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

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СКАЧАТЬ that developed over time required the participation of “native” overseers, functionaries, or collaborators of some sort, a process facilitated by the creation and exploitation of distinctions among the colonized.48 Thus, while colonial administrations ultimately relied on the military power of their home states, internal control was often maintained by privileging one Indigenous people over others.49 One result is what anthropology professor Gwendolyn Mikell describes as the emergence of “static and intransigent” understandings of ethnicity.50 Observing “that African cultural groups have traditionally moved in pluralistic environments, and that peaceful and integrative interactions with others having different identities has been common in Africa until recent periods,” Mikell concludes that “what we now call African ‘ethnicity’ was very much the outcome of the nineteenth-century period of colonial conquest, when western metropolitan or settler groups used force to divide, conquer, and then politically subjugate the African indigenous populations.”51

      This phenomenon is but one facet of perhaps the most destructive dynamic of colonial relations. Because ideological justifications of European colonialism rested on the presumed superiority of Western civilization, the colonial project required the denigration and attempted eradication of the identity and knowledge base of the colonized. In the words of French Tunisian author Albert Memmi, the colonized was “removed from history,” stripped of a role in “every decision contributing to his destiny and that of the world, and all cultural and social responsibility.”52 This was achieved not only by brute force but also by what Kenyan scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls the “cultural bomb” that “annihilate[s] a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves,” thereby eventually “mak[ing] them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves.”53

      Today, classic colonialism is largely deemed a thing of the past. As a result of intense struggles for national liberation—waged “amid tears, fire, and blood,” to quote Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo54—most external colonies were recognized as independent states in the mid- to late twentieth century.55 Thus, as the international legal order began to acknowledge the right of colonized peoples to self-government, “the scramble for colonies that started at the end of the nineteenth century . . . ultimately produced colonial polities that could be turned over to successor states in a symmetrical process of counter-scramble.”56 Despite these changes, much of the colonial world order remained firmly in place. European rule had constructed political entities that possessed most of the attributes of a contemporary state—with the glaring exception of genuine sovereignty. These attributes included internationally recognized territorial boundaries, bureaucratic structures designed to provide relatively uniform governance throughout the territory, and internal political, legal, and educational institutions established by the colonizers. And it was these entities that were recognized as independent and purportedly postcolonial states.

      Insofar as the new countries were only recognized in accordance with colonially imposed boundaries, “national” identities were thrust upon peoples who had been “coercively amalgamated into unitary, foreign-ruled states, without any regard whatsoever for extant economic, demographic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and other social factors.”57 These states were then precluded from exercising sovereignty over their own wealth and natural resources by the Western powers’ insistence that concessionary rights acquired by foreign interests prior to independence be honored and that any nationalization of property required compensation in accordance with international legal standards that had been developed by and for the colonial powers.58 As Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah explained, they were now subjected to “neocolonialism,” a situation in which a purportedly independent state “has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty” but “in reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”59 “Decolonization” has thus resulted in both the internal colonization of subordinated peoples and the continuation of external colonialism in other forms.

      Internal Colonialism

      One can see from this very rudimentary description of classic colonialism that there are many similarities between the experiences of colonized peoples around the world and peoples of color in the United States. These parallels explain why scholars and activists have described racialized Others within the United States as internally colonized and why that characterization has a compelling resonance. There are, however, conceptual limitations to a model that relies extensively on analogies derived from political, economic, and cultural contexts that are structurally distinct from the situation at hand.

      In a seminal work published in 1975, sociologist Michael Hechter employed the Gramscian concept of internal colonialism to explain the disparities attending economic development within the British state. For Hechter, internal colonization results from a “spatially uneven wave of modernization” that produces an “unequal distribution of resources and power” between “relatively advanced and less advanced groups.”60 The dominant group uses its power to monopolize and institutionalize its privilege, creating a system of social stratification—what he terms “a cultural division of labor”—that reinforces ethnic identification.61 As with classic relations between metropolitan centers and their colonies, power resides in the core and is “characterized by a diversified industrial structure,” while “the pattern of development in the periphery is dependent, and complementary to that in the core.”62

      Hechter illustrates how a framework that acknowledges colonial exploitation can explain, in structural terms, the illusory nature of the presumption that internal “minorities” will inevitably, if gradually, be fully incorporated into a unified state. This latter perspective, the diffusion model, predicts that economic disparities will decrease and cultural differences become less significant over time. In this respect it is much like the models of assimilation or multicultural pluralism prevalent in the United States today. The internal colonial model, on the other hand, predicts that economic inequities will persist or increase, “peripheral culture” will be more strongly asserted in reaction to “domination by the core,” and “political cleavages will largely reflect significant cultural differences between groups.”63 These are, of course, developments we have seen within the United States.

      The models’ divergent predictions result from their differing analyses of structural and institutional dynamics, and they lead us toward distinct—indeed incompatible—remedial options. Hechter’s analysis suggests that people of color in the United States might appropriately be characterized as internally colonized and that the disparities between privileged and subordinated groups will not be eliminated until the underlying institutions and political relations have been decolonized. Nonetheless, this is a model derived very directly from, and reliant upon, the conceptual framework of external colonialism. Its geographically oriented core/periphery distinction is of limited applicability in settler societies that, as historian Norbert Finzsch notes, “have no periphery and no core, since the capital-owning elites in the cities and the social actors on the frontier form one complex interactive community.”64 Further, its framing of colonization primarily in terms of economic exploitation and underdevelopment reflects a very Western, linear notion of progress that disregards the fact that contemporary goals of “development” and “modernization” are, themselves, colonial impositions.

      Internal colonization is a construct critical to understanding contemporary struggles for self-determination within “postcolonial” states whose boundaries now encompass multiple preexisting nations. However, to the extent that internal colonialism is understood as a derivative of external colonialism—as it was by many US activists of the 1960s—it is of limited utility in explaining or remediating settler colonial exploitation. In settler societies, there is no geographically distinct metropolitan “mother country” or “core” to which the colonizers may retreat, and the full incorporation of subordinated peoples would simply consummate their colonization.65 Recognizing internal colonialism gives us a starting point for understanding that racial subordination in the United States is deeply, structurally СКАЧАТЬ