Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law

Why Structural Racism Persists

Natsu Taylor Saito

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

New York
1

Racial Realities

“Racial Realism” . . . enables us to avoid despair, and frees us to

imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring fulfill-
ment and even triumph.
—Derrick Bell

Racial justice has been both elusive and contested throughout the history of
the United States. In the wake of World War II, as decolonization movements
swept across Africa and Asia, the civil rights movement gained momentum
and powerful grassroots organizations emerged advocating community con-
trol and self-determination. It was a period of tremendous hope and energy,
but over the next several decades, the formal recognition of racial equality
achieved during the 1960s had little discernible impact on the material condi-
tions of life confronted by most people of color in the United States.1 This led
the late law professor Derrick A. Bell Jr. to observe that “even those hercu-
lean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks
of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns
adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.”2 In the early twenty-first cen-
tury we have seen a resurgence of popular actions to combat racism and to
promote many other forms of social justice. Will these mobilizations develop
into movements that bring about fundamental, structural change or will they,
too, soon “slide into irrelevance”?
According to Bell, only by acknowledging the persistence and adaptability of
racism—an approach he termed racial realism—will we be able envision strate-
gies capable of bringing about meaningful structural change and perhaps even
liberation.3 This book is about imagining and implementing such strategies.
As a precursor to doing so, I believe we need to acknowledge that, despite the
elimination of legally mandated apartheid, racial disparities have not changed
significantly over the past fifty years. At the same time, we will need to recapture
the energy of movements with liberatory visions, mindful of the ways in which
struggles for racial justice have been both repressed and diverted throughout US
history. These themes are explored in this chapter, which lays the groundwork for
reframing the narrative of race in America—the specific histories and lived reali-
ties of communities of color—to incorporate the functions served by racialization.

9
10 | Racial Realities

Persistent Disparities
Moving toward strategies with liberatory potential requires us to acknowl-
edge our current racial realities. In my experience it is rare to have a public
discussion about race in which someone doesn’t say, “But don’t you think
things are getting better?” Thanks to the displays of White supremacist
sentiment attending Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, the ques-
tion gets asked less often these days. Nonetheless, there is a deep-seated
presumption that despite occasional setbacks, the United States is moving,
inexorably, toward racial equality.4 This makes it difficult for many Ameri-
cans to acknowledge the racial disparities that persist in all indices of social
well-being, much less to recognize these as the result of well-entrenched
structural dynamics.5
Social and economic relations have changed over the past half century, but
the statistics tell us that overall, in both absolute and relative terms, things
have not “gotten better” for people of color in the United States. Since the
1970s, community-based programs focusing on health, education, and eco-
nomic self-sufficiency have been replaced by increasingly restrictive govern-
mental programs whose funding tends to shrink with each budget cycle.6 In
what is still one of the richest countries in the world,7 the United Nations spe-
cial rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights found in 2017 that forty
million Americans (almost 13 percent of the population) lived in poverty, and
almost half of them reported family incomes of less than one-half the poverty
threshold.8 The gap between rich and poor is widening, and by a number of
measures, race-based inequities are also increasing.9
Despite laws prohibiting racial discrimination and a growing number of
elected officials of color—even a Black president—nothing approaching so-
cioeconomic parity has been achieved. More than one-quarter of all Black,
Latina/o, and American Indian or Alaska Native residents continue to live
below the poverty line, compared to about one-tenth of White residents.10
In 2010 the Census Bureau estimated the median household income of Black
heads-of-household to be less than 60 percent of their White counterparts,
a percentage that had not changed significantly since 1972.11 Moreover, a
majority of African Americans born to middle-income families in the late
1960s have been “downwardly mobile” since the civil rights era.12 Dispari-
ties in wealth—as distinct from income—are even more glaring. According
to the Pew Research Center, the median wealth of White households in 2013
was thirteen times that of Black households and ten times that of Hispanic
households.13 Similar disparities are reflected in healthcare,14 housing,15 edu-
cation,16 and employment.17
 Racial Realities | 11

In all communities of color, the effects of poverty and unemployment are

reflected in and compounded by rapidly rising and disparate rates of arrest
and incarceration. Since 1972, the American prison population has grown
sixfold to over 2.2 million people, giving the United States the dubious dis-
tinction of having the world’s largest prison population and highest rate of
incarceration.18 In addition, more than twice that many people are on proba-
tion or parole.19 Over 60 percent of the US prison population is now com-
prised of racial or ethnic minorities; almost 40 percent is African American.20
Communities of color have diminished political power due to the disenfran-
chisement of those with felony convictions and, more fundamentally, they are
being stripped of some of their most vital human and economic resources.21
The National Bureau of Economic Research noted in a 2014 study that rising
incarceration and unemployment rates “have left most black men in a posi-
tion relative to white men that is really no better than the position they oc-
cupied only a few years after the Civil Rights Act of [1964].”22
Not surprisingly, settler colonial occupation impacts Indigenous com-
munities with particular intensity. About one-third of those identifying only
as American Indian or Native Alaskan live on reservation or “tribal” lands,
where poverty rates average 36 percent.23 At the end of the 1990s, “the average
on-reservation [American] Indian citizen still had per capita income of less
than $8,000, compared to more than $21,500 for the average US resident,”
making American Indians “the economically poorest identifiable group in
America.”24 There is no evidence that economic conditions have improved
since then. Shannon County, South Dakota, is 93 percent American Indian,
and between 2009 and 2013, over half its population lived below the poverty
line.25 At least fifteen federally recognized tribes have unemployment rates
above 80 percent,26 and even in urban areas such as Rapid City, South Da-
kota, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, about 50 percent of American Indians live
in poverty.27
In concrete terms, this means that Indigenous peoples in the United States
continue to live with hunger and preventable illness, in overcrowded and
substandard housing, with life expectancies decades shorter than the na-
tional average.28 These harsh realities are compounded by a systemic disre-
gard for criminal assaults on Indigenous people and the transgenerational
trauma resulting from the federally imposed boarding school system,29 leav-
ing the most vulnerable members of the community chronically exposed to
violence. According to a 2014 study commissioned by the US Department
of Justice (DOJ), American Indian and Alaska Native children experience
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) “at the same rate as veterans returning
from Iraq and Afghanistan and triple the rate of the general population.”30
12 | Racial Realities

Not coincidentally, the suicide rate among Indigenous youth in the United
States is more than three times the national average; in some communities it
is almost twenty times as high.31
All of these disparities are likely to intensify, for this is an era in which
those who profit from poverty and disenfranchisement—as well as those who
overtly advocate White supremacy—have been empowered. It is quite clear
that President Trump will never acknowledge the harm done to people of
color by structural racism.32 Indigenous sovereignty is under direct attack by
a man whose business interests have long clashed with Native gaming rights.33
His administration is revoking fair pay and workplace safety requirements;
rolling back regulation of the financial services industry; reducing funding
for healthcare, education, and basic social welfare; and promoting policies
that will result in higher incarceration rates for people of color.34 The Justice
Department has prioritized harsh sentencing and dramatically expanded im-
migration detention as well as deportation.35 Black and Central American
immigrants are particularly harshly affected by intensified immigration poli-
cies.36 Islamophobia is on the rise as Muslims are targeted by programs pur-
porting to counter “violent extremism” and, more generally, activists of color
are being depicted by federal law enforcement agencies as “identity extremist”
threats to the national security.37
Simultaneously, it is becoming more difficult to address the racially dispa-
rate impacts of such policies directly. The Justice Department is not enforcing
consent decrees arising from egregious abuses of police powers, and is calling
for an end to affirmation action in education.38 Ethnic studies programs and
other sources of information about the histories of communities of color are
being eliminated, making it more difficult to understand that many social
measures now described as “welfare” or “racial preferences” were instituted
to redress long histories of institutionalized racial exclusion.39 Poverty, crime,
healthcare, education, and migration are portrayed as unrelated phenomena,
and scrubbed of their racialized dimensions. As a result, the structural dy-
namics of systemic disparities are rarely acknowledged, much less addressed
by those with access to institutional resources.

Activism Rekindled
The good news is that we see renewed political engagement across a wide
spectrum of the population, and the neoliberals seem to have abandoned
their claims to have brought us to the “end of history.”40 Since the dawn of the
twenty-first century, millions of Americans have taken to the streets, advo-
cating for social justice. Hundreds of thousands joined the anti-war protests
 Racial Realities | 13

that swept the globe in 2003, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq.41
In the spring of 2006, some five million people participated in the immi-
grant rights marches taking place in hundreds of US cities.42 Inspired by the
Arab Spring of 2011, the Occupy Movement motivated tens of thousands of
(mostly) young people to contest economic inequality.43
Despite widespread insistence that the United States was a “postracial”
society during the presidency of Barack Obama, protests over the killing of
Black men by the police dramatically shifted popular discourse about the per-
sistence of racism. In 2014 Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old
Black man, was shot by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and
left to die in the street, just a few blocks from his home.44 Although such
killings are not uncommon, Brown’s death and the state’s failure to indict
the officer sparked weeks of large demonstrations and increasingly milita-
rized governmental responses.45 Under the banner of “Black Lives Matter,”
grassroots protests swept the country, “propelled by high-profile deaths of
unarmed African-Americans at the hands of police in Cleveland, New York
and Baltimore” and a consistent failure to hold these officers accountable.46
In 2015 and 2016, tens of thousands of protesters again took to the streets in
the wake of the police killings of Black men in Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and
St. Paul, and national demonstrations continue as men, women, and children
of color are killed by law enforcement officials.47
Simultaneously, in late 2016 over ten thousand people—including three
thousand veterans—travelled across the country to join the water protectors
encamped on or near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota,
determined to prevent the completion of a 1,200-mile oil pipeline that en-
dangers Indigenous lands and sacred sites and threatens significant ecologi-
cal damage.48 Those joining the camps—Indigenous people from hundreds
of nations throughout the Americas, environmentalists, and activists from a
diverse range of groups, including the Black Lives Matter movement—were
supported by demonstrations in scores of cities across the United States.49
In 2017 and 2018 Americans took their political opinions to the streets in
numbers we had not seen since the 1960s. President Trump’s inauguration
was met by a massive Women’s March50 and “J20” protest,51 shortly followed
by mobilizations across the country contesting his anti-Muslim travel ban
and intensified immigration restrictions, raids, and deportations.52 In 2018,
tens of thousands protested the Trump administration’s policy of separating
migrant families at the US border.53 We saw marches for “science” advocating
evidence-based governmental policies, and the contestation of Confederate
monuments in many locations.54 While White supremacists were also em-
boldened, they were less inclined to take to the streets, perhaps because after
14 | Racial Realities

their “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—where a counterpro-

tester was killed—they found themselves substantially outnumbered.55
The willingness of so many individuals to engage in public protest—largely,
although not exclusively, to support the rights and well-being of marginal-
ized people—has had tangible effects. Many of the president’s immigration
proposals were delayed if not derailed. Several iterations of the Muslim ban
were rejected, attempts to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arriv-
als (DACA) program were enjoined, and the DOJ had to reverse course on its
policy of separating migrant children from their parents.56 While these were
minimal gains, one expects that in the absence of highly visible protests and
constant scrutiny, considerably less humane immigration practices and poli-
cies would have long since been implemented.
Although the Ferguson grand jury failed to indict the officer who shot
Michael Brown,57 the Justice Department was compelled to document the
routine violations of the Constitution and federal law by the Ferguson police,
illustrating how the city’s “law enforcement practices are shaped by [its] focus
on revenue rather than public safety needs” and confirming that “African
Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s
law enforcement system.”58 In the wake of widespread protests over Freddie
Gray’s killing by the Baltimore police in 2015, the DOJ issued another scathing
report acknowledging pervasive racial discrimination in police practices that
routinely involved unconstitutional stops, searches, arrest, and wanton use
of unreasonable force.59 Such reports do not, of course, resolve the abuses of
state power at issue, but they identify structural mechanisms that perpetuate
racial injustice and create opportunities for us to move beyond the dominant
narrative’s insistence that racism is an individualized rather than systemic
phenomenon.
In 2016, concerted resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline resulted in ex-
ecutive intervention that, in essence, overruled a federal court’s decision to
allow construction to continue while the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s claims
were being litigated.60 Going further, the DOJ, the Army, and the Interior De-
partment jointly acknowledged “the need for a serious discussion on whether
there should be nationwide reform with respect to considering tribes’ views
on these types of infrastructure projects” and proposed formal consultations
on the adequacy of the existing statutory framework for “the protection of
tribal lands, resources, and treaty rights.”61 The federal government is never
going to dismantle the colonial paradigm upon which the state relies for its
existence as well as its wealth and power, but the resistance of Indigenous
peoples and their allies forced it to acknowledge the extent to which colonial
power undergirds the status quo.
 Racial Realities | 15

In these actions we have seen a willingness to directly confront state and

corporate power and a refusal to accommodate policies and practices that
relentlessly destroy lives and communities, sacred sites, traditional lands,
and natural resources. The movements being led by Indigenous and African
American youth, in particular, are rooted in and carry forward long traditions
of resistance to invasion, occupation, enslavement, apartheid, and racial sub-
jugation in US history, and they reflect a commitment to profound structural
change.
Thus, the pipeline protests have not only been about stopping environmen-
tally and culturally devastating construction projects. They are very concrete
expressions of a fundamental responsibility to protect the land and the life
it supports, unconstrained by colonial law or power. According to Nataanii
Means, a young Indigenous leader, “We are making this stand for water. For
your future’s right to clean water, for our futures’ right, for all the winged,
four-legged, water beings, things that crawl and cannot speak for themselves’
right to clean water.”62 The water protectors have been clear that they are con-
testing not simply a pipeline but also any further incursions into Indigenous
sovereignty. As Oglala Lakota elder Regina Brave stated at the Standing Rock
occupation, “If you want to protest here, you must incorporate [this] belief:
We are Nations. We are enacting our sovereign right to say what happens to
our children, our water and our land.”63
Similarly, “young Black activists are showing us once again what it means
to step into history as subjects, not objects . . . challenging a system not at-
tuned to their needs, or the needs of their communities,” according to profes-
sors Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.64 Legal scholar Charles R. Lawrence
III observes that “Black Lives Matter articulates the everyday violence visited
on black communities by the savage inequalities of segregated schools, by
unemployment, and an ever-increasing wealth gap, by our disproportionate
numbers in prisons and our declining numbers in universities and the profes-
sions.”65 In August 2016, after a year of consultation among more than sixty
organizations, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) presented a compre-
hensive policy paper identifying six demands, or goals, supplemented by forty
specific proposals and thirty-four policy briefs. As summarized by history
professor Robin D. G. Kelley, it is a platform “aimed at ending all forms of
violence and injustice endured by black people; redirecting resources from
prisons and the military to education, health, and safety; creating a just, dem-
ocratically controlled economy; and securing black political power within a
genuinely inclusive democracy.”66
While the water protectors at Standing Rock and the M4BL activists artic-
ulate goals that differ in many significant respects, both have moved beyond
16 | Racial Realities

protesting governmental policies and practices to envisioning and strategiz-

ing the restructuring of social relations in very fundamental ways. Rather
than accepting that power rests with the state and its agencies, these activists
are recognizing and reclaiming the power that rests with the people. In this
respect, much of what is being said and done is reminiscent of efforts made in
the 1960s and early 1970s to empower communities of color.
The conceptual framework of colonialism that informs this book has
emerged from my attempts to understand both what gave the movements of
that era their tremendous vitality and what has since happened to that energy.
Taking to heart Mathew King’s advice that we need to know where we have
been in order to figure out where we’re going, the following sections look back
at some of the movements for racial justice that envisioned meaningful struc-
tural change a half century ago, with an eye to understanding how the resis-
tance they encountered largely precluded them from achieving their goals.

Liberatory Visions
The civil rights movement can take much credit for the Supreme Court’s
acknowledgment in Brown v. Board of Education that legally mandated
apartheid violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and for
Congress’s passage of the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts. Sub-
sequently, the dominant narrative insisted that the playing field was level and
presumed racial injustice to be anomalous. But formal legal equality resulted
in little change for most people of color. As early as 1967, psychology profes-
sor Kenneth Clark observed, “The masses of Negroes are now starkly aware
that recent civil rights victories benefited a very small number of middle-class
Negroes while their predicament remained the same or worsened.”67 Accord-
ing to Derrick Bell, the successful elimination of formal, visible racial barriers
encouraged White society to dismiss racism as a historical aberration while
leaving Black Americans in “anguish over whether race or individual failing”
explained their continued exclusion.68 “Either conclusion,” he noted, “breeds
frustration and eventually despair.”69
Oblivious to this reality, mainstream American complacency was shaken
to its core by the hundreds of urban rebellions that occurred in US cities in
the mid- to late 1960s.70 Like many recent protests, most were triggered by
police violence. Analyzing these “riots,” the National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission, determined
that the underlying causes were “pervasive discrimination and segregation in
employment, education and housing” and the resulting “frustrations of pow-
erlessness” that permeated the “ghettos.”71 Significantly, the commission—
 Racial Realities | 17

comprised of powerful political and business leaders appointed by President

Lyndon Johnson—bluntly acknowledged that “white institutions created [the
racial ghetto], white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”72
Motivated by their desire to preclude further urban rebellions, these leaders
recommended governmental action to alleviate some of the most egregious
manifestations of racial subjugation.73
These programs, as well as others associated with Johnson’s War on Pov-
erty, provided much-needed resources and opportunities for the poorest
Americans, but many people of color in the United States had more exten-
sive visions of change, inspired by the movements for fundamental social
transformation sweeping the planet.74 In 1957, under Kwame Nkrumah’s
leadership, Ghana had won its independence from British colonial rule,
and in 1960 alone, eighteen African colonies were recognized by the United
Nations (UN) as independent states.75 The Vietnamese ousted their French
colonizers in 1954, and their resistance to the United States’ military pres-
ence in Southeast Asia was widely perceived as an extension of their war
for independence.76 Anti-colonial struggles and mass movements against
military dictatorships were succeeding in Asia and Latin America, inspir-
ing student and youth uprisings throughout Europe and North America.77
As Argentine journalist Adolfo Gilly observed in his introduction to Frantz
Fanon’s Studies in a Dying Colonialism, “The whole of humanity has erupted
violently, tumultuously onto the stage of history, taking its own destiny in
its hands.”78
The liberatory potential of this new world order was palpable. Against
this backdrop, movements emerged in African American, American Indian,
Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, and Asian American communities that identified
themselves, to some degree or another, with national liberation and anti-
colonial struggles in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.79 More generally, a sig-
nificant sector of activists and scholars saw the struggles against racism in the
United States as integrally related to the global movement for decolonization
and framed their goals in terms of liberation and self-determination rather
than the achievement of civil rights.80 Invoking a long tradition of describ-
ing African Americans as a “nation within a nation,”81 many Black leaders in
the 1960s referenced the international legal paradigm that now condemned
colonialism. Thus, for example, in 1966 Student Nonviolent Coordinat-
ing Committee (SNCC) chair Stokely Carmichael—later known as Kwame
Ture—observed that integration and assimilation were designed to abolish
the cultural integrity of the African American community. “What must be
abolished,” he argued, “is not the black community, but the dependent colo-
nial status that has been inflicted upon it.”82
18 | Racial Realities

The Movement for Black Lives’ 2016 platform calls for community
control and “collective liberation,” while supporting global efforts by Af-
rodescendant peoples to redress “the historic and continuing harms of
colonialism and slavery” and recognizing “the rights and struggle of our
Indigenous family for land and self-determination.”83 In this, one can hear
echoes of the nationalist movements of the 1960s and, in particular, the
ten-point Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
(BPP). Issued in 1966, the BPP Platform began, “We want freedom. We want
power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.” After address-
ing employment, housing, education, military service, police brutality, and
criminal justice, as well as compensation for slavery and genocide, it identi-
fied as its “major political objective” a plebiscite supervised by the United
Nations “for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their
national destiny.”84
Similarly, the legacy of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which
emerged in 1968 against the backdrop of Red Power activism, can be seen in
the Standing Rock water protectors’ occupation of unceded 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 Bro-
ken 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 Univer-
sity 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,”
 Racial Realities | 19

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 “cul-
ture 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 Indepen-
dence” that first addressed the return of “all land that was stolen from our
people,” and then highlighted issues of criminal justice, education, employ-
ment, 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 plat-
forms were not simply demands made to those with institutional or eco-
nomic 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, transpor-
tation for prison visits, support for workers’ struggles, and patrols to pro-
tect 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 cre-
ate, 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 com-
munities as they struggled to survive on a daily basis. Simultaneously, these
local formations participated in regional, national, and international coali-
tions that transcended the boundaries of race or ethnicity. Their analyses situ-
ated 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.
20 | Racial Realities

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 undis-
turbed?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 lament-
ing, “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 can-
not 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, re-
gardless of who is president or which political party controls Congress.98 All
of the movements of the 1960s were subjected to intensive surveillance, infil-
tration, and the use of disinformation to create splits within organizations and
to discredit them in the public eye, most famously through the COINTEL-
PRO (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 lead-
ership 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 Illi-
nois 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 attend-
ing COINTELPRO or similar governmental operations, despite their being
 Racial Realities | 21

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 govern-
ment instituted a wide range of programs intended to improve employ-
ment, 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 and
succinctly summarized in the fact that, by 1999, African Americans com-
prised about 13 percent of the US population and its drug users, but 74 per-
cent of those imprisoned for drug offenses.110 The drug war was accompanied
by a rise in the militarization of police forces throughout the country, alter-
ing their character, in Kenneth Nunn’s terms, “from law enforcement agen-
cies to military occupation forces.”111 All of these dynamics have intensified
in the “war on terror” generally associated with the attacks of September 11,
2001, but more accurately traced, at least domestically, to draconian legisla-
tion passed in the 1990s during the administration of President Bill Clin-
ton.112 Counterterrorism provides the backdrop for the “Countering Violent
Extremism” or CVE policing programs initiated in predominantly Muslim
communities by President Obama, and for the current targeting of “Black
Identity Extremists” by the FBI.113
Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was an Alabama senator who
had been nominated but not confirmed as a federal judge in the 1980s, ap-
parently because of racist statements he had made.114 Evincing a complete
disregard for the crisis of mass incarceration, Sessions instructed federal
22 | Racial Realities

prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,”
describing this as a “core principle” of DOJ policy.115 Trump has reversed
the promises of the post-Ferguson Obama administration to demilitarize
local policing, with the result that “police departments will now have access
to military surplus equipment typically used in warfare, including grenade
launchers, armored vehicles and bayonets.”116
Thus, over the past half century, crime, drugs, and terrorism have been
invoked consistently to dramatically expand governmental power, militarize
policing, eviscerate constitutional rights, and significantly curtail the rights
of immigrants. In the meantime, people of color have been particularly hard-
hit by the deindustrialization of the American economy and by the attendant
shift from relatively stable manufacturing jobs to low-wage, part-time service
sector employment.117 Welfare “reform” has virtually eliminated any safety
net, with the result that—to give just one example—in 2011, six million Amer-
icans had no income besides food stamps.118 While these rollbacks have had a
disproportionate impact on people of color, Peter Edelman observes that they
were instituted with little explicit discussion of such effects because “welfare,”
like “crime,” “had become a code word for race.”119
Predictably, more and more people are consumed by the struggle to en-
sure food, shelter, healthcare, and schooling for their families. Trump’s pri-
orities are reflected in his budget proposals, which have urged cutbacks in
healthcare, education, housing, labor, and environmental protections, while
proposing expanded funding for law enforcement and the military.120 As
summarized by the UN special rapporteur in late 2017, the welfare cuts will
“shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes” and “the
proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most
unequal society in the world.”121
The movements of the long sixties that envisioned liberation and decolo-
nization were thus undermined by (1) multifaceted political repression that
was both overt and covert, legal and illegal; (2) the dramatic expansion of
criminalization and incarceration, accompanied by increasingly militarized
policing; and (3) massive cutbacks in social welfare programs that forced
most poor people to devote their energies to survival. These dynamics, still at
work in American society today, combine to reinforce a regime of “structural
violence” that outstrips the more overt uses of armed force.122
When the nature of oppression is apparent, many individuals are willing to
define themselves in opposition to systemic subjugation, as illustrated by the
mobilizations against American apartheid.123 But resistance becomes much
more complicated when the institutional dynamics are so deeply rooted that
they seem to perpetuate themselves without any obvious discriminatory in-
 Racial Realities | 23

tent. When that happens, it is easy to believe that we—or those closest to us—
are the primary source of our own problems.124 Considered in the broader
context of structural violence, it is not difficult to understand why the energy
fueling the movements of the 1960s dissipated or why it has taken so long for
mass mobilizations to resurface.

Moving Forward
What will it take to actually dismantle the racial hierarchy in evidence
throughout American society? It has been 150 years since Congress amended
the Constitution to guarantee all persons equal protection under law, and a
half century since the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed. In
the interim we have had Democratic and Republican administrations, and
our first Black president. The rhetoric of race has shifted considerably over
this period, but de facto segregation, disproportionate incarceration rates,
and racial disparities in wealth and income, as well as in access to health-
care, housing, and education, persist. State actors are taking full advantage of
the newly expanded opportunities to restrict social welfare programs; to roll
back protections against discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality,
religion, national origin, or immigration status; to minimize the exercise of
Indigenous rights; and to assign natural resources to corporations. As a result,
we have every reason to expect that racial disparities will continue to grow.
A lot of people have taken to the streets since Donald Trump’s election.
In most cases, however, it is not evident that they have plans for constructive
engagement that go beyond expressing their dissatisfaction with particular
governmental actions, actors, or policies. We find ourselves in an era of re-
newed energy and activism, but we also face intensified versions of all the
factors that neutralized the movements of the 1960s and 1970s: the rollbacks
of programs supporting access to basic social goods and services, a general
expansion of police power, and intensified political repression in the form of
counterinsurgency as well as counterintelligence operations. In response to
the growing number of protest actions, federal, state, and local officials are
seeking heightened criminal penalties for protesters and criminalizing many
forms of resistance.
Thus, for example, in Washington, DC, in January 2017, following massive
inauguration protests, more than two hundred protesters faced riot-related
charges that could have resulted in up to eighty years’ imprisonment.125 Ul-
timately most of the charges were dropped, but the government had served
notice that virtually any form of political protest will, henceforth, trigger a
draconian response.126 Even before Trump became president, many state
24 | Racial Realities

legislators were targeting those who contest oil pipelines or protest police
killings. According to the Intercept, as of January 2017, legislation had been
introduced that “would allow motorists to run over and kill any protester
obstructing a highway as long as a driver does so accidentally,” “allow pros-
ecutors to seek a full year of jail time for protesters blocking a highway,” “re-
classify as a felony civil disobedience protests that are deemed ‘economic
terrorism,’” and “make it easier for businesses to sue individual protestors
for their actions.”127 State legislatures have considered making protesters pay
for policing, and debated “Blue Lives Matter” bills that characterize attacks
on law enforcement as hate crimes.128 While most of these proposals have
not yet been passed, it is clear that the personal risks associated with political
engagement are increasing.
Can creative and energized responses to political, economic, and socio-
cultural repression be maintained under these conditions? What is needed
for popular activism to transform not just the discourse about race and so-
cial justice but the structures that perpetuate inequality? What kinds of op-
tions, legal and political, might truly be effective? For most of the past half
century, we have relied on the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and
equal protection to rectify racial injustices. But this strategy has proven in-
adequate, for it does not address the underlying dynamics of power.129 To
effectively challenge the institutionalization of racial hierarchy, violence, and
exploitation in this country, we will need strategies grounded in conceptual
frameworks capable of explaining the underlying functions of racialization
and the mechanisms through which race-based privilege and subordination
are created and maintained.
A first step toward developing such frameworks involves overcoming the
“false consciousness” under which we have been operating.130 If, as Dorothy
Roberts observed, this system “brilliantly serves its intended purposes,”131
meaningful change will require forgoing the comfort of a narrative that prom-
ises constant if gradual “progress.” Instead, we will need narratives that incor-
porate the histories and lived realities of peoples of color in this country, 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, natu-
ral, 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 narra-
tives “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, rein-
forces 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 meaning-
ful 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.

25
26 | Unsettling Narratives

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 inter-
rogates 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 presump-
tive domestic norm and the United States exercised global hegemony in the
name of Western civilization. It is a construction squarely rooted in the dom-
inant—or master—narrative of American history and identity. It has many
dimensions, but most significantly, for our purposes, it is a story about prog-
ress 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 coloniz-
ers, rendering invisible the societies being displaced and replaced, or recasting
them as part of the wilderness transformed by the settlers’ “civilizing mis-
sion.”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
 Unsettling Narratives | 27

expansion attributed to their righteousness. The early Angloamerican colo-

nists’ assertion of “a pre-emptive right to the continent,” embodied in colo-
nial 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 pre-
sented with color-coded maps that take us from sea to shining sea, from the
original thirteen colonies, through the Louisiana Purchase and the annexa-
tion 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 uni-
versality and overwrites the stories of all those it encounters. Its world is an-
thropocentric 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 reli-
gious 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 or-
ganized in a patriarchal and hierarchical manner. Likewise, as everyone is as-
signed 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
28 | Unsettling Narratives

Greece and Rome to Christian Europe, from the Renaissance and the En-
lightenment 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 of an
emergent democracy mitigated by the presumption that those in power were
acting for a higher purpose and in accordance with the standards of their
time.15 As Israeli historian Benny Morris put it, “Even the great American de-
mocracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.
There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts
in the course of history.”16

A Story of Race and Gender

The master narrative is also a story of race and gender, despite the fact that its
protagonists are almost exclusively men of European ancestry. This is because
the colonists assumed that mutually exclusive classifications of race and gen-
der simply existed or could be constructed, that these classifications were or
could be ordered hierarchically, and that imposing the resulting relations of
domination and subordination upon the peoples they encountered was essen-
tial to their “civilizing mission.” Indigeneity is erased by pretending that the
land was vacant when the settlers arrived—thereby facilitating their pretense
to be “native” to it—and by overwriting extant forms of self-identification
with colonial constructs of gender, race, and citizenship. To the extent Indig-
enous peoples are acknowledged—usually as part of the settlers’ depiction of
their valorous conquests—they are characterized not as independent sover-
eigns but as a “savage race.”
Globally, with the expansion of European colonial rule over the past five
centuries, several thousand nations have been arbitrarily (and generally invol-
untarily) incorporated into the approximately two hundred political constructs
we call independent states.17 States are generally understood to have relatively
well-defined boundaries and populations under the jurisdiction—that is, effec-
tive control—of a centralized government.18 “Nations,” as I am using the term,
refers to those who identify “as ‘one people’ on the basis of common ancestry,
history, society, institutions, ideology, language, territory, and, often religion,” as
well as to “the geographically bounded territory” of such a people.19 The United
States, of course, is an internationally recognized state that exercises jurisdiction
over the lands and peoples of perhaps five hundred Indigenous nations, over
those who migrated to this land involuntarily as well as voluntarily, and over
externally colonized territories such as Puerto Rico.
 Unsettling Narratives | 29

The imposition of state formations upon Indigenous peoples represents

a transformative moment in the relationship between gender, identity, and
power. The “civilized” European state is unremittingly patriarchal; the world-
view it embodies insists not only on gendered identities that are binary and
mutually exclusive but also hierarchically ordered, with presumptively het-
erosexual males always dominant. By contrast, many of the nations being
subsumed by these states have had—and often still have—a much more fluid
understanding of gender and gendered relations designed to promote balance
rather than domination and subordination.20
Most North American Indigenous societies are matrilineal, and women
hold considerable decision-making authority, often being responsible for the
use of land, the distribution of goods, the maintenance of stable social rela-
tions, and the appointment of political leaders.21 But the issue is not one of
women being “equal” or having more “rights” in Indigenous societies; rather,
it is that gendered balances are an integral aspect of the cosmos itself.22 The
subordination of complex, multilayered, and organic understandings of gen-
der identities and relations constitutes part of the collateral damage of the
colonial encounter. In their place, the master narrative imposes exclusionary,
binary, and biologically assigned gendered identities as well as patrilineal and
patriarchal forms of social organization, and then frames “women’s rights”
solely as a matter of achieving formal equality with men. I cannot do the sub-
ject justice here, but must note that I believe decolonization to be as essential
to gendered freedom as it is to overcoming racial subordination.
Like gender, race is presented by the master narrative as a preexisting real-
ity rather than a colonial construct. In fact, we know that Indigenous peoples
in what is now the United States have consistently identified themselves not
as “a race” but in relation to their clans and nations—from the Penobscot and
Lenape of the northeast coast to the O’odham of the southwest borderlands,
to the Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest. We know, too, that the Euro-
peans arriving in North America did not initially see themselves as White
but as, perhaps, English, French, Dutch, or German; that Africans did not
come as Black but as Hausa or Mandingo, Yoruba, Ibo, Ashanti, or any of the
other nations swept up into the colonial slave trade.23 The same holds true,
of course, for most migrants from Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East.
“Race” is a social and legal construct, not a biological reality.24 There is
more genetic variation within “racial” groups than between them;25 beyond
that, common sense tells us that there is no inherent logic in, or biological
rationale for, a system that limits Whiteness to those of exclusively European
ancestry, defines persons with but “one drop” of African ancestry as Black,
and refuses to recognize persons indigenous to these lands as “Indian” simply
30 | Unsettling Narratives

because their ancestors’ names were not inscribed on lists created by White
colonizers.26
Nonetheless, we live in a society in which “race mediates every aspect of
our lives,”27 and “has consistently functioned as a proxy for power.”28 Race is
an integral part of our personal identity, and a primary determinant of our
educational and economic prospects, our access to healthcare or housing, the
infrastructure and social resources in our neighborhoods, and the nature of
our interactions with law enforcement and the judicial system. We inhabit, in
other words, what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva terms a racialized social system.29
Racialization as we know it is a product of colonial expansion, on this conti-
nent and globally.30 While racism and colonialism are distinct phenomena,
they are genealogically inseparable. As a result, the ways in which “race” has
been constructed, and the presumptions of racial hierarchy that flow from
that construction, have always been at the core of the American settler colo-
nial narrative.
The legitimacy of the United States rests on the purported supremacy of
its “values,” which are said to include liberty, democracy, and equality—or, at
least, equal opportunity. To reconcile the discrepancy between these claimed
values and actual social conditions, the dominant narrative must consistently
resort to racialization. Thus, for example, the Supreme Court could not de-
clare the United States a “government of laws”31 and simultaneously declare
American Indians incapable of owning land without identifying Indigenous
peoples not only as a distinct race, but one characterized by savagery and
lawlessness.32 Similarly, chattel slavery could not exist in a society in which all
persons—or at least men—were deemed equal, unless some people were ra-
cially identified—“raced”—as less-than-human.33 Thus, even as race has been
erased from the story of America, it permeates the narrative at every turn.

A Story of Property
Finally, it is important to note that the master narrative is a story of property.
From the arrival of the first British colonizers, European understandings of
property and property rights have been superimposed upon this land and
its residents, with the result that racialized and gendered34 constructions of
property are deeply, inextricably embedded in the prevailing paradigm. Like
race and gender, the existence of property—that which can be owned and
alienated—is simply asserted. There may be questions about whose prop-
erty it is, but the construct itself is rarely questioned and, for the most part,
ownership is envisioned in terms of exclusive rights rather than collective
responsibilities.
 Unsettling Narratives | 31

The early Angloamerican settlers considered “canonical” John Locke’s

contention that, under natural law, the transformative power of human labor
allowed commonly held natural resources to be converted into private prop-
erty.35 From this perspective, settler appropriation of Indigenous lands and
resources contributed to the betterment of humanity as a whole for, as Locke
put it, “he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but
increase the common stock of mankind.”36 This “productive use” justifica-
tion for appropriating American Indian territory is belied by the colonizers’
knowledge of the extensive agricultural cultivation of American Indian com-
munities,37 as well as the fact that, until the mid-1860s, much of the country’s
productive activity was not carried out by the White settlers, but by enslaved
people of African as well as Indigenous descent.38
The resulting gap between reality and ideology is bridged by racialization.
The settlers were unwilling, of course, to concede that enslaved persons were
entitled to own the lands they were rendering productive.39 Instead, the co-
lonial narrative transformed the workers themselves into “a highly volatile
and unstable form of property,” property that could be bought or sold; raped,
tortured, or abused at will; pledged as collateral; deeded and inherited.40 As
Chief Justice Roger Taney explained in the 1856 Dred Scott case, when the
Constitution was adopted, “negroes” were considered “an ordinary article of
merchandise,” adding that this “opinion was at that time fixed and universal
in the civilized portion of the white race.”41 As this illustrates, not only did
the opinions of those deemed White provide the foundation for legal deci-
sion making, but White people who were unwilling to view Black people as
property could be disregarded as insufficiently “civilized.”
If property is understood as something to which a person may have legal
entitlement,42 then some people may be designated as property and others as
owners only if we posit a distinction between them that transcends person-
hood. That distinction, in our history, has been Whiteness. It is not simply
that some humans, or their labor, were commodified. Rather, according to
Taney, all those of the “African race,” whether enslaved or not, were “regarded
as beings of an inferior order . . . so far inferior, that they had no rights which
the white man was bound to respect.”43 Only those identified as White were
legally recognized as full persons and, as law professor Cheryl Harris has
brilliantly explained, this identification—their personhood, in the form of
Whiteness—itself became a form of property.44
The fact that racialization once allowed human beings to be defined as
alienable property in the United States is commonly acknowledged, a di-
mension of the master narrative that most often falls under the heading of
“look how far we’ve come,” thereby reinforcing its presumption of continuous
32 | Unsettling Narratives

and inevitable progress. We generally fail to recognize, however, that “real”

property—land capable of being bought and sold—is a construct equally de-
pendent upon racialization. The US assertion of ownership of the continent
rests on a legal theory that vested land rights in the “first possessor,” defined
possession in Lockean terms of “productive use,” and then recognized only
Euroderivative colonial activity as “productive.”45 In other words, the earth
was transformed into property when lived on by some people but not others.
In Johnson v. McIntosh, the Supreme Court’s 1823 opinion that still un-
dergirds the United States’ territorial claims, Chief Justice John Marshall
held that only the settler state (not the Indians) could hold title to the land.46
After noting that the doctrine of discovery gave the European colonial power
making first contact the right to assert title vis-à-vis other European powers,
Marshall then inverted the doctrine—which was, in essence, a non-compete
agreement between European states—to hold that because American Indian
nations could not “dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they
pleased,” they could not have owned it.47
At its most basic level, Marshall’s argument was an assertion of settler pre-
rogative rather than an appeal to legality or justice. The United States’ power to
grant title to lands “has been exercised uniformly over territory in possession
of the Indians,” he noted, and “must negative the existence of any right which
may conflict with” it.48 Why? Because “conquest gives a title which the Courts
of the conqueror cannot deny.”49 The chief justice candidly added that these
“principles” may “find some excuse, if not justification, in the character and
habits of the people whose rights have been wrested from them.”50 Thus, an ex-
ercise of raw power became a foundational principle of American law based on
the racialization of American Indians. As explained by Justice William Johnson,
concurring in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, American Indians were simply “wan-
dering hordes, held together only by ties of blood and habit, and having neither
laws or government, beyond what is required in a savage state.”51
Depicting American Indians as savages or animals with no natural right to
own land allowed the settlers—racialized as White, Christian, and civilized—to
assert an exclusive right to hold title to land.52 This conceptualization did not, of
course, mean that the Indigenous peoples of North America would simply cede
their territories to the colonizers, but it did lay the ideological foundation for
the settlers’ forcible “clearing” of the lands they claimed by any and all means
available to them, and for reconciling their seemingly contradictory claims that
the lands they occupied were both “vacant” and legitimately obtained by con-
quest.53 The racist stereotypes embedded within the settler narrative were as
essential to the Angloamerican transformation of land into property as they
were to the construction of enslaved persons as property.54
 Unsettling Narratives | 33

The American origin story thus justifies the occupation of the continent
(and beyond), the appropriation of its resources, and the exploitation of its
peoples by inventing “races,” attributing particular characteristics to these
classifications, and constructing property as a racially contingent social good.
While many of its specifics are now contested, the dominant narrative’s tri-
umphalist framing of American history in terms of “progress”—the constant
expansion of its claimed territory, its scientific and technological prowess,
its economic and military might—continues unabated. President Trump was
channeling this narrative as he ended his “taming of the continent” speech by
saying, “America is the greatest fighting force for peace, justice and freedom
in the history of the world. . . . We are not going to apologize for America. We
are going to stand up for America.”55
This is a story of origins and identity comforting to those who benefit—or
believe, or want to believe, that they benefit—from the status quo. Its core
message is that the United States represents the most advanced and demo-
cratic form of sociopolitical organization available, so those fortunate enough
to be identified as Americans should be grateful. Moreover, we are assured,
the United States has deployed and will continue to deploy its unparalleled
military, political, and economic power for the greater good of all human-
ity.56 Across the political spectrum, the presumption is that contemporary
social problems result from a failure to adequately implement the founders’
vision of American society; rarely are the problems understood to be a nec-
essary consequence of that vision. Those who wish to “make America great
again” are invoking the trope of America-as-pinnacle-of-human-progress in
the past tense, warning that White supremacy is under attack and calling for
restorative action. Liberal critics of the status quo generally perceive politi-
cal exclusion, racialized injustices, and social inequities as aberrational and
diminishing, and rely on America’s uniquely egalitarian values to ensure their
disappearance.57
There is no room in the master’s narrative for the voices of those who have
been disappeared, literally or figuratively, from the story, for the stories of the
enslaved or indentured, or those who live with the constant fear of violent
attacks, incarceration, or deportation. That means that within the dominant
narrative there are no effective paths to freedom for those deemed Other.
Moreover, just as men can be oppressed by gender discrimination, those
who are at least nominally of the White settler class and, therefore, privileged
may also be limited by the constraints of settler hegemony. The conflation of
“American” with “White” in both law and popular culture has obscured the
histories of varied European immigrant populations and the pressures they
have felt to conform to a homogenizing norm, relinquishing their own stories
34 | Unsettling Narratives

as well as their cultures, languages, and other aspects of a distinct ethnicity.58

The racial privilege built into the dominant narrative masks the exploitation
of White workers and leaves those who do not “succeed” in accordance with
the expectations it creates to blame themselves or, as we have seen repeatedly,
people of color for their failures.59
This book does not attempt to address the impact of settler colonialism on
the settlers themselves. Nonetheless, as we consider alternative narratives, it
seems worth noting that the dominant narrative not only conceals the reali-
ties of those deemed Other, but also limits and controls those who identify
as White. Speaking as a beneficiary of “the privilege of Western patriarchy,”
American studies professor Eric Cheyfitz describes this as being “locked away
in our comfort.” “We cannot afford to enter most of the social spaces of the
world,” he says, for “they have become dangerous for us, filled with the vio-
lence of the people we oppress, our own violence in alien forms we refuse to
recognize. And we can afford less and less to think of these social spaces, to
imagine the languages of their protest, for such imagining would keep us . . .
in continual contradiction with ourselves.”60 The result, he observes, is that
“we talk to ourselves about ourselves, believing in a grand hallucination that
we are talking with others.”61

Silent Spaces
We turn now to some of the silent spaces in the master(’s) narrative, the voids
that “raise the most profound questions.”62 There are many for whom the
hegemonic American narrative rings hollow, their experiences irreconcil-
able with its storyline of ever-expanding prosperity. The “progress” promised
by the civil rights era—the abolition of legalized apartheid, the temporary
expansion of social welfare and affirmative action programs, the purported
recognition of American Indians’ right to self-determination—brought a
degree of material benefit to many individuals. But the disparities and exclu-
sions have persisted, leaving people of color collectively no better off, no more
secure, than we were. The dominant narrative neither adequately accounts for
this reality nor provides effective remedial options, and the exclusion of the
perspectives of subjugated peoples makes it almost impossible to have mean-
ingful dialogue across racial, ethnic, or class lines.

The Violence of Colonization

The lived realities of Indigenous peoples and others who, as a rule, have been
excluded from the settler class are notably absent from the master narrative.
 Unsettling Narratives | 35

While the specifics of their experiences differ widely, the most consistent
shared theme may be the violence visited upon them as a means of achiev-
ing the colonizers’ objectives; a violence that always seems to be minimized,
distorted, or erased by the silent spaces of the dominant narrative. This war-
rants emphasis as we think about social transformation because maintaining
the status quo is almost inevitably portrayed as a nonviolent—usually, the
nonviolent—option; the violence inherent to constructing and preserving
that status quo is rarely acknowledged.
American history as disseminated through the popular media and public
education generally provides a highly sanitized version of the exploitation of
Indigenous peoples, persons of African descent, externally colonized peoples,
and certain immigrant groups. As a result, the violence attending such exploi-
tation becomes invisible. Thus, for example, American Indians are typically
depicted as “inadvertently” being killed by disease or miraculously “vanish-
ing.” When violence on the part of the colonizers is admitted at all, it is almost
invariably characterized as individual or collective self-defense.63
The horrors of enslavement endured—and resisted—by African as well as
American Indian peoples for several centuries are collapsed into a sidebar, the
main story of slavery being the conflicts it engendered within the settler class
and their eventual (triumphal) resolution. Several hundred years of slavery
and economic exploitation, exclusions from citizenship or political participa-
tion, and legalized apartheid are depicted as passing phases in the gradual
extension of democratic rights to White women and to people of color.64 To
the extent that violence in the interest of racialized repression is admitted,
the mainstream narrative relegates it to a past for which no one is today re-
sponsible.65 And the violence faced by people on a daily basis as a result of
their (perceived) race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion is continuously
dismissed as anomalous.66
The legitimacy of acquiring Indigenous lands in violation of treaties, by
aggressive warfare, or through agreements with other colonial powers is
never seriously questioned, for the narrative begins from the premise that the
United States was divinely ordained to exist in its current form. The seizure
of northern Mexico in 1848, the “purchase” of Alaska in 1868, the overthrow
of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1893 and its subsequent annexation, the coloni-
zation of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines beginning in 1898—these
are just color-coded building blocks on the map of US territorial expansion,
evidence of the settlers’ “manifest destiny.”67 Neither the violence entailed in
these invasions nor their consistently questionable legal rationales are ac-
knowledged. In essence, all the United States’ wars have been “good” wars,
enabling its territorial consolidation as well as its rise to global power and
36 | Unsettling Narratives

influence. The underlying realities cannot be interrogated for fear of expos-

ing the conflict between the means used and the “ideals of justice, political
representation, and opportunity” central to the settlers’ justification for the
establishment and maintenance of “their” country.68
All of this is important to understanding where we are, collectively, and
how we got here. But if we want to develop liberatory visions of the future, we
will need to look beyond the silent spaces of the narrative that is being told
to the narratives that are not being told. This means making the effort to un-
derstand what was here before the colonizers arrived and opening our minds
to the fact that there are many perspectives from which the world around us,
and all of our relationships, can be and is understood.

Indigenous Worlds
The master narrative cannot accurately recognize the myriad Indigenous cul-
tures that long predated the colonization of this continent, because doing so
would disrupt its story of linear progress, discredit its “civilizing mission,” and
expose the crude motivations underlying the racialization of American Indi-
ans and, subsequently, other peoples of color. To justify the United States’ very
existence, as well as the wealth and power it has derived by appropriating Indig-
enous lands and resources, the settler narrative contends, implicitly or explicitly,
that this was, or might as well have been, uninhabited land.69 As we question
the prevailing paradigm and consider more liberatory options, it is particu-
larly important to address this “silent space.” This is not because returning to
a precolonial past is an option but because there is much it can teach us about
human relations, forms of social and political organization, and ways of relating
to other societies and the natural world outside the colonial paradigm. These
insights, in turn, undermine the narrative’s disempowering message that what
we see, here and now, is the best of all possible worlds.
We can start by noting that as of the fifteenth century, “most likely, over
100 million inhabitants who spoke at least 1000 languages inhabited the
Americas”70 and, prior to the European invasion, some fifteen million people
probably lived in what is now the continental United States and Canada.71
Indigenous narratives are rooted in epistemologies very different from those
of the colonial powers, and generally begin with origin stories. None support
the settlers’ assertion that American Indians walked from Siberia to North
America some fifteen thousand years ago, a story that conveniently sets the
stage for settler claims that Indigenous peoples are really just immigrants, too.
Thus, for example, Hopi history incorporates the destruction of their lands
by volcanic fire, flooding, and ice, events that geologists correlate to floods as
 Unsettling Narratives | 37

well as glacial and volcanic activity that took place twenty-five thousand or
more years ago.72 In other accounts, the People emerged from worlds beneath
this one, or came from the sky when the earth was still covered with water.73
Many peoples trace their origins to specific geographic sites, such as the La-
kotas’ understanding of their emergence from Wind Cave in the Black Hills;74
others tell of traveling great distances, “listen[ing] to the Earth” in order to
find where they were supposed to be.75
Whatever their particularities, Indigenous “origin stories connect the Peo-
ple to the land.”76 Their cultures, histories, and identities are usually rooted
in a given location—defined, perhaps, by particular mountains or rivers—
and they are correspondingly responsible for ensuring the well-being of these
nonhuman relatives. As Cree attorney Sharon Venne notes, “Every indigenous
‘legal code’ devolves upon . . . requirements that humans shoulder an indi-
vidual/collective responsibility to preserve the balance of the natural order.”77
This approach allowed the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to develop
complex cosmologies and cultures, sophisticated systems of agricultural pro-
duction, and extensive networks of trade and communication that survived
for millennia.78 American Indian scholars John Mohawk and Oren Lyons
provide this much-condensed but very revealing summary:

Long before Columbus made contact . . . some Native American civilizations

had developed vast irrigation networks that rivaled those of Rome; they had
domesticated crops that would eventually save Europe from starvation; they
had developed medical and psychotherapeutic knowledge that made medieval
Europe’s medical model . . . look primitive; they had advanced astronomical cal-
endars; they had a body of literature, both oral and in some cases written, that is
only today finally being recognized as the equal of any found in the world; and
they had developed highly sophisticated forms of representative government in
which freedom was not only prized, but was the foremost principle.79

The Haudenosaunee (Rotinonshón:ni) or Iroquois League, composed of

the Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, and Tuscarora nations,
is one example of these sophisticated forms of governance.80 The Haudeno-
saunee Great Law of Peace provides for a complex, consensus-based system of
checks and balances among the constituent nations of the League, including
the election of leaders, delineation of their responsibilities, and provisions for
their removal.81 The Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution were
strongly influenced by the Great Law of Peace, illustrating the settlers’ con-
sciousness of Indigenous political and legal structures.82 Structured to govern
relations between independent nations, it constitutes a body of international
38 | Unsettling Narratives

law, and in the early years of European settlement, the colonies of New York,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia agreed to join the Haudenosaunee
Covenant Chain, a “relationship of trade and collective security” built upon
treaties.83
As the utilization of Haudenosaunee political insights by the Angloameri-
can “founders” illustrates, the colonizers were quite well aware that the In-
digenous peoples they were encountering had highly sophisticated forms of
social organization, extensive agricultural production, and well-developed
trade routes. As early as 1614, John Smith was recruiting settlers for the Plym-
outh Colony by describing the land as “planted with Gardens and Corne
fields” and “well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned peo-
ple.”84 The settlers themselves wrote countless accounts of their attacks on
Indigenous peoples’ towns, villages, and crops.85 Even as Removal was un-
derway, the Cherokee nation had a national council, a written constitution
and laws, a supreme court, schools, libraries, newspapers, large towns, farms
with tens of thousands of head of cattle, and dozens of mills and blacksmith
shops.86 The settlers’ portrayals of American Indians as “uncivilized” were
simply counterfactual, and the colonial leaders knew it.

Many Worldviews
Envisioning more equitable and fulfilling ways of relating to one another, and
of organizing our social, political, economic, and legal relations will require
stories lived outside the constraints imposed by the dominant narrative. To
survive within a colonial paradigm without being defined by it requires the
development of multiple consciousness.87 As noted earlier, American settler
society presumes a hierarchical social order that places humans second only
to God (or some variant of Truth), and measures their superiority to other
beings by the extent to which they dominate or control them. Not only human
relations but property rights have been framed in accordance with this “natu-
ral order.” As Cherokee author Thomas King recounts in his playful retelling
of the biblical scene in which Adam eats an apple in the garden of Eden:
“Wait a minute, says that god. That’s my garden. That’s my stuff.”88 The perils
of failing to comply with this system of domination and subordination are
illustrated by Adam’s “fall from grace” and the eviction of humans from the
garden of Eden.89 Those at the top own the “stuff,” decide who should have it,
and are responsible for ensuring that everyone and everything remains in his/
her/its place, literally and figuratively.
Many cultures see the world quite differently. To quote Seneca historian
Barbara Alice Mann, “starting with a solitary, male and—most stunningly—
 Unsettling Narratives | 39

portable god necessarily leads one onto a very different pathway from that
which one treads by starting in the Old Way, in a cosmos of balanced Twin-
ships made up of interactive Spirits of Place, in sky or earth, not to men-
tion women as important cultural functionaries.”90 As Vine Deloria reported,
within many American Indian religious traditions, “the whole of creation was
good, and because the creation event did not include a ‘fall,’ the meaning
of creation was that all parts of it functioned together to sustain it.”91 Hu-
mans can be understood not as destined to dominate or destroy nature, but
as very literally related to all living beings. “Indigenous identity is formed by
the intersection of land, culture, and community, and the way we respond to
those critical elements of our existence defines the meaning of ‘sovereignty’
and ‘property’ for the First Nations of this land,” according to law professor
Rebecca Tsosie. It is a reciprocal relationship, with the land looking after the
people and “orient[ing] the people in understanding how to meet their re-
sponsibilities to each other and to the land.”92
According to Mann, “The entire Iroquoian world is made up of comple-
mentary pairs,” which “function[] synchronously so as to maintain a balanced
cosmos.”93 The clans and the nations were consciously created and organized
according to a twinship principle to ensure balance, and their equilibrium
is maintained by a gendering that posits men and women as “natural halves
that parallel one another, socially, politically, economically, and religiously.”94
Thus, while the only governing bodies acknowledged in settler accounts were
composed of men, the Clan Mothers had their own councils that, among
other responsibilities, “appointed warriors, declared war, negotiated peace,
and mediated disputes.”95
This system of governance allowed the Haudenosaunee Confederation
to prosper for many centuries prior to European contact, ensuring the well-
being of the people through consultation with, and participation of, the indi-
viduals, families, clans, villages, and nations comprising the greater Iroquois
League.96 Lumbee law professor Robert A. Williams Jr. notes that, in striking
contrast to Western understandings of political authority, “above all, the Iro-
quois political system sought to assure that the Iroquois listened seriously to
each other.”97 Councils met, often at length, until consensus was achieved,
and the League Council’s decisions did not impose its decisions, but commu-
nicated them “‘to the people, hoping they would agree.’”98
These are just a few examples of the many worldviews, and ways of or-
ganizing society, that the American settler colonial state has done its best
to destroy. Neither Indigenous perspectives and histories nor contemporary
manifestations of Indigenous cultures can be incorporated into the master
narrative in any meaningful way because they would undermine the legiti-
40 | Unsettling Narratives

macy of the colonial project itself. More fundamentally, they cannot be ac-
knowledged because there is no place in the European colonial zeitgeist for
epistemological alternatives.
Expanding our narratives to incorporate the stories and realities of those
deemed Other can free us to recognize that we live in a “pluriverse” of world-
views, as Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash frame it, and to recognize
the constraints of our own.99 As we come to see that we need not limit our
vision of future possibilities to the master narrative’s constructions of indige-
neity, property, or civilization, its linear framing of progress, or the gendered
and racialized social hierarchies it imagines, we may be able to break out of
the highly circumscribed conceptual paradigm of individual rights and for-
mal equality within which we have been operating, and come to understand
racial justice in a richer way.
While remaining mindful of the pitfalls of substituting one universalizing
narrative for another, we can begin to construct theoretical frameworks ca-
pable of explaining historical consistencies and disparities in structural rather
than exceptional terms. In this process, I find it helpful to conceptualize ra-
cialization and racial hierarchy as a function of colonialism—settler colonial-
ism in our case. To the extent that racism serves to consolidate colonial rule,
its dismantling will require decolonization, and we will need narratives that
accurately reflect this relationship in order to envision liberatory options. Be-
cause settler colonial theory is unfamiliar terrain for many of us, the follow-
ing chapter briefly summarizes the constructs of colonialism that provide a
conceptual framework for the remainder of the book.
3

Settler Colonialism

Colonial 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 move-
ments 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 depic-
tion 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 structur-
ally 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 ex-
emplified by European expansion into Africa and Asia. From this perspec-
tive, many parallels emerge between the histories and conditions of colonized

41
42 | Settler Colonialism

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 clas-
sic 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 stra-
tegically 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 colonial-
ism. It concludes by acknowledging potential benefits and pitfalls of “trian-
gulating” 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 estab-
lish such a colony. The mainstream narrative of the early history of British
colonies in North America most often invokes this very benign understand-
ing 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 com-
munity’ in the new land necessarily meant unforming or re-forming the com-
munities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices
including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, enslavement and
 Settler Colonialism | 43

rebellions.”9 This dimension is incorporated into professor Jürgen Osterham-

mel’s theoretical overview of colonialism, which defines colonization as “a
process of territorial acquisition,” a colony as “a particular type of sociopoliti-
cal 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 some-
one” 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 colonial-
ism, as is the imposition of economic, political, and social institutions in-
tended 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 sover-
eignty 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 colo-
nial 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 civiliza-
44 | Settler Colonialism

tion of Europe.”20 Such redemption, in turn, has been the rationale for im-
posing 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 the colonized, and “the unwillingness of the new rulers to make cul-
tural concessions to subjugated societies,” a dynamic that has not necessarily
characterized other forms of empire or expansion in world history.22 Finally,
colonialism is not only a structural relationship, but also an “ideological for-
mation” in which, “rejecting cultural compromises,” “the colonizers are con-
vinced of their own superiority and of their ordained mandate to rule.”23
The construction and imposition of racial identities facilitate colonial
administration, but also go beyond that to render racialized privilege and
subordination more or less permanent. Anghie calls this the “dynamic of
difference”—an “endless process of creating a gap between two cultures, de-
marcating one as ‘universal’ and civilized and the other as ‘particular’ and
uncivilized, and seeking to bridge the gap by developing techniques to nor-
malize the aberrant society.”24 Colonial domination is justified only to the
extent that “civilization” is being promoted and, thus, the colonized must be
rendered perpetually inferior.25 As historian Lorenzo Veracini explains, “A
triumphant colonial society is a state of affairs where . . . the promised equal-
ity between colonizer and colonized . . . is forever postponed, where colonizer
and colonized know and ultimately retain their respective places.”26
The contemporary construct of “race” has functioned as a kind of short-
hand for the cultural differences used to justify colonialism’s “civilizing mis-
sion.” This mission, in turn, has served—and continues to serve—as the
rationale for the exploitation of the land, labor, and natural resources of those
deemed Other. Race has the added benefit, from the colonizers’ perspective,
of being considered a “scientific” descriptor of physical characteristics, serv-
ing to perpetuate the dynamic of difference by linking cultural attributes
identified as savage, barbaric, or otherwise uncivilized to relatively immutable
biological factors.27 Racialization allows colonial administrators to claim they
are uplifting and civilizing “the natives” through assimilationist measures
intended to eradicate Indigenous identities while simultaneously invoking
characteristics they claim are innate to “cap” the political, social, or economic
rights of the peoples subjected to their rule.28
 Settler Colonialism | 45

It is an oversimplification, however, to posit racism (at least as we now un-

derstand the term) as the driving force of colonialism, for factors other than
perceived racial differences have served the same purposes in other eras. Thus,
for example, before Europe could engage in colonial expansion, the various
peoples and nations of that region had to be “Europeanized,” a process that
involved the conquest and assimilation of many “pagan” peoples indigenous
to the region we now call Europe.29 In this process, religious and cultural dif-
ferences were emphasized to justify political domination and consolidation.30
As European colonialism extended out of what had become Europe into Af-
rica, Asia, and the Americas, “race” emerged as a shifting political and social
construct that conveniently incorporated the notion of more and less civilized
peoples and provided markers of “difference” relied upon by colonizing powers
to justify their ventures.31
Generally speaking, the characteristics summarized above apply to all
European (and many non-European) colonial encounters of the past sev-
eral centuries. There are, however, some significant distinctions between ex-
ternal and settler colonial formations. External or “classic” colonialism has
been characterized rather famously by Jürgen Osterhammel as “a relation-
ship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority
and a minority of foreign invaders.”32 Decisions are made and implemented
by colonial administrators in pursuit of interests often defined in a distant
metropolis; they generally involve exploitation of the land, labor, and natural
resources of territories where, for the most part, the colonists do not intend
to settle permanently.33 By contrast, settler colonists plan not only to profit
from but also to occupy permanently the territories they colonize.34 These
divergent purposes have resulted in distinct colonial narratives and forms of
social organization. Their differences are explored in more detail below, as
they help explain why the global movement for decolonization had so little
effect on settler colonial regimes, and why analyses of internal colonialism
that rely on classic colonial models have been inadequate to explain racialized
domination and subordination in the United States.

External Colonialism
European colonialism emerged as participation in networks of trade—initially
in spices, textiles, precious metals, and enslaved humans—evolved into asser-
tions of exclusive control over these and other profitable resources.35 This
control rested on the colonial powers’ claims to “own” the territories from
which these resources were obtained. In this respect, external or “classic”
colonialism can be seen as a form of imperialism, defined by Michael Doyle,
46 | Settler Colonialism

an international relations scholar, as “a relationship, formal or informal, in

which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political
society,” a control that is “achieved by force, by political collaboration, [or] by
economic, social or cultural dependence.”36
According to Osterhammel, external colonies were “usually the result
of military conquest, often after extended phases of contact without land
claims.”37 They were primarily acquired for purposes of economic exploita-
tion and governed in an “autocratic” manner by a “relatively insignificant”
number of colonial administrators “who return[ed] to their mother country
after completing their assignments.”38
The logic and law of colonialism were developed by and among those Eu-
ropean states that recognized each other as “civilized.”39 International law as
we now know it evolved from the agreements initially entered into between
these powers, each interested in minimizing conflicts with the others so that
its economic and military resources could be put to more profitable ends.
The sovereignty of non-European societies was not recognized within this
legal framework, and the colonizing states developed what were, in essence,
non-compete agreements to respect each other’s claims to territories not en-
compassed within recognized states.40
Colonial boundaries were artificially imposed, often from afar, as a result
of these agreements.41 Territorial demarcation tended to reflect the relative
political, economic, and military strength of the European states involved
rather than the local population’s historic understanding of the (often perme-
able) geographic boundaries and patterns of land use that had evolved in rela-
tion to local topography or ecosystems. As a result, the traditional territories
of Indigenous peoples were often divided between colonial powers, and any
given colony might incorporate many different nations and peoples.42
Colonial regimes developed extensive political and administrative struc-
tures to ensure the subjugation of these peoples and the efficient exploita-
tion of their resources.43 Local systems of law and governance were rendered
dysfunctional, and dual legal systems frequently imposed different rights and
responsibilities on the colonizing and colonized populations.44 As Europe in-
dustrialized, colonial administrations increasingly emphasized the creation
of roads, railroads, and communication infrastructure, the consolidation of
agricultural plantations, and the development of sanitation and educational
or training programs. These initiatives were often described in terms of the
colonizers’ “civilizing mission,” but in fact were vital to their goals of efficient
resource extraction and the creation and maintenance of a productive—that
is, profitable—workforce.45
 Settler Colonialism | 47

In external colonies, the representatives of the colonizing powers tended

to identify with and maintain allegiance to their countries of origin. Assigned
to colonial outposts for some fixed period of time, these residents did not see
themselves as permanently settling in the colony; rather, they intended to re-
turn to their homes in the metropolis, or “mother country,” at the end of their
assignments or upon retirement. For this reason, Veracini describes classic
colonial narratives as circular, “an Odyssey consisting of an outward move-
ment followed by interaction with exotic and colonised Others in foreign sur-
roundings, and by a final return to an original locale.”46 While in the colonies,
the administrators’ self-identification as British, or French, or Belgian, for
example, may have intensified as a result of their immersion in a society that
was structured to ensure that their rights and status were contingent upon not
being “native” to the colony.47
By contrast, the identities of colonized peoples were eviscerated by the
pervasive control exercised over all aspects of their lives and societies. The
complex forms of colonial administration 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 distinc-
tions 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 Af-
rican 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 colonial-
ism 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”
48 | Settler Colonialism

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 re-
sult 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 ac-
knowledge 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 con-
structed political entities that possessed most of the attributes of a contempo-
rary 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 indepen-
dent and purportedly postcolonial states.
Insofar as the new countries were only recognized in accordance with co-
lonially 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 pre-
cluded from exercising sovereignty over their own wealth and natural re-
sources by the Western powers’ insistence that concessionary rights acquired
by foreign interests prior to independence be honored and that any national-
ization 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 subor-
dinated peoples and the continuation of external colonialism in other forms.
 Settler Colonialism | 49

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 cul-
tural contexts that are structurally distinct from the situation at hand.
In a seminal work published in 1975, sociologist Michael Hechter em-
ployed the Gramscian concept of internal colonialism to explain the dispari-
ties 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 “rel-
atively 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 rein-
forces 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 exploita-
tion 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 sig-
nificant 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 per-
sist or increase, “peripheral culture” will be more strongly asserted in reaction
to “domination by the core,” and “political cleavages will largely reflect sig-
nificant cultural differences between groups.”63 These are, of course, develop-
ments 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 subor-
dinated groups will not be eliminated until the underlying institutions and
50 | Settler Colonialism

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 lim-
ited 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 commu-
nity.”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 boundar-
ies 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 colo-
nialism gives us a starting point for understanding that racial subordination
in the United States is deeply, structurally embedded. Pursuing that analysis,
however, requires us to acknowledge that settler states represent a distinct
form of contemporary colonialism.

Settler Colonialism
Settler colonialism replaces classic colonialism’s hierarchical relationship of
center to periphery with one in which the settlers reject the suzerainty of
the metropolitan center and directly assert control over colonized lands and
peoples in order to establish a state of their own. “Settler colonialism was
foundational to modernity,” according to anthropologist Patrick Wolfe.66 It
is widely acknowledged that Europe’s industrial revolution and its attendant
economic “development” were fueled by external colonial expansion, that is,
the appropriation of African and Asian natural resources and labor.67 Less
appreciated is the critical role North American settler colonies played by
using occupied land, appropriated resources, and colonized labor to generate
commodities and expand markets for the goods being produced in Europe.68
Individual settlers’ desire for land “dovetail[ed] with the global market’s
imperative for expansion,”69 with the result that, according to historian James
 Settler Colonialism | 51

Belich, “it was settlement, not empire, that had the spread and staying power
in the history of European expansion.”70
In the classic colonial model, the colonizers’ primary goals are to extract
wealth from the land, labor, and resources of the colony and to create captive
markets for the goods they produce. The wealth thus generated is intended
to enrich the colonizing power, and the colonists themselves intend to return
home. By contrast, settler colonists intend to remain in the colonized terri-
tory. They bring with them a purported sovereign prerogative to establish a
new state on someone else’s land; to create social, political, legal, and eco-
nomic institutions intended solely for their own benefit; to determine who
may or may not—or must—live within their claimed borders, and exactly
how they are to live. The acquisition and occupation of the land itself thus be-
comes the colonizers’ first and foundational principle. “Territoriality is settler
colonialism’s specific, irreducible element,” Wolfe notes.71 Land is what allows
the settlers to create and control a society of their own imagining and then,
using that land and its resources, to generate the profits that enable them to
consolidate and expand their sovereign prerogative.72
The settlers’ assertion of sovereign entitlement distinguishes them not
only from Indigenous peoples but also from the voluntary and involuntary
migrants who come to join an existing society rather than to establish a new
one.73 Thus, Mahmood Mamdani observes that settlers “are made by con-
quest, not just by immigration.”74 Or, as Belich puts it, an “emigrant joined
someone else’s society, a settler or colonist remade his own.”75 Because settlers
view the occupied lands as the site of their own reproduction, Indigenous
peoples become the obstacles to the realization of their vision.
Wolfe explained that although settler colonization relies upon the appro-
priation of Indigenous labor, it is “at base a winner-take-all project whose
dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement.”76 Replacement, of
course, requires the elimination of that which already exists—Indigenous
peoples, along with their towns, farms, and hunting grounds; their names and
sacred sites; their languages and cultures. Warfare between Indigenous peo-
ples and colonizers is central to the origin stories of most settler societies—
certainly that of the United States—but in the process of colonial expansion,
armed conflict is “necessitated” not by Indigenous peoples’ acts of aggression
but by their mere existence. “People got in the way just by staying home,” as
professor Deborah Bird Rose aptly observes.77
As Indigenous peoples are “disappeared” in various ways, settlers turn to
strategies of replacement, and what they describe as putting appropriated
lands and resources to “productive” use.78 This requires the active recruitment
52 | Settler Colonialism

of a critical mass of settlers; the development of a unique cultural identity;

the formation of independent structures of governance and social control,
including but not limited to law; and the maintenance of military and eco-
nomic power sufficient to sustain themselves in these endeavors. Settlers also
perceive a need for a readily available labor force that is not intended to share
the benefits accruing to the settler class and, accordingly, develop strategies
to acquire and control those workers.79
Settler states establish, maintain, and protect their dominion by subjugat-
ing Indigenous peoples, non-Indigenous Others, and “deviant” members of
the settler class.80 The colonizers assert a possessory right to the state and
establish legal systems designed to ensure that each population subgroup re-
mains in its assigned place, geographically, socially, economically, and politi-
cally.81 The settler class portrays these as prerogatives of sovereignty but, as
Aboriginal legal scholar Irene Watson observes, “The myth of colonialism is
that it carried with it and applied sovereignty. The truth is that state sover-
eignty was claimed and constituted through colonialism.”82
The exercise of colonial power remains in constant tension with its ideo-
logical justifications—the settlers’ superior civilization, their democratic and
humanitarian values, the leading role they play in their own narrative of pro-
gressive human development.83 On the one hand, settler society is presumed
sacrosanct and the inclusion of Others cannot be allowed to corrupt it. On
the other, it needs to demonstrate, continuously, that humanity writ large will
benefit from accepting its social and political structures and internalizing its
worldview. The result is a constant and “unresolved tension between same-
ness and difference”84 that lays the foundation for the construction of racial
identity and hierarchy.
Settlers both identify with and reject their metropolitan centers of origin.
They seek to distinguish themselves from Indigenous peoples, but also need
to legitimize themselves as “indigenous” to the lands they settle.85 They also
want to distance themselves from those forcibly brought to provide labor as
well as those who migrate to join “their” society. From the settlers’ perspec-
tive, voluntary migrants range from the potentially assimilable to the hope-
lessly different, with the result that integration and exclusion “co-define each
other.”86 The resulting tensions between inclusion and exclusion are mediated
by the dynamic of difference essential to all colonial relations.87 Ethnicity and
national origin are subsumed within racial identities that, in turn, are designed
to keep the assimilationist vision proffered by the colonizers just out of reach.88
These are patterns common to all settler states and they help explain why,
as Wolfe concluded, settler colonial “invasion is a structure not an event.”89
The narrative framework of settler colonialism resonates with the lived expe-
 Settler Colonialism | 53

riences of Indigenous peoples, migrants of color in the United States, and all
those consigned to the margins of the master narrative. It explains, in struc-
tural terms, why Indigenous peoples continue to be the poorest and most
consistently ignored “racial” group in the United States, and why racism has
proven so intractable. Considering the structural dynamics of racialization
in the United States from this perspective can facilitate a realistic assessment
of the conditions currently faced not only by Indigenous peoples, but also by
peoples brought to this country as enslaved workers, incorporated by virtue
of territorial annexation, or induced to migrate without the option of becom-
ing part of the settler class. Such analyses, in turn, can help us envision a wide
array of remedial options for race-based injustices.

Colonialism and Genocide

The narrative presented in this book begins from the premise that, notwith-
standing its insistent self-identification as a land of freedom and equality,
the United States was established as a settler colonial state and—like Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and Israel—it remains one today.90 Patrick Wolfe’s
insight that settler colonization is a structure rather than an event means that
colonialism cannot be relegated to history. We live in a society whose most
fundamental relationships have been, and largely continue to be, defined by
the settlers’ goals of occupying the land, controlling its natural resources, ren-
dering it profitable, and maintaining a social order reflective of their own
priorities. In other words, we live within colonial (not postcolonial) eco-
nomic, political, and social structures.91
Colonialism cannot function without perpetuating difference between
the colonizers and the colonized; therefore, the social, political, or economic
institutions of a colonial power cannot ultimately be made equitable. More
fundamentally, colonialism is “by its nature” genocidal, as the philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out.92 This does not mean that it operates only by
engaging in slaughter, although that certainly has happened and continues
to happen. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who coined the term,
wanted to clarify that it was criminal to “destroy, cripple, or degrade entire
nations, racial and religious groups,” thereby eradicating their cultures and
the contributions they had made or might make to humanity.93 Genocide
thus encompasses a wide range of actions “committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” to
quote the 1948 Genocide Convention.94
In his seminal work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin explained that
“genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the op-
54 | Settler Colonialism

pressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the op-
pressor.”95 The latter, he noted, “may be made upon the oppressed population
which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after the removal
of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own
nationals.”96 Sartre observed that “colonialism cannot take place without sys-
tematically liquidating all the characteristics of the native society,” and this is
why he concluded that it is intrinsically genocidal.97
The historical patterns of destruction and imposition identified by Lemkin
are characteristic of American settler colonialism.98 As the following chapters
illustrate, people of color have been racialized in ways that facilitate strategies
intended to eliminate them, physically and conceptually, to exploit their labor,
to contain and control them, and to force them into an assimilationist paradigm
that nullifies their extant identities, thereby preempting them from exercising
their inherent right to self-determination. This is why structural racism cannot
and will not be eliminated if its colonial foundations are not recognized.

First Principles
In developing a narrative that frames racialization and racialized subjugation
as a function of colonialism, I find it helpful to remain mindful of a few basic
principles. The prime directive of settler colonization is to secure a territo-
rial base, and this requires—from the settlers’ perspective—the elimination
of those who, since time immemorial, have lived on, defined themselves in
terms of, and taken responsibility for that land. Two central points emerge
from this bedrock premise. The first is that settler societies, including the
United States, cannot function as such without continuously enforcing their
jurisdiction, political and military, over their claimed territories. This requires
them to ensure that their assertion of sovereignty is accepted as legitimate
within the larger global order, notwithstanding any illegalities involved in the
acquisition or occupation of the lands at issue.99 The second point is that the
decolonization of settler colonial states requires challenging their underlying
territorial claims.100 Reforming settler societies to be kinder, gentler, more
environmentally sustainable, or more inclusive legitimizes and, therefore,
entrenches the underlying colonial relationships. Such reforms are incapable
of dismantling settler hierarchies of power and privilege.
Moving from an analysis that focuses solely on the relationship between
settlers and Indigenous peoples to a triangulated analysis that distinguishes
migrants who are not intended to become part of the settler class from both
settlers and Indigenous peoples runs the risk of glossing over the central-
ity of territorial occupation, thereby reinforcing settler hegemony.101 For this
 Settler Colonialism | 55

reason Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar Haunani-Kay Trask insists

that portraying immigrants to Hawai‘i as anything other than the functional
equivalent of settlers means that “the history of our colonization becomes a
twice-told tale” because it allows the political and economic “success” story of
Asian immigrant laborers to reinforce a settler regime that keeps Indigenous
Hawaiians landless and poor, lacking access to decent healthcare or educa-
tion, institutionalized in the military, and disproportionately imprisoned.102
From this perspective, the status of Asians in Hawai‘i should be defined not
in relation to White settlers but solely in terms of “their relationship to indig-
enous peoples in a settler state.”103
The same issues arise with respect to other non-Indigenous peoples of
color throughout the United States. Stokely Carmichael articulated this very
clearly with respect to those of African descent. Speaking in 1970 at More-
house College in Atlanta, he identified the United States as a settler colony
and explained in his typically straightforward manner:

In order to be a successful settler colony, one must commit genocide against

the traditional owners of the land. This is exactly what the Europeans have
done. . . .
When you call them Americans, you make it sound as if they belong here.
You do that because you want to call yourselves black Americans and you
want to feel that you belong here too. . . . [But] if we say we are Americans . . .
it means that we participated in committing genocide against the red man
and support the genocide that “Americans” are committing in Vietnam, Asia,
Africa, and Latin America.104

Much as any of us may wish to “belong here,” if we are not indigenous to

this land we would not be here but for settler occupation, and our relation-
ship to structures of power and privilege must be understood in that context.
Because our very presence as non-Indigenous peoples can legitimate settler
society and its genocidal appropriation of Indigenous lands, struggles we
wage to rectify the disparities between the settler class and non-Indigenous
Others run the risk of rendering settler colonial institutions invisible while
simultaneously reinforcing them.105 As Veracini explains, “The colonising
settler can disappear behind the subaltern migrant” and settler states “can
then be recoded as postcolonial migrant societies.”106
This danger must not be ignored or minimized. It need not, however, pre-
clude development of accurate analyses of structural racism in the United
States through particularized inquiries into the ways in which the settler
class—defined as those who came with, and still live with, the presumption
56 | Settler Colonialism

that this is their country—has facilitated the migration, voluntary or involun-

tary, of persons it never intended to fully incorporate into American society
and developed a panoply of social institutions to ensure that non-settler mi-
grants remain marginalized and subordinated. Such endeavors can help us
understand the significance of the differences between the treatment of Indig-
enous peoples and the treatment of non-Indigenous Others, and how these
distinctions are rooted in the diverse purposes served by various segments of
the population over whom the settler class asserts hegemonic control.
The choice faced most immediately by non-Indigenous people in the
United States is not necessarily “stay or leave,” but whether we are choos-
ing to function as colonizers or to consciously pursue decolonization.107 The
dominant narrative attempts to disappear Indigenous peoples and to con-
vince the rest of us that we are simply part of a “nation of immigrants.” In that
construction, the well-being of non-Indigenous people of color is enhanced
by the consolidation of settler state hegemony. If, however, we understand
the persistence of racialized injustices and disparities as reflective of the dy-
namic of difference essential to the maintenance of a colonial state, and accept
that the subjugation of so-called racial minorities is rooted in the displace-
ment of Indigenous peoples, we may see that Indigenous struggles for self-
determination are, in fact, our struggles, too.
11

Decolonization and Self-Determination

The position that only the state creates law . . . confuses the status
of interpretation with the status of political domination. . . . Le-
gal meaning is a challenging enrichment of social life, a potential
restraint on arbitrary power and violence. We ought to stop cir-
cumscribing the nomos; we ought to invite new worlds.
—Robert Cover

International law goes well beyond the United States’ domestic law in its
interpretation of the prohibition of racial discrimination, its recognition of
the unique status of Indigenous peoples, and its acknowledgment of forced
assimilation—among other measures—as inherently genocidal. States are
responsible for protecting all of these rights, and for providing effective rem-
edies when they are violated. States resist the application of this body of law
to oppressed or colonized peoples within their claimed borders, but generally
do so by denying, for example, that genocide has occurred, or that a con-
temporary state practice is discriminatory. They rarely contest the fact that
human rights law prohibits such conduct. As a result, the arbitrary exercise of
state power and the subordination of peoples on the basis of race, ethnicity,
national origin, religion, gender, or any number of other characteristics are
now understood not only as moral wrongs, but also as violations of law.
Nonetheless, international law, like domestic law, remains tightly con-
trolled by those who wield state power and, as a result, often serves to perpet-
uate colonial relations both within and among extant states. The ideological
framing and aspirational norms embodied in law are often in tension with
the exercise of raw power. By bringing the contradictions between ideals and
reality to bear, we can, at times, expand substantive legal protections and fa-
cilitate their implementation. A legal framing can also empower those who
work for justice at the grassroots level by confirming that law, at some level,
acknowledges the legitimacy of their efforts to protect their communities and
their insistence that society writ large respect their rights and their human-
ity. However, both international and domestic legal systems remain some
variant of “the Courts of the conqueror,” to return to Justice Marshall’s blunt
descriptor.1

186
 Decolonization and Self- Determination | 187

This means that, while drawing on the legal resources available to us, we
must also conceptualize ways of organizing human society that go beyond the
parameters of extant law. As Robert Cover reminded us, rather than conflat-
ing law with political domination, we have the capacity to frame it in much
broader and more socially constructive ways. In this endeavor, the right of all
peoples to self-determination provides a useful starting point. This chapter
begins with an overview of the decolonization process of the 1960s and early
1970s, noting in particular the failure of this process to extend the right of
self-government to internally colonized peoples in either external colonies
or settler states. The chapter then considers the potential applicability of the
right to self-determination to Indigenous peoples and people of color in the
United States.

The “Decolonization Era”

The political changes of the decades following World War II were accompa-
nied by dramatic transformations of international law and legal institutions,
many of which purported to facilitate a decolonized world. Three chapters of
the UN Charter and one of its principal organs were devoted to ensuring the
eventual independence of “non-self-governing territories” and the well-being
of their “inhabitants.”2 On December 14, 1960, the General Assembly issued
a Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and
Peoples (Resolution 1514), “solemnly proclaim[ing] the necessity of bringing
to a speedy and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifesta-
tions” and acknowledging that the “subjection of peoples to alien subjugation,
domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human
rights, is contrary to the charter of the United Nations, and is an impediment
to world peace and co-operation.”3 “Immediate steps” were to be taken in all
non-self-governing territories “to transfer all powers to the peoples of those
territories, without any conditions or reservations.”4
The following day the General Assembly adopted Resolution 1541, which
identifies three options for non-self-governing territories: sovereign indepen-
dence, free association with an independent state, and integration with an
independent state.5 Mindful of the reluctance of colonial powers to relinquish
“their” territories, the resolution notes that the status of “free association” is
to be contingent upon the free and voluntary choice of the peoples of the ter-
ritory, must “respect[] the individuality and the cultural characteristics of the
territory and its peoples,” and may be modified by the people.6 Integration, if
chosen, was to be on the basis of full equality, and “should be the result of the
freely expressed wishes of the territory’s peoples acting with full knowledge of
188 | Decolonization and Self- Determination

the change in their status.”7 The choice, clearly, was not up to the colonizing
powers, but one for colonized peoples to make.
To all appearances the colonial world order was crumbling and, initially,
the prospect of truly liberatory change on a global scale seemed imminent.
On June 30, 1960, celebrating the occasion of the independence of the Demo-
cratic Republic of the Congo, prime minister Patrice Lumumba noted that
the successful effort “to put an end to the humiliating slavery that had been
forced upon us” marked the beginning of another “sublime struggle that will
bring our country peace, prosperity, and grandeur.”8 The following year, Gha-
na’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, said with respect to Africa’s vast
mineral, agricultural, and hydrological resources, “Never before have a people
had within their grasp so great an opportunity for developing a continent
endowed with so much wealth.”9 Besides political independence, Nkrumah
stated, “all we ask of the former colonial powers is their good will and co-
operation to remedy past mistakes and injustices.”10
This request, of course, was not met. Lumumba was assassinated in early
1961 at the behest of Belgium and with the support of the United States;
Nkrumah was overthrown in a 1966 coup soon after he published Neo-
Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, a radical critique of Western re-
sponses to African nationalism.11 Their fates reflect the broader reality that
the anticipated benefits of decolonization have not materialized in any mean-
ingful way for most formerly colonized peoples. Substantive decolonization
under international law has been constrained by many factors, including
most prominently the presumptions that (1) decolonization meant indepen-
dent statehood and nothing more; (2) the rules of international law, devel-
oped by and for colonial powers, would remain largely unchanged; (3) the
boundaries of existing external colonies would become the boundaries of the
new states; and (4) only territories “geographically separate” from colonizing
powers were eligible for decolonization.
Antony Anghie notes that the jurists of the decolonization era were
“framing the project as though the colonial encounter was about to occur,
as opposed to already having taken place.”12 Rather than “remedy[ing] past
mistakes and injustices” as Nkrumah requested, the changes initiated by the
most powerful states and their leaders ignored the history of colonialism,
thereby precluding substantive analyses of structural inequities.13 The extent
to which newly recognized states had been stripped of their wealth was dis-
regarded, as was the extent to which the Western powers had relied upon the
exploitation of the resources of these territories for their own development.14
It was as if the historical slate had been wiped clean at the moment the former
colonies became independent.15
 Decolonization and Self- Determination | 189

This clean slate was subject to one important caveat. The historical record
had not been erased with respect to the leases and concession agreements
entered into prior to independence, which the colonial powers now insisted
were binding on the new states.16 Although colonized peoples—like Ameri-
can Indian nations—had not been recognized as sovereign enough to pre-
vent colonial occupation and expropriation, they were now deemed to have
had just enough sovereignty to alienate their natural resources.17 The result,
as Nkrumah observed in 1965, was that Africa’s “earth is rich, yet the prod-
ucts that come from and above and below her soil continue to enrich, not
Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s
impoverishment.”18
The formerly colonized territories were now characterized as simply “back-
ward” or “less developed” states, and the colonial powers that had become
rich and powerful at their expense began creating institutions that would
“aid” in their development without risking any fundamental change in global
economic power.19 In this respect, decolonization has functioned similarly
to the “granting” of formal legal equality under US law—a level playing field
was declared and remedial measures addressing a long history of exploitation
were, for the most part, off the table.
For internally colonized peoples in classic and settler colonial territories,
the United Nations’ “solemn proclamation” of “bringing to a speedy and un-
conditional end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations” did little—or
nothing—to further their decolonization. The UN Charter prohibits “the
threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence
of any state,” a principle reiterated in several General Assembly resolutions.20
This principle protects colonial boundaries that were externally imposed with
no recognition of Indigenous peoples’ ties to the land or their cultural, po-
litical, or economic realities. Known as uti possidetis, “the doctrine that old
administrative boundaries will become international boundaries when a po-
litical subdivision achieves independence”21 has been consistently employed
to require that arbitrarily imposed colonial boundaries be accepted by emerg-
ing states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia as a condition of independence,
thereby “legitimiz[ing] the denial of sovereignty to pre-colonial, independent
African states and communities.”22 The result, law professor Tayyab Mahmud
observes, “is often a mockery of the right to self-determination” as “colonial
lineage and the process of territorial demarcation of postcolonial states en-
sured that internal colonialism became the rule rather than the exception.”23
Settler states similarly rely on “territorial integrity” to deny Indigenous
land rights, but the mere fact of militarized occupation gives them no supe-
rior claim. France quite famously attempted to maintain its colonial power
190 | Decolonization and Self- Determination

over Algeria by declaring Algeria to be part of its metropolitan territory,

largely because such a significant French population had taken up what it
considered to be permanent residence in the colony.24 The French claim was
never accepted as compatible with international law, yet there is nothing that
meaningfully distinguishes it from the claims of the United States to, say,
Hawai‘i or Alaska, both incorporated into the United States in accordance
with the wishes of the settlers and without regard for the preferences of their
Indigenous populations.25
As we consider the decolonization of territories occupied by settler states,
it becomes clear that the roadblocks created by international law’s emphasis
on respect for “territorial integrity” are reinforced by the exemption of settler
states from the decolonization mandate. Thus, Resolution 1541 attempts to
limit the definition of non-self-governing territories to those that are “geo-
graphically separate” as well as “distinct ethnically and/or culturally” from
the “administering” state.26 This is sometimes described as a requirement that
territories be separated from their colonizing powers by an open expanse of
“salt water” (or “blue water”) in order to have a right to decolonization.27 Like
the uti possidetis doctrine, its territorial focus undermines the right of peoples
to self-determination, and reinforces internal colonial regimes.
Settler states wield much power in the international legal system and they
have ensured that the right to decolonization will not be interpreted to reach
them. Nonetheless, the legal and economic limitations imposed upon the
mandate to decolonize were political compromises, not a reflection of what
international law actually required at the time, now mandates, or could evolve
to be. As Patrick Wolfe observes, “Nothing . . . about settler colonialism re-
quires there to be a spatial hiatus (or ‘blue water’) between metropole and
colony. Settler colonization occurs and persists to the extent that a popula-
tion sets out to replace another one in its habitation regardless of where the
colonizing population originated.”28 Conversely, its decolonization will not be
imposed from above, but must be effectuated from below. With this in mind,
we consider how recognition of the right to self-determination may aid us in
this process.

The Right to Self-Determination

“Liberation does not come as a gift from anybody,” Adolfo Gilly observed
in introducing Fanon’s Studies in a Dying Colonialism.29 Self-determination,
likewise, is not granted; rather, we realize it by fulfilling our responsibilities
for ourselves, for the well-being of our communities, and for all of our rela-
tions. As Robert Williams summarized, it “is understood generally, at its core,
 Decolonization and Self- Determination | 191

as encompassing the idea that human beings, individually and as groups,

should be in control of their own destiny, and that systems of government
should be devised accordingly, and not imposed upon them by alien domina-
tion.”30 From this perspective, it comes as no surprise that self-determination
is central to the movements of Indigenous peoples, peoples subjected to
external colonialism, and those who are colonized within recognized states.
According to the International Court of Justice, “The right of peoples
to self-determination, as it evolved from the Charter and from United Na-
tions practice, has an erga omnes character”; in other words, it is binding
on all.31 The UN Charter identifies the development of “friendly relations
among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-
determination of peoples” as one of the United Nations’ primary functions.32
As mentioned above, the General Assembly’s 1960 Declaration on the Grant-
ing of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (Resolution 1514)
“solemnly proclaims the necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional
end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations.”33 It states forthrightly,
“All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they
freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social
and cultural development.”34
This is repeated almost verbatim in Common Article 1 of the ICCPR and
the ICESCR.35 According to the UN Human Rights Committee, the right
to self-determination was given such primacy because it is a foundational
precept whose “realization is an essential condition for the effective guar-
antee and observance of individual human rights and for the promotion
and strengthening of those rights.”36 In other words, individual rights can-
not be fully realized absent decolonization. As with any legal principle, the
real debates emerge in its application. Legal scholar Richard Falk observes
that self-determination “bears directly on many of the bloodiest and persis-
tent struggles that presently beset every region of the planet.”37 Its redemp-
tive potential, he notes, hinges on “whether the criteria relied upon to clarify
the right to self-determination are to be determined in a top-down manner
through the mechanisms of statism and geopolitics or by a bottom-up ap-
proach that exhibits the vitality and potency of emergent trends favoring the
extension of democratic practices and the deepening of human rights.”38
Not surprisingly, states do not see it as in their interest for peoples purport-
edly under their jurisdiction to exercise their right to self-determination and,
as a result, have developed strategies for resisting such efforts or minimizing
their impact. Because self-determination is articulated as a right of “peoples,”
a state’s first line of defense is often to claim that a particular group is not
a distinct “people” but simply a minority group within the general popula-
192 | Decolonization and Self- Determination

tion.39 Settler states and other entities with internally colonized peoples also
continue to rely on the “salt water” or “blue water” doctrine to limit decolo-
nization to territories that are “geographically separate” as well as “distinct
ethnically and/or culturally” from the “administering” state.40 Finally, states
claim that their right to “territorial integrity” precludes interference with their
“internal affairs.”41
A different picture emerges when self-determination is viewed from the
bottom up. From this perspective, five foundational principles are worth
noting:

1. Territorial integrity is a legal fiction.

2. Peoplehood is constructed and defined by the people, not the state.
3. Self-determination cannot be constrained by a paradigm of “universal”
rights.
4. States are not the only viable forms of political organization.
5. Self-determination is a process and a continuing right.

We turn now to these principles.

Territorial Integrity
State resistance to decolonization based upon the right to territorial integrity
quickly devolves into claims based on raw power rather than legality. With
respect to internally colonized peoples, states rely primarily on the principle
of uti possidetis or the “salt water” thesis to deny that the legal obligation to
decolonize applies to them. In realpolitik terms, it makes sense for these prin-
ciples to have been incorporated into a body of law established largely by
and for states. Substantively, however, these rules lack legitimacy, even within
that framework, prompting international legal scholar Henry J. Richardson
III to observe more than a quarter century ago that “the colonialism-derived
condition that a ‘people’ may only exist on territory not belonging to the met-
ropolitan state . . . has arguably been dropped.”42
Uti possidetis, ita possideatis was a principle of Roman law meaning “as you
possess, so may you possess,” and it was not the rule of decision in a dispute
over real property but merely the starting point, establishing that the party not
in possession had the burden of proof.43 Contemporary international law’s
transformation of this presumption into an inflexible determinant of terri-
torial rights simply gives force the imprimatur of law. As law professor Ste-
ven Ratner observes, it is “a complete reversal from the Roman law concept,
 Decolonization and Self- Determination | 193

which excluded even provisional possession to a party who accomplished it by

violence.”44
The so-called “salt water” thesis is no less transparently based on power
rather than law. Why would geographic contiguity render an otherwise colo-
nial occupation into a legally acceptable territorial acquisition? This restric-
tive interpretation of the mandate to decolonize originates with UN General
Assembly Resolution 1541, but that simply reflects the power of the major set-
tler states to conform the law to their practice, as well as the fact that, in this
case, their interests were aligned with those of the newly independent states
anxious to preempt secessionist movements. The right to decolonization is a
function of structural relations, not location. As a result, “self-determination
units” may encompass “entities part of a metropolitan State [that] have been
governed in such a way as to make them in effect non-self-governing territo-
ries,” according to international law scholar James Crawford.45

Defining Peoples
The right to self-determination is one that may be exercised by peoples, and
peoplehood is established by the history, beliefs, and actions of the people.
States do not have an exclusive right to determine which groups under their
claimed jurisdiction constitute peoples. Rather, as legal scholar Howard Vogel
observes, “the definition of the term ‘peoples’ in a minority rights context
must be left to the people themselves.”46 The 1976 Universal Declaration
on the Rights of Peoples, also known as the Algiers Declaration, states not
only that “every people has an imprescriptible and unalienable right to self-
determination” but also that this encompasses “the right to break free from
any colonial or foreign domination, whether direct or indirect, and from any
racist regime.”47
Groups previously relegated to “minority” status are increasingly recog-
nized as having a right to self-determination.48 Richardson observed in the
mid-1990s that “a new constitutive feature of the world community comprises
the recent global phenomenon of claims to the right of self-determination of
peoples, by a wide variety of peoples and groups,” including Chechens and
Georgians in Russia, Chiapas “rebels” in Mexico, the Ogoni in Nigeria, and
Native peoples in the United States and Canada.49 Other examples abound,
including but not limited to the Basques and Catalans in Spain, the Nagas in
India, and the Tamils in Sri Lanka.50 In 1998 the Canadian Supreme Court
noted with respect to the status of Quebec that “a people” may be a minority
within a state,51 and that a “definable group” may have the right to determine
194 | Decolonization and Self- Determination

their own political status when they are consistently excluded from political,
social, and cultural participation in government.52
Peoplehood is often conceived in static or essentialist terms, but it can be
actively constructed. In 1971, in the Namibia case, the International Court
of Justice rejected South Africa’s argument that “tribalism” within Namibia
prevented its population from constituting a people.53 Addressing “the Na-
mibians’ status of a people,” vice president Fouad Ammoun’s separate opinion
recognized the role of agency in this process by pointing out that “the Namib-
ian people . . . asserted its international personality by taking up the struggle
for freedom” and, as a result, had been recognized by UN General Assembly
and Security Council resolutions, as well as by the Court.54 Similarly, sus-
tained occupation does not, per se, alter the nature of the relationship. Justice
Ammoun also observed that neither Germany’s colonization of Namibia nor
South Africa’s administrative “mandate” erased Namibia’s legal personality.55
“Sovereignty, which is inherent in every people, just as liberty is inherent in
every human being, therefore did not cease to belong to the people subject to
mandate. It had simply, for a time, been rendered inarticulate and deprived
of freedom of expression.”56
As the two major human rights treaties unequivocally state, all peoples
have “the right to freely determine their political status and to freely pur-
sue their economic, social and cultural development.”57 They also have the
right to “freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources,”58 which is
why the major settler states fought a protracted battle to have Indigenous
peoples referred to as “populations” rather than “peoples” in international
legal forums.59 But this does not necessarily imply any particular course of
action. As Resolutions 1514 and 1541 affirm, colonized peoples have the right
to choose, for themselves, whether they wish to be politically independent or
to negotiate other relationships with their (former) colonizers. Legal scholar
Maivân Clech Lâm notes that “the overwhelming majority of indigenous
peoples represent, even as they pursue the recognition of their full right of
self-determination, that they do not plan to exercise the right to effect separa-
tion or secession from encompassing states, but only to re-negotiate, albeit in
fundamental respects, their relations with them.”60 Nonetheless, the choice is
to be made by the people themselves, not by the colonizing power.

Moving beyond “Universality”

According to the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
human rights comprise a “common standard of achievement for all peoples
and nations,” to be promoted and respected by “every individual and every
 Decolonization and Self- Determination | 195

organ of society.”61 Universality is often considered the greatest strength of

the international human rights system but may also be its Achilles’ heel, as
the values and presumptions at issue are so explicitly Euroderivative. Rights
are framed primarily in terms of the relationship between the individual and
the state, and it is presumed that they are most effectively protected by dem-
ocratic governance, as that concept has been developed in the West. “The
paradox of the corpus is that it seeks to foster diversity and difference but
does so only under the rubric of Western political democracy,” Makau Mutua
notes, thereby resulting in a system characterized by “inelasticity and cultural
parochialism.”62
All human societies have developed norms and expectations of behavior—
what we might call the rights and responsibilities of its members. One can
envision a global framework of human rights that recognizes and respects the
plurality of cultural perspectives and the importance of particularized con-
text, but our contemporary human rights norms emerge from an explicitly
colonial setting. Mutua observes that its colonial legacy is perpetuated in a
narrative subtext that consistently “depicts an epochal contest pitting savages,
on the one hand, against victims and saviors on the other.”63 In this construc-
tion, the “saviors” utilize human rights to protect the “victims” from “sav-
age” or “backward” practices. Thus framed, the globalization of human rights
tends to impose particularly Western constructs upon non-Western societies
as well as on those deemed Other within Western societies, thereby replicat-
ing the hierarchies characteristic of colonial relationships.64
In many cultures, human beings are understood not as atomized individ-
uals but in relation to their communities, and human communities do not
exist autonomously but in relationship to all other forms of life. “Indigenous
identity is formed by the intersection of land, culture, and community,” ac-
cording to legal scholar Rebecca Tsosie. It is a reciprocal relationship, with the
land looking after the people and “orient[ing] the people in understanding
how to meet their responsibilities to each other and to the land.”65 From this
perspective, one’s rights cannot be coherently understood apart from one’s
responsibilities.
For those of us raised within the dominant culture of the United States, it
is difficult to grasp the meaning of Robert Vachon’s admonition that among
many traditional Indigenous cultures, the word “rights” does not exist, and
that for many people “it is difficult to understand that rights or entitlements
could be homocentrically defined.”66 Continuing, he notes, the notion “that
they, furthermore, could be defined by a sovereign state . . . is almost ridicu-
lous.”67 Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash report learning from their
“grassroots experiences . . . that we do not live in a universe, but in a pluriv-
196 | Decolonization and Self- Determination

erse; that the universality in the human condition claimed by human rights
propagators exists only in their minority worldview.”68 Among other things,
this means that true self-determination will inevitably take many different
forms.

Thinking beyond States

States are not inevitable forms of human social organization. The contem-
porary international legal order is composed of state actors, and we tend to
presume that lands and peoples would, of course, come under the exclusive
jurisdiction of a particular state. But history tells us otherwise. The current
state-centric system is generally traced to 1648 and the Peace of Westpha-
lia, but it took an additional three centuries before the world was divided up
almost exclusively between state actors.69 Human societies were organized
in many different ways for millennia before states were imposed upon them,
and “sub-state” forms of governance continue to be as influential, in many
respects, as state governments. “Possession of sovereignty is the result of force
threatened and applied,” and “states are the results of wars fought and won,
rather than of some sort of natural truth about the community,” Paul Kahn
observes.70
State boundaries have always been, and continue to be, in flux, and the
viability of the state system itself is increasingly being called into question.71
It is not clear that states have contributed in any significant way to human
well-being. Instead, they have functioned to override alternative forms of so-
cial organization, imposing in the process very Western, universalizing, hi-
erarchical, and exclusive presumptions about governance. But we know that
nations can be organized in multiple and overlapping ways, that territories
may be shared between them, that individuals can identify themselves within
networks of relationships rather than as subjects of a particular sovereignty.
This means that self-determination can take many forms. As Rosa Ehrenreich
Brooks suggests, “If we stop fetishizing the state, perhaps many phenomena
that now often appear . . . as problems . . . would instead appear as virtues or
opportunities.”72

Self-Determination as a Continuing Process

Finally, self-determination is not a static right, but a “continuing” one. As
framed by international legal scholar Antonio Cassese, “The issue of whether
the government of a sovereign State is in compliance with [common article
1 of the ICCPR and the ICESCR] is a legitimate question, with reference to
 Decolonization and Self- Determination | 197

any State, at any point in time.”73 This means that the status of a people sub-
ject to the jurisdiction of any state may always be reassessed.74 Perhaps more
importantly, self-determination continuously addresses the conditions under
which people live and the ways in which they are governed.75 Erica-Irene
Daes emphasizes that

it is very important to think of self-determination as a process. The process of

achieving self-determination is endless. This is true of all peoples—not only in-
digenous peoples. Social and economic conditions are ever-changing in our
complex world, as are the cultures and aspirations of peoples. For different peo-
ples to be able to live together peacefully, without exploitation or domination—
whether it is within the same state or in two neighboring states—they must
continually renegotiate the terms of their relationships.76

In other words, self-determination is not an endpoint but a way of being.

Nations Within
Henry Richardson summarizes the state of the law as follows: “The right
of self-determination of peoples remains authoritative as international jus
cogens. Not only has there been no limiting of the right under international
law, but rather the right has expanded and continues to do so. It is no longer
limited to freedom from overseas colonialism and foreign occupation if it
ever was.”77 What does this mean for people under US jurisdiction?
A key feature of settler colonialism is the colonizers’ presumption that
they came with, and still maintain, a sovereign prerogative to assert control
over the lands, resources, and peoples found within their claimed territorial
boundaries. Asserting this prerogative, the American settler state has defined
all peoples “encapsulated” within its borders as “minorities” with only such
rights as it chooses to grant or recognize.78 But this does not mean that these
groups are not “peoples” with legal rights. The determination of who consti-
tutes “a people” is largely in the hands of the people themselves. As Justice
Ammoun of the ICJ noted in the Namibia case, international personality can
be asserted “by taking up the struggle for freedom,” and sovereignty does “not
cease to belong to the people” simply because it has “been rendered inarticu-
late” by sustained occupation.79
International law tends to speak of “peoples” in relatively fixed and es-
sentializing ways, but it is much more realistic to see peoples and nations as
living beings, organic entities that grow and adapt in response to their envi-
ronments. Indigenous peoples around the world have long recognized that
198 | Decolonization and Self- Determination

kinship connects them to others in ever-expanding networks of relationship

without eviscerating their own identities.80 As a result of our histories and the
social relations we have chosen or have had thrust upon us, Indigenous and
non-Indigenous peoples within the United States are not easily separated into
distinct and exclusive identities, racial or otherwise. This does not, however,
preclude their recognition as peoples.

Native Nations
The most fundamental principles of international law thus establish that
the Native nations of the “lower forty-eight” states, the Indigenous nations
in Alaska, and Native Hawaiians constitute peoples with the right to self-
determination. In light of their long-standing relationships with the territory
now occupied by the United States—their rights to and responsibilities for
these lands—there is no reason, other than raw colonial power, why they
should not be recognized as non-self-governing peoples with a right to decol-
onization. And that, in turn, means that it is their decision as to whether they
wish to be independent, to be incorporated into the settler state, or to negoti-
ate a compact of free association on terms acceptable to all parties. (These
rights, of course, also apply to external US colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam,
the Northern Marianas, “American” Samoa, and the “US” Virgin Islands.81)
This raises the possibility of an entirely different configuration of “Ameri-
can” territorial rights and responsibilities. Indigenous peoples on territories
claimed by the United States also have a right to restitution with respect to
stolen lands and natural resources, and to both compensation and satisfac-
tion for the egregious harms inflicted upon their peoples. And it is at this
point that we encounter the “fear factor.” In my experience it is difficult to
have a rational discussion about decolonizing American society with anyone
who is not Indigenous because the very idea triggers a defensive reaction that
generally manifests as “but then we’d have to leave,” quickly followed by “and
I don’t have anywhere to go.”82 As this reaction illustrates, it is useful for set-
tler culture to project sovereignty and identity as all-or-nothing propositions,
leaving non-Indigenous peoples to imagine that their disappearance is the
only alternative to the status quo. Because this is not a thinkable alternative, it
allows them to dismiss the foundational issue of colonial occupation without
even addressing it.
In fact, however, it was Angloamerican settlers, not American Indian na-
tions, who imposed their presumption of exclusivity, who arrived with a firm
conviction that they could live on this land only if Indigenous peoples were
eliminated. As Dean Saranillio observes, “Imagined violence on the part of
 Decolonization and Self- Determination | 199

Indigenous movements is a common trope that allows Native savagery to

stand in for settler self-critique.”83 But it is the settler state that has always im-
posed itself through violence. What decolonization actually entails is a relin-
quishment of the settlers’ self-assigned entitlement to encompass everything
and everyone within their state; in other words, their insistence that only they
have the right to be self-determining.84 Indigenous nations “encapsulated”
within the United States have rarely if ever called for the departure of all set-
tlers or other migrants, “but rather accountability for their discourses and
practices that ultimately come at Native expense.”85 The presumption that re-
linquishing exclusive settler sovereignty equates to a wholesale evacuation of
the territory by non-Indigenous peoples does not reflect any material reality
but simply an inability to conceive of living with, or within, others’ polities.

“Nations Becoming”
What are the implications of decolonization and self-determination for non-
Indigenous people of color in the United States? This question has been
debated, in one way or another, since the arrival of the first enslaved Africans
in the British colonies,86 the annexation of Mexico in 1848, and the United
States’ acquisition of external colonies from the late nineteenth through
mid-twentieth centuries. Ultimately, it will only be answered by the people
themselves, for this is what self-determination means. But we can make some
preliminary observations.
People of African descent in the United States have long been described
as a “nation within a nation”87 and, according to Richardson, under interna-
tional law they are best understood as “encapsulated” within a national state
but nonetheless a “people” entitled to rights of self-determination.88 Interna-
tional law does not give internally colonized or “encapsulated” peoples within
the United States a right to function as colonizers themselves. The fact that
peoples indigenous to one part of the world have been relocated to the ter-
ritories of other Indigenous peoples does not erase their peoplehood or their
inherent sovereignty, but neither does it give them a legitimate claim to some-
one else’s lands. Relocated peoples are, however, entitled to freely determine
their political relationship to the colonizing power, and they are certainly free
to negotiate with the Indigenous owners of the lands they now occupy or wish
to occupy.
The distinct rights of peoples and nations can help communities to think
of themselves outside the institutions imposed upon them by the state. This
is why there were so many “nationalist” movements among people of color
in the United States during the 1960s. One striking example was “El Plan
200 | Decolonization and Self- Determination

Espiritual de Aztlán,” a 1969 Chicano declaration of “the Independence of

our Mestizo Nation,” a “Union of free pueblos.”89 The invocation of Aztlán
became a bold assertion of Chicano identity, recognizing the Indigenous
heritage of Mexicans in the Southwest, emphasizing the occupation of their
lands, and rejecting assimilation in favor of cultural independence. Other
non-Indigenous people of color have found it more difficult to pinpoint what
might make them a “people,” but nonetheless we continue to struggle, as in-
dividuals and communities, to develop identities that do not intrinsically re-
inforce the settler state.
Envisioning and realizing identity, like self-determination itself, is a pro-
cess. Peoplehood may be forged and kept alive through struggle, as Justice
Ammoun recognized. While our histories and relationships are essential
components of our identities, we need not invoke or rely upon a mythical
or essentialized past. Frantz Fanon observed that “a national culture is not
a folklore, nor an abstract populism. . . . It is not made up of the inert dregs
of . . . actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the
people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in
the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which
that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.”90
In 1970 the late poet and playwright Amiri Baraka urged Black Americans
to live “as if we were liberated people,” and called for the establishment of
a political organization that would “be a model for the nation becoming.”91
What is it that we—any of us—are becoming? In the final chapter we consider
ways to move beyond the presumption that “only the state creates law” as
Cover put it, and to “invite new worlds.”92
Conclusion

We Won When We Started

This exploration of the potential that settler colonial theory holds for address-
ing issues of racial justice was motivated by my concern that young people
of color in the United States today continue to face the deeply entrenched
racial disparities and injustices that many of us confronted in the 1960s and
early 1970s, without the collective energy and vision that inspired activists of
that era. Remembering the impact that the global struggles for decoloniza-
tion had on movements for social change within the United States, I began by
considering whether the analysis of people of color within the United States
as internally colonized, frequently proffered a half century ago, was theoreti-
cally unsound. Concluding that this perspective was not so much unsound as
incomplete, I have suggested that applying settler colonial theory to the racial
realism Derrick Bell urged us to embrace can provide a historically accurate
basis for understanding how and why racialized privilege and subordination
have become so deeply institutionalized in American society. My hope is that
developing this theoretical framework from a multiplicity of perspectives will
help us implement liberatory alternatives to the status quo.
Our stories, the narratives of our past and present, allow us to envision and
build our futures. A realistic narrative about contemporary manifestations
of racism must begin by acknowledging that in the United States today we
are defined by colonial relations. Unlike their brethren who colonized much
of Africa and Asia, the Angloamerican “founding fathers” did not come to
extract profit from the land, labor, and natural resources of their colonies and
then return home. Instead, they came to stay. This meant occupying the land
and doing their best to disappear the peoples indigenous to that land. It meant
making the land profitable by importing labor—voluntary and involuntary—
and establishing structures for controlling that labor. These colonizers came
with a presumption of their own sovereign prerogative, not to join someone
else’s society but to establish a state over which they exercised complete con-
trol. They assert, to this day, the right to determine who will be permitted to
enter or remain within their claimed boundaries, who will be accorded par-
ticular civil or political rights, and the extent to which settler privilege will be

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promoted and protected by the state. These prerogatives are manifest through
a racial hierarchy that pervades all aspects of life in the United States, one that
is enshrined in its legal system and is intended to ensure that each person
remains in his or her “place,” literally and figuratively.
Racialized injustice continues to shape the lives and limit the potential of
each generation of children in this country. The United States is neither post-
racial nor postcolonial, and a revised narrative will not change these realities.
However, by understanding the functions served by the policies and practices
of the settler colonial state, we can more creatively envision remedial mea-
sures and assess their ability to empower our communities. Rather than en-
gaging in what amount to moral appeals to a legal system that has facilitated
genocide, slavery, and racialized subjugation, we can expose its lack of moral
authority and consider ways in which law can further decolonization. We can
actively and collectively engage in the construction of the law and, by exten-
sion, in the creation of social, political, economic, educational, and cultural
institutions that meet the needs of our communities. As Robert Cover urged,
we can “stop circumscribing the nomos” and “invite new worlds.”1
We are supported in this effort by fundamental principles of international
law. International law does not provide us with any quick fixes, but its empha-
sis on human dignity affirms that we cannot be free within social structures
that crush the human spirit. International law clearly mandates decoloniza-
tion, and we cannot pretend that this does not apply to settler colonial states.
Our first and foundational responsibility is to support Indigenous struggles
for self-determination because as long as Indigenous peoples are colonized in
the United States, the rest of us are complicit in the occupation. To the extent
we refuse to function as colonizers, we will be able to promote the right of
all peoples to self-determination. It is a right that can be exercised in an infi-
nite variety of ways, from gatherings where members of a community iden-
tify their needs and proprieties; to the assertion of local control of policing,
education, or healthcare services; to the reorganizing of economically self-
sufficient and politically independent nations. The crux, as I see it, is whether
any given action empowers communities and promotes decolonization, or
further entrenches extant relationships of domination and subordination.
We take inspiration from those who came before us, whose struggles for
survival allowed us to be here today. When we challenge the status quo, we
can never be certain of victory. But we know that as we implement our col-
lective understandings of what human societies can be, we are engaging in
processes of decolonization. We do not require anyone’s permission to live
with dignity or to exercise our right to self-determination. Those who build
community-controlled institutions create space for future generations to
 Conclusion | 217

thrive. Those who take to the streets or otherwise physically challenge the
prevailing order demonstrate the futility of the laws intended to keep colo-
nized peoples perpetually subordinated.
The late Derrick Bell reminded us that by refusing to allow the guns and
dogs of the state to intimidate them into inaction, those who step out to de-
fend the people allow us to see our own potential. He encouraged us to “stand
in the place where persons of courage have always stood, uncertain of victory
but unafraid of defeat,” remembering what “the old black farmer who had left
his fields to march from Selma to Montgomery said when asked whether they
would win: ‘We won when we started.’”2