peoples have consistently recognized the impact of colonization on their communities, and in recent decades a strong body of scholarly analysis has emerged to address its ongoing manifestations.1 The situation of other peoples of color within the United States, however, is rarely discussed, much less theorized, in terms of colonialism.2 This was not always true. As noted in chapter 1, during the global “decolonization era” of the 1960s, powerful movements emerged in African American, American Indian, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian American communities that identified themselves, to some degree or another, as internally colonized peoples, and it was not uncommon for scholars of color to also articulate this perspective.3 Since then, however, internal colonialism has come to be regarded as—at best—an empowering analogy rather than a framework for meaningful structural analysis, at least with respect to non-Indigenous peoples of color.4 The demise of the approach has been attributed to the systematic and violent repression of organizations and movements that framed their goals in terms of national liberation, as well as the (perhaps related) failure of mainstream social science to recognize it as a legitimate inquiry.5 These developments, however, tell us only that the depiction of “racial minorities” as colonized peoples is perceived as a threat to the status quo; they do not address the underlying question of the extent to which ongoing colonization accounts for structural racism in the United States today.

      This was the question that led me to write this book. Did the construct of internal colonialism largely disappear from the discourse on race simply because of social and political repression or was the theory itself structurally flawed? Upon closer examination, I realized that most of the analyses invoking internal colonialism with respect to non-Indigenous peoples in the American context employ the lens of external or “classic” colonialism, as exemplified by European expansion into Africa and Asia. From this perspective, many parallels emerge between the histories and conditions of colonized peoples in Africa and Asia and people of color in the United States. But there are also many aspects of American racial hierarchy and exploitation that are not easy to account for within this paradigm. Viewing the United States as a different kind of colonial power, however, can fill in many of the narrative gaps that exist in each of these approaches.

      While the United States has maintained external colonies, it is first and foremost a settler state.6 Settler colonialism is structurally distinct from classic external colonialism and, thus, it is not surprising that a model based upon external colonization has limited utility when applied to a settler state. Analyzing the histories of American Indians, African Americans, and other peoples of color in the United States through the lens of settler colonial theory can explain a great deal about our contemporary racial realities. In particular, we can see how structures of racial subordination have been employed strategically to consolidate the settler state and to enhance the wealth and power of the settler class. Chapters 4 through 8 explore those strategies in more detail. Establishing a framework for those explorations, this chapter provides an overview of the concept of colonialism and describes briefly what is meant by external or “classic” colonialism, internal colonialism, and settler colonialism. It concludes by acknowledging potential benefits and pitfalls of “triangulating” settler colonial analyses by distinguishing non-Indigenous peoples of color from the settler class.

      Colonialism: An Overview

      Colonialism has taken many forms and is described in numerous ways. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a colony as “a settlement in a new country; a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the connexion with the parent state is kept up.”7 To colonize is simply to establish such a colony. The mainstream narrative of the early history of British colonies in North America most often invokes this very benign understanding of colonialism. However, as English professor Ania Loomba observes, it is a framing that “evacuates the word ‘colonialism’ of any implication of an encounter between peoples, or of conquest and domination.”8

      Loomba emphasizes the need to recognize that there were, in fact, peoples occupying virtually all colonized territories. “The process of ‘forming a community’ in the new land necessarily meant unforming or re-forming the communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, enslavement and rebellions.”9 This dimension is incorporated into professor Jürgen Osterhammel’s theoretical overview of colonialism, which defines colonization as “a process of territorial acquisition,” a colony as “a particular type of sociopolitical organization,” and colonialism as “a system of domination.”10 Colonialism, Osterhammel notes, is a relationship “in which an entire society is robbed of its historical line of development, externally manipulated and transformed according to the needs and interests of the colonial rulers.”11 Or, as Stokely Carmichael put it, “Colonization is not just the economic raping of someone” but the “destroying [of] the person’s culture, his language, his history, his identification, his total humanity.”12 This is why colonization is inherently genocidal, for genocide, by definition, involves the intended destruction, “in whole or in part, [of] a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”13

      The exploitation of land, labor, and natural resources by people or entities not indigenous to the territory is a common feature of all forms of colonialism, as is the imposition of economic, political, and social institutions intended to facilitate such exploitation. As a general rule, the European colonial domination of the past several centuries was exercised by states over lands and peoples not recognized by the colonial powers as sovereign.14 State sovereignty is a peculiarly circular construct, dependent on the recognition of one state by other states, and a commitment by the latter to respect the former’s territorial integrity and powers of government.15

      A state, as summarized by cultural geographer Bernard Nietschmann, is “a centralized political system within international legal boundaries recognized by other states,” which “uses a civilian-military bureaucracy to establish one government and to enforce one set of institutions and laws.”16 A “nation,” on the other hand, may be understood as the “geographically bounded territory of a common people as well as . . . the people themselves,” where they identify as “a people” based not only on common ancestry but also common culture, history, worldview, and social institutions.17

      Until recently, state recognition has been a dimension of international law controlled by colonizing powers and dependent on their assessment of the level of “civilization” possessed by those wishing to be so recognized.18 This reflects another important dimension of colonial relationships—the assertion that the colonizing power and its representatives are inherently more civilized than the peoples being colonized.19 In fact, the hallmark of European colonial expansion, later emulated by the United States and Japan, among others, has been its self-described “civilizing mission.” Legal scholar Antony Anghie explains this as “the grand project that has justified colonialism as a means of redeeming the backward, aberrant, violent, oppressed, undeveloped people of the non-European world by incorporating them into the universal civilization of Europe.”20 Such redemption, in turn, has been the rationale for imposing extensive administrative structures intended to eradicate the cultures, languages, religions, and histories, as well as the social, economic, legal, and political structures and institutions of the colonized.

      Osterhammel identifies three salient characteristics of colonialism. The first is that it goes beyond domination or exploitation to sunder societies from their “historical line of development,” transforming them “according to the needs and interests of the colonial rulers.”21 A second characteristic is its emphasis on the differences, real or perceived, between the colonizers and СКАЧАТЬ