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

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СКАЧАТЬ treaty land, their invocation of international law, and their ability to galvanize people from so many Indigenous nations. Like the Black Panther Party, AIM’s initial focus was the curbing of police brutality, but its activities soon encompassed a wide range of community-based programs, struggles to defend land rights, and the protection and promotion of traditional ways. In 1972 the American Indian Movement organized a cross-country caravan to highlight the “Trail of Broken Treaties” by taking a twenty-point platform focusing on land and treaty rights to Washington, DC.85 In 1973 it achieved international renown as a result of the federal government’s seventy-one-day siege of AIM members and supporters at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The following year, at the behest of Lakota elders, Russell Means and other AIM leaders organized the International Indian Treaty Council, which worked with peoples from North and South America to obtain recognition of Indigenous rights—most notably the right to self-determination—at the United Nations.86

      The influence of such formulations can be seen in the visions developed by other organizations in this period. “Affirm[ing] the right of self-definition and self-determination,” the Asian American Political Alliance at the University of California–Berkeley asserted that “to be truly liberated,” “all minorities must have complete control over the political, economical and educational institutions within their respective communities.”87 The Asian American Red Guard’s Political Program of April 1969 began, “We want freedom. We want the power to determine the destiny of our people, the Asian community,” and went on to address housing, education, healthcare, employment, police brutality, and criminal justice.88 Similarly, the Puerto Rican Young Lords’ thirteen-point Program and Platform, promulgated later in 1969, began with calls for self-determination for Puerto Ricans, all Latina/os, and all Third World peoples. It emphasized “community control of our institutions and land,” including “people’s control of police, health services, churches, schools, housing, transportation and welfare,” and education appropriate to the “culture of our people.”89 In 1970 the Chicano Brown Berets issued a “13 Point Political Program—To Unite All Our People under the Banner of Independence” that first addressed the return of “all land that was stolen from our people,” and then highlighted issues of criminal justice, education, employment, and housing.90

      As these excerpts illustrate, community empowerment was a consistent theme of these organizations, and their agendas reflected a conviction that fundamental social change was both necessary and attainable. Their platforms were not simply demands made to those with institutional or economic power; they were plans of action to be implemented by their members and generally included breakfast programs for children, free medical clinics, community-based liberation schools, independent news services, transportation for prison visits, support for workers’ struggles, and patrols to protect community residents against police brutality.91 Young Lords leaders Iris Morales and Denise Oliver-Velez reflect, “We woke up each day to serve the people . . . and at night we dreamed about the new society that we would create, convinced that the richest country on the globe had sufficient resources to make a better world.”92

      These groups represent only a handful of the hundreds of organizations that emerged in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s, but they are still considered iconic, perhaps because of their ability to galvanize the popular imagination. Providing a liberatory vision of what could be, each had a network of chapters dedicated to empowering people within their own communities as they struggled to survive on a daily basis. Simultaneously, these local formations participated in regional, national, and international coalitions that transcended the boundaries of race or ethnicity. Their analyses situated their communities’ problems and potential solutions within the global context of anti-colonial movements and evolving interpretations of collective rights under international law, particularly the right to self-determination. But the fact remains that, despite their commitment, these movements were not able to implement most of their goals, or to sustain the institutions they created. If contemporary struggles are to be more effective, there is much we need to learn from both the successes and failures of these movements.

      Retrenchment and Repression

      What happened to the energy and vision of the organizations and social movements struggling so hard for structural transformation during the “long sixties”? More than half a century later, how is it that overt acts of racialized violence still dominate the headlines,93 Americans have elected a president endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan,94 and structural racism remains largely undisturbed?95 These developments are not simply a reaction to the Obama years; instead, they reflect the retrenchment that followed the civil rights era much as, in the wake of the Civil War, the gains of Reconstruction were quickly eviscerated. By 1991, the late author and activist Maya Angelou was lamenting, “In these bloody days and frightful nights when an urban warrior can find no face more despicable than his own, no ammunition more deadly than self-hate and no target more deserving of his true aim than his brother, we must wonder how we came so late and lonely to this place.”96 The despair she described continues to permeate many communities and, because we cannot afford to keep “circling the same old rock,” as Nakota legal scholar and theologian Vine Deloria Jr. put it,97 we must confront this question head-on.

      Direct governmental repression is, no doubt, part of how we came to this place, a phenomenon that has not abated over the past several decades, regardless of who is president or which political party controls Congress.98 All of the movements of the 1960s were subjected to intensive surveillance, infiltration, and the use of disinformation to create splits within organizations and to discredit them in the public eye, most famously through the COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) operations of the FBI.99 Organizations perceived as the most “radical” faced barrages of criminal prosecutions that relied on false testimony and fabricated evidence to incarcerate their leadership and to divert their resources into protracted legal defense efforts.100 When these tactics failed to meet their stated goal of “neutralizing” threats to the status quo, leaders such as Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Illinois Black Panthers were simply assassinated.101 In other cases, as in the 1973 siege of American Indian Movement activists and supporters at Wounded Knee, armed force was intensively deployed and military counterinsurgency methods subsequently used to undermine support for AIM on the Pine Ridge Reservation.102

      Under these conditions it is not surprising that many of those who once identified as “warriors” would come to consider defending their communities and creating alternative institutions to be, at best, an exercise in futility. No one was held responsible for the violations of constitutional rights attending COINTELPRO or similar governmental operations, despite their being condemned as illegal and unconstitutional by a Senate oversight committee. Instead, many victims of these operations remain incarcerated today.103 For the most part, organizations that advocated self-determination for people of color under US jurisdiction have been erased from mainstream history or are portrayed as “gangs” of criminals and thugs.104 Numerous COINTELPRO tactics have since been legalized in the “war on terror”105 and advocates of “separatism” are now classified as extremists and potential terrorists not only by the FBI but also by liberal organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.106

      The evolution of broader governmental policies and programs also helps explain what has been described as political apathy. Responding to the mass movements that swept the country in the 1960s, the urban rebellions, and the recommendations of governmental commissions, the federal government instituted a wide range of programs intended to improve employment, education, the welfare system, and housing in poor communities.107 Despite evidence that these programs had positive effects and that criminal activity was not increasing, President Richard Nixon shifted his focus to an ever-intensifying “war on crime” soon after his 1968 election.108 As Christian Parenti summarizes, “Crime meant urban, urban meant Black, and the war on crime meant a bulwark built against the increasingly political and vocal racial ‘other’ by the predominantly white state.”109

      By the early 1970s, the war on crime had morphed into a “war on drugs,” whose disproportionate effect on Black communities is well documented СКАЧАТЬ