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

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СКАЧАТЬ for without these, our ability to envision and construct alternative futures will be hopelessly constrained.

      2

      Unsettling Narratives

      The silent spaces of history raise the most profound questions.

      —Howard Berman

      Narratives of origin, identity, and purpose tell us who we are, where we have come from and where we are going, what we should fear, what we should want and how we should try to attain it. These understandings structure social relations, identifying who belongs in any given grouping, each person’s status with respect to others, and how decisions for the collective will be made and enforced.1 Our stories can convince us that the status quo is right, natural, and inevitable, or they can open up a world of transformative possibilities.

      Nigerian author Ben Okri observes, “One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted—knowingly or unknowingly—in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.”2 The stories that shape our lives are embedded in the broader cultural and historical narratives “planted in us” by our families and communities, by our interactions with friends and strangers, by what we see—or do not see—in the media, and by what we are taught—or not taught—in school. In other words, they are refracted through, if not entirely defined by, the dominant social narrative.

      Social narratives situate both individual stories and those of entire peoples within cultural paradigms or worldviews, and the master narrative of how the United States came into being and what it now represents is no exception. It is a story firmly situated within a Eurosupremacist paradigm and told from the perspective of the early settler colonists and those who identify as their successors. Not surprisingly, this narrative extols the colonial mission, reinforces the status quo, and promises ever-expanding wealth and well-being. It is also a story that reinforces the racial domination and subordination that are deeply rooted in the psyches of all who live in this society. To effect meaningful change, we will need to live different stories—stories that more accurately represent the origins of the country and the varied experiences of its peoples, stories that recognize the emancipatory potential of multiple and overlapping identities, perspectives, and worldviews.

      This book tells a story about racialization—the construction of “races” and the attribution of particular characteristics to them—that diverges from the dominant narrative by focusing on how race and racial inequities have been used, quite strategically, to generate power and wealth for the state and to consolidate control of that power and wealth in the hands of the settler class. Laying the foundation for this alternative perspective that I believe can help us change our lives, this chapter presents an overview of the master narrative—the “consensus reality” we confront on a daily basis—and interrogates some of its silent spaces.

      The Master(’s) Narrative

      The slogan “Make America Great Again” was coined by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 presidential campaign and revived by Donald Trump in 2016.3 Without mentioning race, it evokes an era in which White privilege was the presumptive domestic norm and the United States exercised global hegemony in the name of Western civilization. It is a construction squarely rooted in the dominant—or master—narrative of American history and identity. It has many dimensions, but most significantly, for our purposes, it is a story about progress and about property and, because of the ways those constructs are framed, it is inevitably also a story about race and gender.

      A Story of Progress

      The versions of US history most commonly presented in education and entertainment are explicitly Eurocentric, often beginning with a reference to Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas before moving quickly past the Pilgrims and Puritans to the “pioneers” who “settled” the West.4 Like the origin stories of other settler states, it begins with the arrival of the colonizers, rendering invisible the societies being displaced and replaced, or recasting them as part of the wilderness transformed by the settlers’ “civilizing mission.”5 It is a triumphal tale of Europeans who “braved the wilderness”—and its “roaming savages”—to transform “wastelands” into agricultural bounty. Their sacrifices enabled the development of the cash crops and mineral resources that fueled the industrial revolution in the United States and its eventual rise to global economic dominance.6 As summarized by President Trump in his 2018 commencement address at the Naval Academy, “our ancestors trounced an empire, tamed a continent, and triumphed over the worst evils in history.”7

      The founders’ desire for democratic governance and religious freedom is emphasized in this story, the country’s population growth and territorial expansion attributed to their righteousness. The early Angloamerican colonists’ assertion of “a pre-emptive right to the continent,” embodied in colonial charters that “designated the Pacific Ocean . . . as the western boundary of the several colonies,” and their presumption of sovereignty over territory they had never seen8 provide the ideological foundation for their subsequent appropriation—and continuing occupation—of the continent.9 We are presented with color-coded maps that take us from sea to shining sea, from the original thirteen colonies, through the Louisiana Purchase and the annexation of northern Mexico, to the Pacific coast.

      This was all made possible, we are told, by the European immigrants whose experiences set the stage for the narrative’s embrace of an assimilative pluralism. Until recently, at least, the story emphasized the United States as a “nation of immigrants.”10 This characterization underscores the desirability of being an American—why else would so many people go to such lengths to come here?—and suggests that American society has always been open to people of diverse backgrounds. It is a framing that conveniently omits the selectivity with which voluntary immigrants have been admitted and elides the histories of both those who were here all along and those who were forced to migrate.

      This is a narrative of constant and inevitable progress that asserts its universality and overwrites the stories of all those it encounters. Its world is anthropocentric and hierarchically structured, with humans second only to a presumptively male God who instructs them to exercise “dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”11 For those who reject the religious framing, the hierarchy nevertheless remains, with civilization or science replacing God at the pinnacle. Once this paradigm is accepted, it is equally logical to envision and construct hierarchical relations among humans, with some closer to God—or scientific “truth”—and others closer to nature.

      Given this framing, it is not surprising that settler societies would be organized in a patriarchal and hierarchical manner. Likewise, as everyone is assigned a particular place in this order, it is not surprising that both individual and social identities tend to be understood as singular and exclusive rather than multiple, overlapping, or interpenetrating. “Rationality,” particularly in the form of science and technology, provides the path to conquering nature, and therefore is cast as the basis of civilization. History is the record of linear human “progress,” and Western civilization represents the highest stage of human development.12

      The American master narrative takes this a step further, positing the United States as the culmination of Western civilization, the product of a genealogy that, in anthropologist Eric Wolf’s words, takes us from ancient Greece and Rome to Christian Europe, from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to political democracy and the industrial revolution.13 “Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”14 In this telling, historic injustices are inadvertent rather than constitutive, the growing pains СКАЧАТЬ