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MAY 24, 2016 / 4 COMMENTS
STOLEN PEOPLE ON STOLEN LAND:
DECOLONIZING WHILE BLACK.
y Adele Thomas
Settler privilege, as I’ve understood it
oadly, is having specific rights, advantages
or immunities granted or available only to a particular group of people (settlers),
while the Indigenous groups are excluded from those benefits. But when you are
neither the colonizer nor the Indigenous group, where do you fit in? More
specifically, can African Americans claim access to this privilege?
Stolenpeoplestolenland - Hari Ziyad (2016)
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Often, I find myself feeling the guilt of anti-Indigeneity and Native erasure,
contemplating my role in systems oppressive of Indigenous people alongside
colonizers who are also charged with African genocide. Taken or sold into bondage
and used to develop a global economy, most Africans did not a
ive in this country
y choice but instead for the purposes of chattel slavery, and while it may be arguing
semantics, if Black people cannot claim economic, educational, financial, or cultural
privilege, what exactly defines our privilege on stolen land?
The open ended use of the word “privilege” lends it to be used without
egard for how much power a person or group has in relation to thei
culture or geographic habitation. That which many are describing as
privilege is more accurately described in the case of African descendants of
slaves as willful complicity: the act of submitting to systemic oppression of
the self and of others.
It could be argued that many African descendants of slaves do have a sense of false
ownership of this country and its fruition. However dangerously dismissive certain
sentiments are, some Black folk, particularly those who desire for patriarchal power,
share views or can rationalize the type of shit like, “Our ancestors built this country
with blood, sweat, and tears! This country was built by us but not for us.” But what
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country are we talking about if not the one Indigenous people have been
struggling against since its inception?
It can’t be ignored that African enslaved people in the U.S. have also set into motion
movements that have inspired and continue to inspire uprisings against the
oppressive status quo. They should always be acknowledged so that their work lives
on. But what happens when you use that work to pave the way for you to
demand settlers and their decedents let you into their oppressive systems?
Hold chairs and offices in their
anches of government? Put the faces of anti-
capitalist freedom fighters on the oppressor’s cu
ency?
What might such behavior mean to a group of people also oppressed by white
supremacy, capitalism, genocidal practices, and forced assimilation—who have
likewise said from the beginning that “muthafuckas never luh’d us”?
In many social justice and progressive spaces for Black and Brown people, these
conversations can quickly turn sour. Cross accusations of cultural appropriation,
anti-Blackness, Native erasure and a lack of necessary nuance in describing people of
the diaspora as “settlers” on their captor’s occupied land doesn’t create a space fo
productive criticism. The belief in “Black hypervisibility” perpetuates the idea that
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we purposefully garner an unfair amount of attention for our struggle comparative
to others.
This same “hypervisibility” is, in my opinion, often for white
entertainment and placation. The struggle for “visibility”, framed as anti-
acism, distorts the effects of racism and white supremacy on Indigenous
people and creates a strong arm in Black people that is forced to bear the
weight of others’ oppression.
When I think about reciprocity, solidarity and equity for the African Diaspora in a
evolutionary framework, I grapple internally with wanting to speak within the
country, about the country, in criticism of the country, but very much enjoying the
enefits of living in the country that was lived on first by Indigenous and Native
people. This land is connected to their descendants, some of which are my
neighbors, friends and co-workers.
When someone calls me, a Black woman, on settler privilege, it can seem like a
classic oppression Olympic tactic. But when I sit on my laptop, enjoying WiFi and
Hulu, daydreaming about home loans and renovations to a cute historic ranch
house, what am I really doing? Am I imagining my “American dream”? Where land
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still belongs to settler communities under anti-Black decree? In this context, the
problem is not defined as an eithe
or—of either being oppressed o
oppressing—but rather being complicit either willfully or negligently to
the oppression of Indigenous and Black people alike, a type of complicity
Indigenous people can fall into as well.
Immediately, I’m
ought to the stark realization that as a child of the diaspora, I
could also be seen as a settler if I returned to any place in Africa, where most of my
ancestral lineage is. But is that what ties you to the land? Is the land what ties you to
your personhood and your identity? Where does a radical Black American woman
like myself exist in this moment?
Searching for the answer
ings me face to face with a difficult reality—a reality that
means it is understood and acknowledged that I am here as a result of theft of life
and culture. This feeling is hollowing and a specific loss of self and personhood
unique to that of a non-Indigenous slave descendant. The denial of ever having a
true anchor even if able to completely dismantle the settler system.
Jared Sexton reframes anti-racism and anti-settler colonization as movements with
a need for nuance in the understanding of oppression under colonialism, with
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specific acknowledgment of the effects of chattel slavery on the African diaspora as
it pertains to land sovereignty. In The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the
Unsovereign, Sexton states:
‘What if the problem is sovereignty as such’ (Moten, 2013)? Abolition, the
political dream of Black Studies, its unconscious thinking, consists in the
affirmation of the unsovereign slave – the affectable, the derelict, the
monstrous, the wretched – figures of an order altogether different from (even
when they coincide or cohabit with) the colonized native – the occupied, the
undocumented, the unprotected, the oppressed. Abolition is beyond (the
estoration of) sovereignty.
Is it possible that we could understand our mutual trauma of continued
colonization and oppression to have a solution outside of a “claim” to land? I
have seen Black and Indigenous people reckon with these issues without hostility.
So where is this sense of enmity created? Is it another example of movements not
deconstructing the colonial framework of their revolutions, dooming them to repeat
the same mistakes, which are both anti-Black and anti-Indigenous? Perhaps
acknowledging what I choose to call willful complicity rather than charges of
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African American settler privilege is a chance to take an organic next and very
adical step toward revolution in solidarity and reciprocity.
Adele Thomas is a social media content creato
and contributing editor of Consciously
Decolonizing on Facebook, Tweets too much
@Whogivesabi
le and takes supportive
donations from readers and followers via
Paypal.me/whogivesabi
le. She is a human and birth rights activist, member of the APSP
and African National Women’s Organization, and a Black African Femme Geek by day…
evolutionary mother by night.
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Word Of The Day: BLACK (With a
Capital "B")
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Black Radicalism As Vulnerability.
April 21, 2015
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June 23, 2015
In "american flag"
July 6, 2015
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11/2/2016 “A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity - Lateral Lateral
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J. Kēhaulani Kauanui,
"“A structure, not an
event”: Settle
Colonialism and
Enduring Indigeneity,"
Lateral XXXXXXXXXX),
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settler-colonialism-
enduring-indigeneity-
kauanui/.
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ISSN 2469–4053
Forum: Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities
Issue 5.1 (Spring 2016)
“A Structure, Not an Event”: Settle
Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui
I begin this essay
1
by unpacking what I mean by “enduring indigeneity” in my title and
what that means to an understanding of settler colonialism. Here I use it in two senses:
st, that indigeneity itself is enduring—that the operative logic of settler colonialism may
e to “eliminate the native,” as the late English scholar Patrick Wolfe
illiantly theorized,
ut that indigenous peoples exist, resist, and persist; and second, that settler colonialism
is a structure that endures indigeneity, as it holds out against it.
Wolfe’s essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”
2
is often cited as the
principal work representing the concept and theory of the settler colonial analytic. And
although Wolfe insisted on making it clear time and again that he did not create the eld
of settler colonial studies—that Native scholars did—within the eld of American Studies
(as just one example), he tends to be most frequently cited as if he had. Indeed, this one
article of his (although not his rst writing on the subject, nor the last) also seems to be
the most cited, perhaps because it offers so much in one piece by distinguishing settle
colonialism from genocide, contrasting settler colonialism from franchise colonialism, and
11/2/2016 “A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity - Lateral Lateral
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—through comparative work focused on Australia, Israel-Palestine, and the United States
—showing how the logic of settler colonialism is premised on the elimination of
indigenous peoples.
As Wolfe noted, because settler colonialism “destroys to replace”, it is “inherently
eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.”
3
He was careful to point out that settle
colonialism is not simply a form of genocide, since there are cases of genocide without
settler colonialism, and because “elimination refers to more than the summary liquidation
of Indigenous peoples, though it includes that.”
4
Hence, he suggested that “structural
genocide” avoids the question of degree and enables an understanding of the
elationships between spatial removal, mass killings, and biocultural assimilation.
5
In
other words, the logic of elimination of the native is about the elimination of the native as
native. And yet, to exclusively focus on the settler colonial without any meaningful
engagement with the indigenous—as has been the case in how Wolfe’s work has been
cited—can (re)produce another form of “elimination of the native.” Because settle
colonialism is a land-centered project