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

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СКАЧАТЬ effectively dislodge structural racism. Yet we continue to return to the courts, the legislatures, and “our” political leaders in these terms, seeming, collectively, at a loss for meaningful alternatives.

      The 2008 election of Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, generated a wide range of public reaction.1 It gave those contesting racialized subordination renewed hope for meaningful structural change. Those generally content with the status quo hailed it as evidence that the United States was already a “postracial” society.2 And for those clinging to the perceived benefits of White supremacy, it signaled the crumbling of their world. The visuals shifted during the Obama era, but ultimately very little changed with respect to racial disparities in the distribution of power and wealth.

      Since the beginning of 2017, President Donald Trump’s administration has illustrated how quickly and easily the perceived gains of subordinated groups can be reversed by executive action. Within just a few weeks of taking office he expedited approval of oil pipelines contested by Indigenous peoples, intensified immigration enforcement and approved a travel ban targeting persons from predominantly Muslim countries, undercut enforcement of healthcare legislation, and appointed an attorney general who—despite the mass incarceration crisis—ordered federal prosecutors to seek the toughest charges and harshest sentences possible, even for persons accused of nonviolent drug offenses.3 Of equal significance, Trump’s call to “make America great again,” with its thinly veiled racial overtones, clearly resonates with a large sector of the population. Trump is not “being divisive” so much as exposing some of the deepest schisms that permeate this society.4 The vision of America as a White supremacist, patriarchal, settler society is alive and well today. Ignoring this reality is no longer an option.

      We all have visions of better worlds, ones we’d like for ourselves, or to bequeath to our children and their children. To build these futures, we need to understand what’s wrong with where we are, and how it got to be wrong. Tracing the problem to its source allows us to conceive structural, rather than superficial, solutions. Michel Foucault articulated this in terms of “historical genealogy,”5 but it doesn’t take a French philosopher to make this point. Analogizing political struggle to a journey across the Northern Plains, Lakota elder Mathew King observed that it is necessary to look back over your shoulder periodically because “to know how to get to where you want to go, you have to first know where you are, and to know where you are, you always have to know where you’ve been.”6

      This process requires conceptual frameworks unconstrained by the “consensus reality” reflected in the master narrative of American history, for we know it to be a narrative that does not accurately reflect the realities of life for most peoples of color or, indeed, most White people in this country.7 Tracing our histories back to locate the origins of racialized subordination leads us inevitably to the colonization of this continent by Euroamerican settlers, to their determined attempts to eliminate the Indigenous peoples of this land, and to the various strategies the settlers have employed—and continue to use—to profit from occupied lands.2 That genealogy, and what it can tell us about deconstructing racial privilege and subjugation, is the focus of this book.

      I have found that discussing race as a function of colonialism meets with considerable resistance from those who contest the status quo as well as those who support it, from non-Indigenous people of color and from those who identify as White. This may be because most struggles for racial justice focus almost exclusively on the enforcement of rights and the expansion of opportunities within extant state structures. For those of us engaged in such efforts, the suggestion that we might be trying to obtain “our fair share” of lands and opportunities built on the shifting sands of genocide and continuing colonial occupation is virtually unthinkable. As a result, discussions of Indigenous sovereignty are generally cabined in their own discursive sphere while broader discussions of racism tend to include American Indians as, at best, simply another “minority” in the requisite list of racial “food groups.”8

      The relationship between Indigenous rights and the subordination of other people of color is only occasionally confronted. It is the elephant in the room (or, perhaps, still waiting in the hall), a subject few non-Indigenous people are willing to address except in the past tense.9 Yet if racialized power and privilege in the United States today are rooted in the historic and ongoing colonization of Native North America, dismantling the colonial relationships that still undergird the state is in the interest of not only Indigenous nations and peoples but all subordinated peoples of color and, quite possibly, a large majority of those who identify as White Americans.

      In exploring the genealogy of race and racism in the United States from this perspective, the conceptual framework of settler colonial theory provides a good starting point. Briefly put, it assesses the impact of colonizers who did not just intend to exploit the land, labor, and resources of other peoples and then go home, but who came to stay. Over the past several centuries, a largely Angloamerican settler class has exercised a presumed prerogative to appropriate Indigenous lands and resources; to establish a state over which it wields total control; and to decide who could, could not, and had to live within its claimed territorial boundaries.10 To date, most settler colonial analysis has focused—quite appropriately—on settler-Indigenous relations; the structural implications for other peoples of color in the US context have been explored only minimally.11 There is, however, much to be learned by viewing the relationship of voluntary and involuntary migrants of color to both Indigenous peoples and Euroamerican settlers in terms of the ongoing colonization of this continent.

      Most contemporary writing on race in America presumes that implementing the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection is the best—or perhaps only—way of remediating racialized domination and subordination. However, an equal protection framework presumes that we start from a level playing field, and addresses the persistence of racial disparities in terms of explicit or implicit personal bias and/or the lingering effects of historic dispossession or exploitation. This means that potential remedies are, for the most part, limited to some variant of sensitivity training, laws and regulations prohibiting intentional discrimination, and compensation for a narrow range of past wrongs. Collectively, we have followed this path for well over a half century only to see that any gains we make can readily be stripped away by those determined to maintain the political, economic, and racial status quo. By framing our struggles in terms of the state’s responsibility to implement its promises of procedural fairness and nondiscrimination, we have already foreclosed the possibility of fundamental structural change arising from grassroots movements for self-determination.

      This book explores the possibility that if racial hierarchy is rooted in, and was essential to, the establishment of the United States as a settler colonial state and those foundational colonial relationships of power and privilege persist, then racism can be meaningfully eliminated only in conjunction with decolonization. Deconstructing the narratives we have come to accept and developing more accurate understandings are messy processes, particularly since there is considerably more overlap in the construction and experiences of various “races” than we have been led to believe. However, much light can be shed on contemporary racial dynamics if we are willing to come to grips with the foundational and continuing colonization of Indigenous lands and peoples, the functions of enslaved African labor in the settlers’ early efforts to consolidate and profit from occupied lands, the ways in which the settler class maintained its hegemony in the wake of the abolition of chattel slavery, and the strategies subsequently utilized to recruit, exploit, and maintain a preferably disposable labor force consisting largely of migrants of color.

      To some extent all peoples of color within the United States have been subjected to what philosopher Georgio Agamben calls “inclusive exclusion,”12 the transformation of those who have been coercively included in American society into excluded and subjugated Others. Those who struggle for racial justice often find it necessary to advocate for, or challenge, administrative actions, laws, and judicial decisions. However, relying solely on such measures cedes power to the state. Rather than assuming that inequities can be remediated only by governmental action, we can also support local initiatives СКАЧАТЬ