Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law. Natsu Taylor Saito
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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 structural change a half century ago, with an eye to understanding how the resistance 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. Subsequently, 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 professor 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 According 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 powerlessness” that permeated the “ghettos.”71 Significantly, the commission—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 Poverty, provided much-needed resources and opportunities for the poorest Americans, but many people of color in the United States had more extensive 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 presence 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, inspiring 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 significant 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 describing 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 Coordinating 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 colonial status that has been inflicted upon it.”82
The Movement for Black Lives’ 2016 platform calls for community control and “collective liberation,” while supporting global efforts by Afrodescendant 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 addressing employment, housing, education, military service, police brutality, and criminal justice, as well as compensation for slavery and genocide, it identified 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 Broken Treaties” by taking a twenty-point platform focusing on land and treaty rights to Washington, DC.85 In 1973 it achieved international renown as a result of the federal government’s seventy-one-day siege of AIM members and supporters at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The following year, at the behest of Lakota elders, Russell Means and other AIM leaders organized the International Indian Treaty Council, which worked with peoples from North and South America to obtain recognition of Indigenous rights—most notably the right to self-determination—at the United Nations.86
The influence of such formulations can be seen in the visions developed by other organizations in this period. “Affirm[ing] the right of self-definition and self-determination,” the Asian American Political Alliance at the University of California–Berkeley asserted that “to be truly liberated,” “all minorities must have complete control over the political, economical and educational institutions within their respective communities.”87 The Asian American Red Guard’s Political Program of April 1969 began, “We want freedom. We want the power to determine the destiny of our people, the Asian community,” and went on to address housing, education, healthcare, employment, police brutality, and criminal justice.88 Similarly, the Puerto Rican Young Lords’ thirteen-point Program and Platform, promulgated later in 1969, began with calls for self-determination for Puerto Ricans, all Latina/os, and all Third World peoples. It emphasized “community control of our institutions and land,” including “people’s control of police, health services, churches, schools, housing, transportation and welfare,” and education appropriate to the “culture of our people.”89 In 1970 the Chicano Brown Berets issued a “13 Point Political Program—To Unite All Our People under the Banner of Independence” that first addressed the return of “all land that was stolen from our people,” and then highlighted issues of criminal justice, education, employment, and housing.90
As these excerpts illustrate, community empowerment was a consistent theme of these organizations, and their agendas reflected a conviction that fundamental social change was both necessary and attainable. Their platforms were not simply demands made to those with institutional or economic power; they were plans of action to be implemented by their