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

by Justice William Johnson, concurring in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, American Indians were simply “wandering 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 conquest.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

      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 triumphalist 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 democratic 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 humanity.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 necessary 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 political 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 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 realities 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 violence 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 irreconcilable 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 exclusions 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 meaningful 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. While the specifics of their experiences differ widely, the most consistent shared theme may be the violence visited upon them as a means of achieving the colonizers’ objectives; a violence that always seems to be minimized, distorted, or erased by the silent spaces of the dominant narrative. This warrants 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 exploitation becomes invisible. Thus, for example, American Indians are typically depicted as “inadvertently” being killed by disease or miraculously “vanishing.” 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 participation, 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 responsible.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