Andrea Smith on Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism

Since 2000, colonialism has been an important part of the Damascus Road Antiracism Analysis Training. Andrea Smith brings her insightful analysis in this fine piece on her Decolonization blog, “The Colonialism That is Settled and the Colonialism That Never Happened.” With a historical analysis, she points to the interconnections between settler colonialism and anti-Black racism:

[S]ettler colonialism does not merely operate by racializing Native peoples, positioning them as racial minorities rather than as colonized nations, but also through domesticating Black struggle within the framework of anti-racist rather than anti-colonial struggle. Anti-Blackness is effectuated through the disappearance of colonialism in order to render Black peoples as the internal property of the United States, such that anti-Black struggle must be contained within a domesticated anti-racist framework that cannot challenge the settler state itself. Why, for example, is Martin Luther King always described as a civil rights leader rather than an anti-colonial organizer, despite his clear anti-colonial organizing against the war in Vietnam? Through anti-Blackness, not only are Black peoples rendered the property of the settler state, but Black struggle itself remains its property – solely containable within the confines of the settler state.

Read Andrea Smith’s entire post here.