IN SEARCH OF A BLACK, INDIGENOUS FUTURE AWAKENING DE/ANTI-COLONIZATION

BY

SANDRA MARIE HUDSON

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements For the degree of Master of Arts

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION

ONTARIO INSTITUTE FOR STUDIES IN EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

© Copyright by Sandra Marie Hudson, 2018

IN SEARCH OF A BLACK, INDIGENOUS FUTURE: AWAKENING DE/ANTI-COLONIZATION

Sandra Marie Hudson Master of Arts Department of Social Justice Education University of Toronto 2018

ABSTRACT

This thesis demonstrates the need to retheorize ideas of decolonization as they relate to Black people and anti-Blackness. Placing critical texts together in a discursive engagement reveals their theoretical gaps. Numerous texts within discursive literature on decolonization pervasively absent Blackness. Those texts that do address Blackness tend to disregard Black people’s history and relationship to the Land prior to European colonial contact with the African continent.

Instead, such works often discuss Blackness solely as it relates to enslavement and the afterlife of slavery (Hartman, 2007), in a stunted manner that belies white supremacist logics (Smith, 2010) and anti-Blackness. This thesis critically analyzes existing works about settler colonialism, anti-

Blackness, white supremacy and de/anti-colonization theory.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have many people to thank, without whom this undertaking would not have been possible.

First and foremost, I thank my mother, Juliette Marcia Hudson; my father, Donovan Hudson; my sister, Dionne Hudson; and my brother, Michael Hudson. Without their constant love and support, none of my endeavours would be possible.

While writing this thesis, I dealt with difficult targeted anti-Black attacks as a semi-public figure and activist. To this next set of people, thank you for being my close friends and confidantes, for pushing me, discussing my ideas with me, and being there for me when it all seemed too much.

I am so grateful to my cousins, Matthew Shepherd and Janaya Khan; and to my dear friends

Alice Wu, Adnan Najmi, Adam Awad, Walied Khogali, Gilary Massa, Saron Gebresselassi,

Rodney Diverlus, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Leah Stokes.

To my teams: Black Lives Matter—Toronto and the Black Liberation Collective, especially Yusra

Khogali, Pascale Diverlus, Ravyn Wngz, Syrus Marcus Ware, Leroi Newbold, Brieanne Berry-

Crossfied, Sefanit Habtemariam, and Melissa Theodore, thank you for struggling with me, trusting me, and doing the courageous work with me that made everything I have written in this work possible.

To the professors at the University of Toronto who supported me, mentored me, and helped me believe that I could engage in serious academic work: Professor George Dei, Professor Rinaldo

Walcott, Professor John Portelli, Professor Vannina Sztainbok, Professor Alyssa Trotz, Professor

Stan Doyle-Wood, Professor Dickson Eyoh, Professor Melanie Newton, Professor Beverly Bain, and Professor Deborah Cowen, thank you for always having my back and believing in me.

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To the OGs who remain a constant guiding light, and source of love: Professor Idil Abdillahi,

Professor Akua Benjamin, Dr. Angela Robertson, Professor Grace-Edward Galabuzi, Professor

Afua Cooper, and Beth Jordan, thank you for giving me something to aspire to.

And finally, I give thanks to my grandmothers and ancestors, for making it all possible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS------p. iii

II. TABLE OF CONTENTS------p. v

1. INTRODUCTION------p. 1

2. CONTEXT: THE WEATHER------p. 26

3. DE/ANTI-COLONIZATION DISCOURSE: WHAT’S HERE? WHAT’S MISSING? CRITIQUES p. 46

4. BLACKNESS: WHERE DO WE APPEAR? HOW DO WE APPEAR? WHAT’S MISSING?----- p. 74

5. UNBORDERABLE: DIASPORIC BLACKNESS------p. 97

6. ANTI-BLACK ANTAGONISMS IN THE ACADEMY------p. 121

7. CONCLUSION------p. 138

8. WORKS CITED------p. 141

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1. INTRODUCTION: THEORY, METHOD, AND SOCIAL LOCATION

This thesis demonstrates the need to retheorize ideas of decolonization in a settler colonial context as they relate to Black people and anti-Blackness. Placing critical texts together in a discursive engagement reveals their theoretical gaps. It also uncovers the logics of white supremacy and anti-Blackness that currently influence the literature. This thesis critically analyzes existing works about settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy and de/anti- colonization theory.

Numerous texts within discursive literature on decolonization pervasively absent Blackness.

Those texts that do address Blackness tend to disregard Black people’s history and relationship to the Land prior to European colonial contact with the African continent. (Here, I use the term

Land as more than simply geography: it is a “social, cultural and political [construct] with far reaching consequences for decolonial and anti-racist politics…The Land is not simply a fixed physical space/place” [Dei, 2017, p.116].) Instead, such works often discuss Blackness solely as it relates to enslavement and the afterlife of slavery (Hartman, 2007), in a stunted manner that belies white supremacist logics (Smith, 2010) and anti-Blackness.

Additionally, too much academic space delineates differences between Black and Indigenous people. Such work highlights instances when either community has aided the settler-master in projects of colonization and enslavement. It does not properly situate enslavement as a tool of settler and classic colonialism. These hegemonic obstacles obscure discursive de/anti-colonial theorizing about responsibilities owed to Black people worldwide as continued victims and survivors of colonialism and enslavement.

This school of thought also fails to connect hundreds of years of brutality with the history of ancestors of formerly enslaved Africans: they had a relationship to the Land, irreparably severed

2 by colonialism. Such academic discourse thus prevents de/anti-colonization theorists from engaging with Black people as dispossessed people. It also fails to adequately address the politics of colonialism—and a contemporaneous neo-colonial, imperialist economic structure— on the African continent.

These lacunae prevent discursive theorizing of Black people as dispossessed from their Lands in varying degrees. They preclude discussion of how an anti-colonial futurity could and should manifest. Simultaneously, this literature engages incompletely with enslavement—and therefore cannot show how a liberated Black futurity could and should manifest. These gaps in the literature produce a highly problematic, anti-Black, incomplete engagement with settler colonialisms.

Prior to locating myself within the work that I am embarking on, I wish to comment on discourse and the purpose of this project. This thesis is a racial project, in the sense that Omi and Winant

(2014) describe. It is a work of political scholarship that reorganizes the ways we think and act with respect to de/anti-colonization projects and race. In particular, it interrupts and shift the discourse with which we discuss de/anti-colonization—and in tandem, colonization—in a North

American context.

My experiences and identity as a social activist particularly inform my approach to this topic. I founded Black Lives Matter–Toronto in 2014. A social movement against anti-Blackness, Black

Lives Matter–Toronto is the Toronto-based chapter of an international movement dedicated to

Black liberation. In many ways, the Toronto chapter’s involvement has forced the movement for

Black lives to critically reflect on its American-centric frame and investment in American imperialism.

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I recall a meeting of the Black Lives Matter network in which Black Lives Matter–UK and Black

Lives Matter–Toronto were the only international chapters present. It became clear that a global understanding of Blackness was not a given for many. Some attendees did not understand why there would be movements against anti-Blackness in Canada and the United Kingdom. Some asked us to explain our existence outside of the United States—how did we come to be in

Canada? How did we come to be in the UK? I was only accustomed to hearing these questions from non-Black people.

Some Black American attendees suggested initiating campaigns to move to Canada to escape anti-Blackness. There was barely any mention of Indigeneity, colonialism or land issues. This surprised me; I had not expected the differing political geographies to shroud the experiences of Black people so effectively between locations. I realized that this contemporaneous movement for Black liberation required an interruption of (at worst) an imperialist mindset. It might make gains for Black people within the American empire, but would not effectively challenge the ways that the empire itself manifests anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and colonialism globally.

Black Lives Matter–UK, Black Lives Matter–Toronto, and individual first- and second-generation migrants to the United States, all insisted on including an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial framework within the struggle. Since that time, Black Lives Matter has been intentionally involved in Black liberation struggle outside of the United States. It works in solidarity with folks indigenous to the Americas, participating in struggles that relate to Blackness and Land. In the service of this work, I have visited Columbia and Brazil as a member of a Black Lives Matter delegation. Black Lives Matter–Toronto, in particular, has been present in Black Lives Matter

4 delegations to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Standing Rock, and Palestine. Of course, I have also participated in such work in Canada.

Toronto’s inclusion interrupted a movement that risked reifying the American state through its tactics, forcing a critical reflection on unconsidered issues of colonialism, migration and imperialism. This infusion of internationalist discourse has allowed Black Lives Matter to initiate solidarity work in several countries. It prompts activists to consider relationships between Black communities, communities indigenous to the Americas, and colonialism, within a Black liberation movement.

I believe that this story shows how crucial it is, for those of us engaged in eradicating white supremacy and anti-Blackness, to consider de/anti-colonial frameworks. Otherwise, our investment in the struggle can be dangerous to Indigenous people all over the world, and to

Black people whose very existences are fraught within borders that enable the work of global anti-Blackness and uphold the superiority of whiteness. If those of us concerned with Black liberation struggle do not do the work of de/anti-colonialism, we run the risk of reifying white supremacist borders and contributing to white supremacist imperialist projects.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF BLACKNESS, DE/ANTI-COLONIZATION AND

DISCOURSE

Blackness is almost absent in current North American discourses regarding colonialism, as it is in so many places where it should be present (Sharpe, 2016). This discursive exclusion of Blackness significantly limits the type of knowledges and practices we are able to produce (Hall, 1997;

Freire, 2000). I argue that since the de/anti-colonial discourse itself fails to consider Blackness,

5 the knowledge that the discourse produces is consequently inadequate. It thus becomes necessary to interrupt the discourse, producing a different truth that considers Blackness.

It is essential, here, that I explain the term de/anti-colonization. I refer to decolonization and anti- colonization in a connected format — de/anti-colonization. I suggest that de-colonizing cannot be effective unless it is truly anti-colonial: against the concept of colonization in and of itself. I recognize that other scholars distinguish between the two. However, many so-called de- colonizing practices have led to neo-colonialism. In this sense, then, de-colonization is simply a misnomer—a continuation of liberalism and colonization itself. When I refer to de/anti- colonization, I mean the body of strategies that refer to de-colonization and anti-colonization.

I understand discourse as Foucault and Stuart Hall describe:

by ‘discourse’, Foucault meant ‘a group of statements which provide a language for

talking about —a way of representing the knowledge about—a particular topic at a

particular historical moment…Discourse is about the production of knowledge through

language. But…since all social practices entail meaning, and meanings shape and

influence what we do—our conduct—all practices have a discursive aspect” (Hall, 1992,

in Hall, 1997, p. 44).

The discourse in question is then systemically integrated into the production of knowledge and becomes culturally true.

This section details the theories and methods that inform my work. The literature review creates discourse between anti-racist literature (with a focus on Blackness1) and de/anti-colonial

1 Throughout this work, I capitalize Black and Indigenous when they are not used as adjectives and designate a group of people. This is in recognition that these terms are not merely descriptors but are representative of collective identity formations that refer to people who organize and represent themselves, much like the proper nouns of nations, states and ethnicities.

6 literature. These separate and distinct fields have much to offer one another in their related goals to eradicate Black and Indigenous subjugation. Discourse between the two fields reveals gaps in the literature.

Several questions guide me as I explore this discursive interruption. What questions and discussions does the absenting of Blackness in de/anti-colonization discourse erase? Why does this absenting occur? In an anti/decolonizing revolutionary practice, what debts are owed to

Black people? How do we engage the benefits that settlers and colonizers alike have gained through the fungibility (Hartman, 1997; Patterson, 1982; & Wilderson, 2010) of Blackness? How do we theorize a decolonization practice that recognizes the Land (Dei, 2016) as far more than just the dispossession of geographic space, when engaging with Black people? How do we recognize that the benefits of Black labour have surpassed borders, allowing settlers and colonizers the world over to benefit from our colonized and enslaved status?

In my own principled approach as a student of these fields, and as a Black liberation activist, I have personally been enriched by embodying a discursive approach—linking the theories of anti-racism, Blackness, and de/anti-colonialism. I am critically implicated in these issues that I seek to explore, and I am invested in particular outcomes, theoretical directions and struggles.

My thesis seeks to shift discourse such that de/anti-colonization practice engages Blackness as an indispensable component, centres the subject position of Blackness, and fully considers Black

Indigeneity (Dei, 2016).

As Dei states, our lived experiences are theory (2013, p. 2). My social identifiers are crucial to informing how this work is approached both theoretically and politically. My own embodiment of the multiple identities that I hold, and the intersections of these identities within myself, implicate me in this project, bring me to this project, and affect my interest in this project. This

7 work is a critical political intervention, and my commitment to de/anti-colonization and Black liberation activates its political goal.

Foremost, I locate myself as a Black, Afrikan2, second-generation immigrant to Toronto of

Jamaican ancestry. I am a woman from a working-class background who is a descendant of enslaved people. I am an activist who works on a local and international level for Black liberation and am resolutely committed to de/anti-colonization. I am able-bodied and I am cis-gendered. I name these details about myself as part of a critical anti-racist theoretical approach to this work.

I claim my Blackness in defiance of liberal discourses that only recognize race as a negative identity category. Instead I see it, as Crenshaw (1991) articulated, as “a source of social empowerment and reconstruction” (p. 4).

I claim an Afrikan identity as a refusal to negate my ancestry, and a commitment to a global

Black national consciousness, culture (Fanon, 1963, p. 247) and struggle in which I see all Black

Afrikans as kin.

I claim my migrant history as, again, a refusal to negate my ancestry and difference within experiences of Blackness. But I also claim this migrant history as an entry point that informs my de/anti-colonial resistance to borders, and my assertion that state borders are white supremacist, colonial, and anti-Black. My direct connection to an embodiment of Black migration and my diasporic connection to Blackness inform my entry point to theorizing Black land relations.

I claim my womanhood and working-class background as critical embodiments of how I experience anti-Blackness and white supremacy, my understanding of patriarchy and capitalism as tools of white supremacy, and vice versa. My womanhood and working-class background also engenders a commitment to feminist, anti-capitalist theories and methods that will thread

2 I use the spelling Afrikan to denote a political and diasporic identity dedicated to Black liberation.

8 through this review and analysis of existing literature. I will expand on my commitment to Black feminisms below, as it is an indispensable part of my approach to this work and the intersectional framework that I bring to my analysis (Crenshaw, 1991).

I claim my privileges as able-bodied and cisgendered to denote that there are knowledges important to this work that I do not embody, and therefore will not have the same epistemological relationship to them.

Finally, I am an activist. By naming this, I make clear my commitment to conscious praxis. As

Freire wrote, “revolution is achieved with neither verbalism nor activism, but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” (1970, p. 125).

From my standpoint, this project should yield useful knowledge in the practical struggles against white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and decolonization. Similarly, this project should both draw from the knowledges of critical theorists in these academic fields, and from those struggling against these oppressive structures, practically, outside of the academy and other sites of critical reflection.

My embodiment of this particular social location has led me to particular paradigms of thought.

These paradigms inform both my own theorizing, and the practice of the activism that I give to my communities. No one identity that I have articulated above alone would provide me with the epistemic approach I bring to this project. Each of these marginalized identities, and my conscious acknowledgement of them, implicates me in this work. I must insert my whole self into my analysis as an ontological approach.

Each of my experiences has taught me that the interlocking struggles against anti-Blackness and colonialism require a more strategic direction in practical struggle. As an individual who is immersed in both practical struggle and academic theorizing, and who also has a standpoint

9 informed by an intersectional embodiment of several affected identities (Crenshaw, 1991), I hope to lend useful tools to the world through my review and analysis of the literature.

That this project appears in the academy is a contradiction. The academy is a tool of colonization, white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It has furthered and encouraged the antagonisms between colonized people, making it difficult for each of us to end our collective suffering. As a result, to engage in “Indigenous knowledges and the decolonization of the

Western/Euro-American academy is to take personal and collective risks” (Dei, 2002).

However, Black scholarship contains opportunities for subversive thought. The Black academy has a long tradition of producing this sort of ground-breaking thinking. I hope that this work will continue that tradition in assisting colonized peoples — including Black people — to recognize the exclusion of Black voices and experiences, thus identifying where knowledges and approaches are absent, erased, or concealed.

Unsurprisingly, a lack of academic theorizing also demonstrates the necessity for the tools that this work proposes. In and outside of the academy, I have learned that de/anti-colonization theory and action must intentionally consider Blackness or it will never truly achieve its goals.

Likewise, Black liberation theory and action must understand itself as de/anti-colonial or it risks an inadequate framework from which to achieve its goals.

METHODS: BLACK FEMINISM

My methods of analyzing the literature rely heavily on the Black feminist tradition. First, and in particular, this thesis uses Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) concept of intersectionality. Her ground-

10 breaking article made clear that feminist analysis can serve white supremacy, and anti-racist analysis can serve patriarchy, if either approach is not intersectional. She wrote (p.12):

The failure of feminism to integrate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism

will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of colour, and the failure of

antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the

subordination of women.

Since Crenshaw gifted the academy (and all of us involved in struggle) with this concept, other authors have expanded intersectionality’s scope to include multiple marginalized identities.

Intersectionality is thus a crucial analytical framework for the substantive issues that this review interrogates.

In discursively examining the literature on Blackness and de/anti-colonization, I am conscious of the intersections of Blackness and being a colonized person. Failing to read Black people as simultaneously African, colonized, and Black affects perspectives on us in any one of these realms. Such an omission, when considering the global social and political condition of Black people, could lead to incomplete analyses and faulty conclusions. In turn, as Crenshaw so elegantly put it, “ignoring difference within groups contributes to tension among groups” (1991, p. 3).

Popular cultures of social justice often incorrectly apply and co-opt Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, while neglecting to consider Blackness. By analogy, this also describes the absence of Blackness in de/anti-colonization discourse. An intersectional analysis that does not consider Blackness is incomplete, since this is its very purpose and foundation. The same is true of de/anti-colonization discourse.

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Black people’s history does not begin when Europeans genocidally kidnapped millions of

Africans. Similarly, Black people are a colonized people and must be considered in any discussion of de/anti-colonization, especially given our worldwide existence—and systematic dispossession—in multiple geographies. Differences between the experiences of Black and other colonized peoples are essential to understand.

African identity means that we are indigenous to a land that has been colonized—and not simply landless and formerly enslaved. Colonized identity means that colonizers have dispossessed us, relocated us, and forced us to adhere to laws not written for our benefit—often, at our expense.

Black identity means, from the standpoint of the settler-masters and their junior partners, that we exist without history, without contribution, without humanity, without virtue, undeserving of self- determination, occupying the lowest rung on a global white supremacist racial hierarchy.

Failing to fully consider the status of Black people in a de/anti-colonization project risks, at best, an incomplete project that does not account for large swaths of colonized Black people. At worst, it indicates an anti-Black de/anti-colonization project that reinforces white supremacist and colonial relationships toward Black people. It potentially implicates non-Black Indigenous people in advancing a colonial project.

In response, this intersectional framework may reveal new epistemic approaches to the social and political project of de/anti-colonization. It could also create new approaches to struggling against white supremacy, anti-Blackness and colonialism.

Other Black feminist traditions also guide my work. Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks articulated standpoint theory, and Audre Lorde’s concept of the outsider expanded upon it. Hill Collins discusses how “institutionalized racism operates in gender-specific ways,” revealing how racism works with gender oppression on marginalized bodies (1996, p. 16). hooks states that the

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“exclusionary practices of women who dominate feminist discourse have made it practically impossible for new and varied theories to emerge” (1984, p. 9). Such analyses effectively describe how colonialism works with race to marginalize people, and could thus inform readings of de/anti-colonial literature in the North American context.3 In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde discusses how white feminist scholarship configures Black women as outsiders, by refusing to recognize Black women’s distinct issues as related to their own (1984, pp. 117-118).

Though the power dynamic is significantly different, Lorde’s insight is instructive for this thesis’ subject matter. Black people’s distinct relationship with colonialism in the literature is constructed as outside of it, even as colonialism’s interaction with enslavement and genocide have come to define our collectivity. Defining us as outside of colonialism in a political de/anti- colonization project is akin to defining Black women’s issues outside of feminism in a political feminist project: it risks re-inscribing colonial logics onto Black communities. Using this framework to think through the literature on de/anti-colonialism will help to reveal anti-Blackness within de/anti-colonization. The light that this process sheds will allow activists to develop de/anti-colonization tactics that encompass liberation for all colonized peoples.

Recognizing that this academic project is a political project, I want to briefly discuss how it understands power. As Fanon articulated, the colonized standpoint contains power. Feminists such as hooks (1984) and Mohanty (1984) expanded his notion to show that there is power from a Black feminist standpoint. Our power is evident in the collective and coordinated resistance of all colonized people, whether those activities occur in the streets or as a scholarly endeavour. To effectively harness and mobilize our power, colonized people must find ways of understanding one another, understanding that our goals are interrelated, and working with each other in

3 Though I touch on South America from time to time, the scope of this project is mostly limited to a North American frame of analysis.

13 solidarity. Failing to recognize a significant group (Black people) as colonized will only hinder our progress and limit our collective power.

It is crucial, at this juncture, to describe what this project does not intend. Black feminists and non-Black feminists of colour have long warned academics about the dangers of creating a monolithic category such as “woman”. This ignores the differences between women who exist in the intersections of multiple oppressions, and in different contexts that create multiple standpoints (Mohanty, 1984; Lorde, 1984; hooks, 1984). These feminists’ analytical warnings will also guide this work.

This work does not attempt to create another problematic homogenized category of

“colonized,” devoid of context and historical specificities. Rather, this work recognizes that

North American analysis constructs the category of “colonized” as so monolithic, and so homogenous, that it often excludes Black people from that category. The recognition of difference within the category of “colonized” is woefully incomplete, and it is crucial that de/anti-colonization scholarship refuse logics of the colonizer, of white supremacy, and of anti-

Blackness as it charts new epistemic approaches to liberation.

Neither is this work a project about belonging. This work maintains that the rupture and alienation of Black people from land is so complete that it troubles claims to African-ness or

Indigeneity (Tuck & Walcott, 2017). Without an understanding of Land as Dei (2016) discusses, beyond the colonial designations given to the Earth, what epistemologies do we absent?

This work engages in questions about Black Indigeneity throughout. But I wish to make very clear that this does not imply the intention to become Indigenous as a result of existing in a place for a long period. That is a settler project, a colonial project (Tuck & Walcott, 2017).

Rather, this project seeks to uncover what can be learned from constituting Black people as fully

14 human, as coming from a place—as, indeed, indigenous to a place—both as descendants of enslaved people and descendants of differently colonized people on the African continent.

CRITICAL ANTI-RACIST THEORY

Next, when considering de/anti-colonization, this work uses critical anti-racist theory as a framework explaining the various ways in which race and power work to marginalize Black and colonized subjects. Race is salient throughout every form of social stratification, subjugation, marginalization, or other social relation in our society: whether through class, gender, ability, sexuality, sexual orientation, religion, or health (Omi & Winant, 2014; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001;

Hall, 1997). Colonialism is no different. Given these truths, it is a wonder that North American discourse on colonialism continues to absent Blackness, and to lack racial analysis.

Omi and Winant (2014), as well as Delgado and Stefancic (2001), note that within the framework of critical race theory, racial formation is a social and political phenomenon. It is a concept that dominant, hegemonic power structures have strategically reified (and continue to reify) to carry out political work (Hall, 1997; Omi & Winant, 2014). Omi and Winant write that “through its powers of racial classification, the state fundamentally shapes one’s social status, access to economic opportunities, political rights, and indeed one’s identity itself” (2014, p. 121). A political project using the concept of race “advances the interests of both white elites [at the top of the racial hierarchy] (materially) and working-class people (psychically)” (Delgado & Stefancic, p. 7). So, while dominant liberal discourses equate race with hate, advocating colorblindness to end racial injustice (Omi & Winant, 2014; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001), “large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it” (Delgado & Stefancic, p. 7).

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While race may be based on biological phenotypical markers, biology itself has very little to do with the formation of race, or with how race and racialization work in our society alongside power to structure social, political, economic and geographic relations. Indeed, race is not fixed to particular biological or genetic markers, despite our society’s predilection toward relying on race to falsely demarcate bio-social difference. The genetic similarities we all share as a species far outweigh the phenotypical differences between different races (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001;

Omi & Winant, 2014).

Foucault’s, and later, Hall’s, theories of representation describe race as a representational concept that is socially and historically specific. Omi and Winant show that race locates individuals or groups “within a socially and historically demarcated set of demographic and cultural boundaries, state activities, ‘life-chances,’ and tropes of identity/difference/(in)equality.

Race is both a social/historical structure and a set of accumulated signifiers that suffuse individual and collective identities, inform social practices, shape institutions and communities, demarcate social boundaries, and organize the distribution of resources” (2014).

Essentially, race is a social construct: a set of categories that humans use to classify one another.

Many understand this statement to assert that race is not “real.” In a sense, this is true; race is not biologically “real.” However, race still has real consequences for our lives, and it cannot be dismissed simply because it is a social construction: its construction, acceptance, and reproduction within society makes it real.

In turn, race is not necessarily a negative construction. While “race is a template for the subordination and oppression of different social groups,” it is also “a template for resistance to many forms of marginalization and domination,” including Indigenous resistances (Omi &

Winant, 2014, 108). To this day, many movements draw upon the work of Black resistance

16 movements to challenge marginalization and oppression. Oppressed groups seeking emancipation may need projects that strategically use race in a liberatory manner (Crenshaw,

1991; Omi & Winant, 2014; Brand, 2001; Dei, 2016; McKittrick, 2006; etc.). The present work is one such strategic use of race.

The racialized knowledge of Blackness has, however, interacted with the power structure of white supremacy in ways that significantly absent it from discussions regarding decolonization and anti-colonization. One explanation for this absence is that My work shows how defining

Blackness outside of colonialism is strategically beneficial to hegemonic power.

Certain aspects of race are contextual; but there is a universality to the construction of Blackness as outside of humanity, and therefore on the bottom of the racial hierarchy. For example, certain contexts, times, and geographies construct individuals from the Middle East as white.

Increasingly, the post-9/11 world racializes people of Middle Eastern origin as non-white—a contextual shift that has significant political and social consequences. Yet the possibility of such a contextual shift does not exist within dominant concepts of Blackness. Blackness, as a social organizer, always relegates those with Black identity to a role outside the realm of humanity

(Fanon, 1952; Wilderson, 2010; Hartman, 2007). The hegemonic system of anti-Blackness creates a universal fixity and permanence to Blackness specifically as an identity marker that organizes a worldwide racial hierarchy.

Certain aspects of the consideration of Blackness are, however, contextual. In this historical socio-political moment, Blackness is considered as separate from and outside of colonization and Indigeneity, for example. This can and should change. The racialized construction of

Blackness has interacted with the power structure of white supremacy such that Blackness is absent from discussions regarding decolonization and anti-colonization. This obscures how the

17 very construction of Blackness was central to the western colonization project as a whole

(Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Hall, 1997).

As social categories that hegemonic forces subjugate for political gain, Blackness and

Indigeneity are subject positions. Settler-masters, in their position of power, construct

Indigenous people as not fully human; and yet fit to negotiate land rights with (however dishonestly). In contrast, they construct Black people as entirely outside of the human race, with no negotiating power over even their own bodies (Wilderson, 2010, 2011; Tuck & Yang, 2012;

Sexton, 2014; Lethabo King, 2013; Hartman, 2016). The “conquest [of colonialism]…was the first—and given the dramatic nature of the case, perhaps the greatest—racial formation project.

Together with African slavery it produced the master category of race, the racial template we have discussed” (Omi & Winant, p 114).

Creating the subject positions of Blackness and Indigeneity also creates the subject position of the settler-master (Wilderson, 2010)—a term recognizing the settler and the master as one and the same. Through considering these constructions and subject positions from a critical anti- racist perspective, it is clear that a consideration of Blackness alongside colonization can reveal crucial knowledges.

Thus, the present socio-political moment views Blackness as separate from, and outside of, colonization and Indigeneity. Its historically contextual construction affects how de/anti-colonial discourse operates today, where Blackness’ absence appears natural. Western social justice groups generally accept colonialism as a heinous, genocidal act. They furthermore accept that to atone for such evils requires some sort of restitution to Indigenous people of the Americas. No such social agreement exists for the other great victims of colonialism: Black people. This contextual disparity, positing Blackness as a category that does not intersect with Indigeneity

18 and colonization, strategically benefits the hegemonic position of the settler-master. The absence of Blackness in de/anti-colonization discourse itself is a racial project that benefits white supremacy and colonialism.

BLACK THEORY, DE/ANTI-COLONIZATION, AND THE ACADEMY

Academia reproduces the exclusion of Blackness from de/anti-colonial discourse. The academy disciplinarily reduces Black authorship on decolonization, and arbitrarily excludes it from de/anti- colonial theory, with the notable exception of Frantz Fanon (Rabaka in Cabral, 2016). Rabaka insists on the need for transdisciplinary knowledge in order to adequately theorize Blackness. I agree: knowledge from Black theorists must be placed in conversation with de/anti-colonization theory. I focus on Black theorists who foreground Blackness in de/anti-colonization thought in order to challenge the absenting of Blackness in this discussion. My analysis of de/anti- colonization theories draws from Black thinkers who discussed colonialism deeply: such as Frantz

Fanon, Reiland Rabaka, Tiffany Lethabo King, Saidiya Hartman, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral,

Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and George Dei.

Sexton states that the Black radical tradition is and should be considered de/anti-colonial in nature because Black people should be understood as colonized (2014). He states that decolonial theory suffers from “epistemic closure,” where one is only open to, or seriously engages with knowledge emanating from, their respective discipline or field. Such epistemic closure considers knowledge from “outside” of their discipline or field pure folly, “foreign” foolishness, as it were (in Cabral, 2016, p. 18). My interest is to engage with Black people as land-dispossessed, a fact rarely acknowledged or taken up, by de/anti-colonization theorists, both in respect to the Black diaspora and Black people in Africa.

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As Wolfe famously stated, colonialism is a structure, not an event (1999). Colonialism is one of the very systems that built the modern Western world, alongside other hegemonic systems like capitalism. Colonialism works with other systems to destroy complex societies, often in the name of “improving” them. These systems purposefully and methodically attempt to erase any evidence of culture and “civilization” in these societies (Kelley in Césaire, 2000).

Césaire thinks of colonization as “thingification” that wipes out possibilities. He states that contact between the colonizer and the colonized is non-human, because the colonizer has objectively transformed the colonized into a non-human being. While the colonizer exists in various forms—as police, surveillance, and violent “educator”—the colonized becomes “an instrument of production” (Césaire, 1955, p. 42). All that exists is a relationship of dominance and submission.

Colonization of Black people involves the “denial of [our] historical process” (Cabral, 1979).

Because dominant discourse constructs us to exist without history, and without colonized status, it sees our history to begin when we made contact with white supremacy. This denial of history erases Indigeneity, or the diverse body of “knowledge resulting from long-term residence in a place” (Dei, 2002). This is why Cabral states that “the national liberation of a people is the regaining of history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which they were subjugated” (Cabral, 1979). In this way, Cabral agrees with Fanon, Césaire, Kelley, Wilderson,

Hartman, Sexton, and so many other Black theorists who insist that true de/anti-colonization can only occur when the entire world system—and all its constituent hegemonic systems—are abolished: “It is no longer a question of knowing the world, but transforming it” (Fanon, 1958).

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This study engages with theorists who suggest that colonialism is markedly different from settler colonialism and should be discussed differently, or who suggest that experiences between various Indigenous and otherwise colonized groups are too different to engage at once. But

Cabral’s words that “the experience of others is highly significant for someone undergoing any experience…we must be able to derive from everyone’s experience what we can adapt to our own conditions, to avoid unnecessary efforts and sacrifices” (1979, p. 31) resonate with my own views. It is my sense that the academy is in dire need of Cabral’s orientation.

This work will also engage with various conceptions of colonization, settler colonialism, de/anti- colonization and the Land. Cabral states that “the Land is more than just a nationalist, territorial, geographic conception” (2016), and George Dei has taken this suggestion much further. I draw heavily upon Dei’s conception of the Land as unbound by the Eurocentric, imperialist geographic lines that white settlers, colonizers, and invaders have drawn on a map. My work theorizes the Land as intimately connected with culture, language, spirituality, and self- knowledge.

I will also draw upon George Dei’s conception of “Indigenous” as an international category (Dei,

2016). My current location assumes Indigeneity to be a fixed, almost racial, category— attributable solely to those who are indigenous to the land where I reside. The academy rarely receives African Indigeneity as legitimate, even when scholars expand the concept to other geographies. This theoretical juncture is critical to my exploration.

Thus, I analyze both classic texts about colonization (for instance, Césaire and Fanon), and contemporary ground-breaking work in the fields of Black studies (especially Afropessimist texts). I illuminate the significant contributions of underappreciated Black theorists, who also grapple with the questions that my work considers. I examine the contemporary writings of

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Native Studies feminists, and of scholars engaging in settler colonial studies. I draw upon writings on Indigeneity from Eve Tuck, Wayne Yang and Glen Coulthard, Ward Churchill,

Taiaiake Alfred, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith.

OVERVIEW OF IN SEARCH OF A BLACK, INDIGENOUS FUTURE

I have chosen five broad topics through which to investigate anti-Blackness and de/anti- colonization.

Chapter 2 will draw heavily upon Christina Sharpe’s work In The Wake (2016), borrowing her concept of “The Weather” (p. 102) to contextualize anti-Blackness and de/anti-colonization discourse. Anti-Blackness is that invisible climate that affects each and everything that we do; it is the Weather. I add to that weather white supremacy and white supremacy through multiculturalism. I will also engage with Andrea Smith’s “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism and

White Supremacy” (2010) and her concept of white supremacist logics, offering my own suggestions for logics that constitute anti-Blackness4.

Chapters 3 and 4 undertake an in-depth discussion of current de/anti-colonization discourse.

Grounded in a Fanonian analysis, I think critically about what de/anti-colonization can mean, and what it cannot mean. These chapters thoroughly engage with decolonization theorists who are

Indigenous in a North American context, showing where Blackness is missing from their texts.

They also describe the similarities of Indigenous and Black experiences under colonialism, and question whether or not Black people are Indigenous.

4 Author’s note: I am aware of questions that have been raised regarding Smith’s identity. Her identity, community, and relations are not mine to police. Her theorizing is sound and the content of her work has been indispensible for the development of my own theorizing.

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Next, I discuss how Black people have addressed de/anti-colonization in their own academic work. Our construction as both landless and without history means that only Black scholarship discusses Black dispossession under colonialism, while much de/anti-colonization scholarship considers Black scholarship outside its body of work. I engage deeply with Afropessimist theorists and the contributions of Tiffany Lethabo King, Frank Wilderson, and Jared Sexton.

Chapter 5 will discuss Black geographies and the importance of reducing reliance on colonial borders to discuss Blackness. It highlights the importance of the Black diaspora and Black geographies as a threat to imperialism and colonialism. The fungibility of Black bodies throughout times has meant that Black people and the similarities of the uniquely Black experience throughout the globe threatens the colonial concept of the “nation” state. Black people cannot be bordered in the same way that white supremacy demands that people everywhere should be bordered. We share a kinship across borders because of our resistance to the white supremacist, global anti-Black project.

This discussion relies heavily on Katherine McKittrick’s “Demonic Grounds” (2006). The relationship between Black geographies and anti/de-colonization theory shows the importance of engaging with Black geographies in any discussions regarding anti/de-colonization in the

West. I will heavily critique “bordered” (and especially American) Black thought as imperial, and therefore complicit in the white supremacist colonization project. Reluctance to conceive of

Blackness outside of a bordered framework has stunted our collective projects for freedom, and ultimately, de/anti-colonization.

The sixth chapter engages with antagonisms in the academy that result from absenting

Blackness, and theorizing decolonization through the logics of white supremacy and anti-

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Blackness. It will critique particular texts that demonstrate the dangers of absenting Blackness, and reveals anti-Blackness in certain texts that claim intentions of anti/decolonization.

Bonita Lawrence, Enakshi Dua and Zaynab Amadahy (2005, 2009) and “The White Possessive” by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015), are the subjects of critique for this work. Assisting in the analyses are pieces by Sharma and Wright (2008) Andrea Smith (2010), Jared Sexton (2014), an earlier piece I wrote for New Framings on Anti-Racism (Hudson, 2017), and George Dei’s

Reframing Blackness and Black Solidarities through Anti-Colonial and Decolonial Prisms (2017).

These texts reveal a particular form of absenting Blackness on the part of Lawrence, Dua,

Amadahy and Moreton-Robinson. This work holds that, when articulating de/anti-colonization theory, the academy risks seduction into white supremacist logics. I will stress the importance of engaging with the Land as more than a simple geographic construction. I will, drawing from my own experience, discuss how activists on the ground have effectively been able to build coalitions in spite of these antagonisms in the academy.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER: UNDISCIPLINED METHODS

In this work, such texts converse with one another through “undisciplined” methods that Black women theorists have developed. Sharpe argues for undisciplined methods and states:

“For Black academics to produce legible work in the academy often means adhering to

research methods that…[do] violence to our own capacities to read, think, and

imagine…Despite knowing otherwise, we are often disciplined into thinking through and

along lines that reinscribe our own annihilation” (2016, p. 13).

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Recognizing the violence of the academy, and its capacity to act as a tool of anti-Blackness,

Sharpe calls upon Dionne Brand’s unscientific, “Blackened knowledge” method, which “comes from observing that where one stands is relative to the door of no return and that moment of historical and ongoing rupture.” She also proposes a new method, “wake work”—a method of

“encountering a past that is not past,” and of bringing absented knowledges to the surface

(2016, p. 12-13).

In her work In the Clearing, Tiffany Lethabo King similarly calls for the use of a different kind of

“sight” to encourage different understandings of existing works. With respect to Blackness and its relationship to colonization, she specifically suggests that theorists engage in “simultaneous sight,” seeing the processes of enslavement and anti-Blackness together with that of colonization. She also engages with Jacqui Alexander’s concept of palimpsestic time, recognizing that we cannot engage in this work using a colonial, linear understanding of time.

The palimpsestic approach requires a theorist to read what is being obscured from the visible layer. Our subjugation spans centuries and is ongoing. Our abolition work spans centuries and is ongoing. Throughout these hundreds of years, certain versions of history have been foregrounded and placed on top of other versions of history, obscuring them, but not erasing them (2013).

These methods of textual analysis will reveal knowledges that are not immediately obvious in a dominant, uncritical reading. This text concludes by linking the literature review from the previous chapters relevant to contemporary Black movements. It compares what the scholarly texts tell us about Blackness and decolonization with activist realities on the ground. As part of a praxis exercise, I also offer my own theoretical interjections that I have drawn from my work with the Movement for Black Lives.

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Activists in Black and Indigenous communities have created movements that support one another. If we do not work together, henceforward, we risk continued death: as Fanon (1963) noted. I make proposals regarding how Black and Indigenous people can struggle side-by- side—in coalition where possible (Trask, 1991), and in support of one another where such coalitions do not make sense. Such joint struggle will always share a goal of revolutionary change to dismantle violent, oppressive, hegemonic systems.

Finally, using my practical and material experience in grassroots organizing, I offer suggestions for the academy. The academy can advance a collective and contingent goal of de/anti- colonization and liberation for Black and Indigenous (including Black Indigenous) people. Black academics have access to a place where new ideas can be theorized in a (sometimes) more nurturing environment than the hustle of the ground. Therefore, they have a responsibility to their Black kin to struggle against the anti-Blackness embedded in important academic criticisms of hegemonic systems.

We must resist a de/anti-colonial construction that absents Black people. We must resist a construction of Blackness that is only in itself a relation to white violence. We must demand reflection and retheorizing from our colleagues who have used white supremacist logics to further anti-Black ideas on the name of de/anti-colonization. We must contribute to an overall struggle towards de/anti-colonization, and resist colonialism’s and anti-Blackness’ alienation of our communities who fight against these hegemonic systems in practice.

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2. CONTEXT: THE WEATHER

A few years ago, I had the unparalleled honour of speaking at the annual Nelson Mandela

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Lecture at Ryerson University’s Social Justice Week, on a panel entitled “A New World is Possible: A Conversation on Anti-Black Racism.” The privilege was all the more overwhelming, for I shared the program with the peerless Dionne Brand. Her address referenced Christina Sharpe’s analogy describing the context of anti-Blackness and white supremacy under which we all live: the Weather.

The analogy astonished me: the term perfectly describes the systems around us, how ubiquitous they are, and how they affect our own movements. We must constantly brace ourselves to face the climate we might interact with on any given day, and it might affect how and whether we interact with other people. It was the first time I had heard the term. I was so grateful for this concept, which allowed me to articulate my own experiences in language, that I excitedly shared the idea with several friends and colleagues in the weeks that followed.

And then I read Christina Sharpe’s masterpiece, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016).

Sharpe’s use of poetics in her theorizing of Black life ranks among the most impactful and personally meaningful works I have ever had the privilege to read. Beyond my awe at Sharpe’s prescient work of art, I appreciated her explanation of “the Weather,” in the final quarter of her visionary four-part treatise on tragedy:

In the United States, slavery is imagined as a singular event even as it

changed over time and even as its duration expands into supposed

emancipation and beyond. But slavery was not singular; it was, rather, a

singularity—a weather event or phenomenon likely to occur around a

particular time, or date, or set of circumstances. Emancipation did not make

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free Black life free; it continues to hold us in that singularity. The brutality was

not singular; it was the singularity of antiblackness.

Singularity: a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time

are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final

state of matter falling into a black hole. (Merriam-Webster Online)

In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The

weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric

condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies. Ecology: the branch

of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to

their physical surroundings…When the only certainty is the weather that

produces a pervasive climate of antiblackness, what must we know in order

to move through these environments in which the push is always toward

Black death? (In the Wake, p. 106, emphasis in original)

Here, Christina Sharpe provides a framework explaining the social, economic, political, and cultural conditions that form the discursive basis for the non-Black world’s relationship to Black lives and Black life. She is also theorizing Black people’s relationship to land, space, environment, spirituality, survival, each other, and knowledge. Her analogy to weather presents anti-Blackness as all-encompassing and ever-present—capable of massive shifts in day-to-day experiences, monumental disasters, and mild annoyances.

The Weather is such an apt descriptor for anti-Blackness and white supremacy because of how ubiquitous it is. Denying its existence is as absurd to those disadvantaged by its existence as denying the weather. We may have differing levels of analysis by which to identify a cold front, but there is no denying its existence. She is describing a social condition of Black life, wherein a literacy about how to live in the world, or prepare for the Weather, is a matter of life and death.

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In addition to shaping our lives, this Weather largely shapes discussions and erasures surrounding de/anti-colonization theory and Blackness. To use Gramsci’s term for the

“Weather,” our society is organized by multiple hegemonies. Such hegemonies—patriarchy, misogyny, capitalism, heteronormativity, colonialism—beget phenomena like sexism, gender- based violence, poverty, homophobia and anti-Indigeneity, respectively. White supremacy and anti-Blackness are hegemonies that mass Western culture, until quite recently, has relegated to the realm of the unspeakable.

WHITE SUPREMACY

When I teach workshops on white supremacy, I observe that white people often feel a sense of personal individual attack or guilt, and resist acknowledging its existence. However, when I speak of white supremacy or whiteness, I am not referring to individuals. I am referencing a system—a climate—under which we all live. So pervasively do these Weather patterns inform the subjugation of Black life worldwide, it is no wonder that white people are resistant to considering their complicity in them.

White supremacy is responsible for some of the most heinous crimes against humanity in the world. Though some may see and understand that white people clearly have privileges not afforded to anyone else, many are far less willing to accept that it is an ongoing problem which may implicate them. This may especially be true if they are not doing anything to combat it. It is much easier to deny its existence.

Similarly, there is a marked resistance to acknowledging and discussing anti-Black racism, certainly in North American culture, and I would argue worldwide. In my experience, people in places like the United States, Canada and Brazil, are wont to point to progress with respect to

29 race and racism. “Diversity” offers the mythological “proof” that racism is no longer a threat. But a cursory survey of Black people’s material conditions will quite viscerally reveal that such diversity does not result in Black people enjoying the same social and economic mobility that non-Black people do. Again, reluctance to acknowledge the Weather, as it plainly exists, appears to veil culpability. It shields others from realizing what seems patently obvious to those of us who are Black.

“Whiteness is a racial discourse, whereas the category ‘white people’ represents a socially- constructed identity, usually based on skin colour” (Leonardo, 2002, p. 31). Whiteness has many characteristics and logics that make it difficult to confront by design. Part of its characteristics includes an unwillingness to discuss it. In an in-depth description of white supremacy’s Weather patterns, Leonardo notes that whiteness also minimizes racist legacies and encourages racialized people to avoid “identifying with a racial experience or group” (Leonardo, 32).

Leonardo also makes clear that whiteness is not about a culture that belongs to a specific group of people. In fact, whiteness is a fictive grouping. It is a paradigm that groups diverse European- descendant people together under the claim of a repeatedly-debunked biological racial superiority, and groups racialized people together while attributing biological inferiority to them.

Despite whiteness’ scientific disproving, its reification as a social concept is easy to identify through the social and economic privilege that it affords white people when compared to non- white people.

Similarly, I have experienced an unwillingness to discuss anti-Blackness from both white people and non-Black racialized people. This is because anti-Blackness is a system that privileges all non-Black people in varying degrees. The people that the racial hierarchy of white supremacy and anti-Blackness deem as closer to Blackness enjoy less privileges than other non-Black

30 racialized people. Anti-Blackness is a hegemonic, global system that disadvantages people of

African descent. It is the system that ensures that, in general, Black people are politically and economically disadvantaged when compared to their non-Black counterparts across the globe.

Anti-Blackness also marginalizes non-Black people of colour who dominant society reads as closer to Blackness. For example, Tamil people and Pacific Island people are disadvantaged compared to other South-East Asians or East Asians, respectively. Though non-Black racialized people are certainly affected by white supremacy and disadvantaged to varying degrees by racism, they can still benefit from anti-Blackness. This is why anti-Blackness can be observed in non-white communities around the globe. Smith states, “racial hierarchy tells people that as long as you are not black, you have the opportunity to escape the commodification of capitalism.

Anti-blackness enables people who are not black to accept their lot in life because they can feel that at least they are not at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy” (p. 2).

LOGICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY5

Smith further explains white supremacy by identifying three logics of white supremacy:

Disappearance, Slaveability and Orientalism. My essay “Indigenous and Black Solidarity” adds to these the logic of One True History (Hudson, 2017). I discuss each in turn.

White supremacy enacted a logic of Disappearance toward communities indigenous to the lands across the Americas that the British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and others had colonized

(Smith, 2010). White colonizers needed to create a lasting logic of themselves as “native” to lands where they settled—such as the lands they identify as Brazil, the United States, and

5 This section adapted from “Indigenous & Black Solidarity in Practice: #BLMTOTentCity,” by S. Hudson in Newton, J. & Soltani, A. (Eds.), New Framings on Anti-Racism: Volume 2 – The New Futurity (pp. 1-17), 2017, Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Copyright 2017 by Sense Publishers. Adapted with permission.

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Canada. This white supremacist geography, which I discuss later, is a logic that persists today— despite its obvious impossibility.

Presence and visibility of Indigenous communities challenge the white supremacist assertion that the Americas are composed of white states. Accordingly, settlers committed genocide against

Indigenous communities to further the myth that the lands they had usurped were empty. In

Canada and the United States in particular, the logic of Disappearance created and intentionally isolated reserve communities.

The logic of Disappearance also led white colonizers to create a racist understanding of

Indigeneity predicated on primitivity, in turn dependent upon “blood purity.” Canada’s Indian

Act, for instance, only recognizes children’s Indigenous status when their mothers are Indigenous women. Over the years, this settler strategy has resulted in the British (and subsequently, the

Canadian) state refusing to acknowledge many with Indigenous ancestry as Indigenous.

Residential schools amplified these strategies of disappearance, causing significant harm in

Indigenous communities; a cultural and physical genocide.

With respect to Black communities, the settler-master needed to impose a logic of Slaveability

(Wilderson, 2010; Smith, 2010). Despite Canada’s cultural myth of innocence regarding the international enslavement of Black people in white states, Canadians used the labour of enslaved Africans. Canada was also built upon the profits that the British Empire realized through its use of “free” labour (Austin, 2010). Additionally, traders of sugar, cotton, salt, and other plantation goods all enslaved Africans, and benefitted from the logic of Slaveability.

Slaveability resulted in a different genocidal process than Disappearance. Wolfe (2006) states,

“as opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth,

Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive.

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In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination,” and continues to do so today.

The settler-master needed to multiply his labour supply. Thus, rather than insisting on racial purity, the white supremacist logic enacted the “one drop” rule as a marker of Slaveability: so long as one had a veritable “drop” of African ancestry, one was unfit to be considered fully human. The process excluded African people from humanity in the eyes of the colonizer

(Cooper, 2007).

Enslavement was a permanent condition that literally stripped tens of millions of African people of their right to live. Watching Black life end violently became white leisure. And even if one did survive, survival was equivalent to social death (Cooper, 2007). It is important to note that the logic of Slaveability persists today, with the near universal acceptance of slave-like working conditions for prisoners, who are disproportionately Black; and temporary foreign workers—who, in Canada, are imported from the Caribbean and Mexico.

The final white supremacist logic that Andrea Smith considers is Orientalism. The Orientalist logic imposes borders upon the earth as markers of innate human value, civility, and worth.

Orientalism provides white supremacist colonizers with the logic necessary to declare themselves superior to all societies outside of white states, giving them dominion over the world

(Smith, 2010).

I add to Andrea Smith’s three identified logics the additional white supremacist logic of One

True History. White supremacy’s logics of anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and other forms of racism persist in part because of its insistence on one version of history that white people have exclusive dominion over. It is expressed through the Eurocentric dismissal of oral histories and reliance on the written word as irrefutable truth. As Tuhiwai Smith articulates, history told from

33 the perspective of colonizers assumes that “history is a totalizing discourse” and that there is a

“universal history” (pp. 74-77, 2012). It is expressed through an almost scientific reliance on the white encoders of history to tell us “truths” about people the world over, despite obvious reasons that we should not rely on white supremacist historians to tell African history.

The logic of One True History results, for example, in the denial of Canadian enslavement, because officials responsible for census data did not include Africans in their accounts (Brown,

2008). “Daniel Defoe, writing in 1713 about the slave trade, plantation slavery, and the triangular mercantile trade among Great Britain, Africa, the West Indies, and the Americas, summed up the tangled web of total exploitation of Africa and Black people as follows: ‘No African trade, no

Negroes; no sugar, no sugar islands; no islands, no continents; no continent, no trade: that is to say farewell to your American trade, your West Indian trade’” (Inner quote: Daniel Dafoe, in

Brown, 2008).

Such logic also makes the history of the Underground Railroad in the public and contemporary imagination dreadfully incomplete. It mythologizes Canada into a promised land for escaped slaves, because the history of Canada’s enslaved population crossing the 49th parallel into the freedom of the United States is unwritten. Canadian popular consciousness does not acknowledge that the first large-scale escapes of enslaved people (that could be deemed an

“underground railroad” movement) were from Amherstberg and Sandwich in Canada to Detroit in the United States (Cooper, 2007). That the brutalization of an African woman by a Canadian slaver sparked this movement is also virtually unknown. So are Canada’s attempts to recover its lost “property” (i.e. enslaved Black people) (Cooper, 2007).

Such logic gives rise to a present where Canadian whiteness can believe that the imagined geographical border represents a significant shift in principles, history and experience. This

34 obscures the colonial, imperialist history of Canada. It also mythologizes all Black people living in

Canada as recent immigrants, despite our presence on this land dating back to the 1600s. David

Austin (2010) states: “In other words, power, in this case state and corporate power, is facilitated and exercised through the production of truth, that is contrived narratives designed to maintain power, order and authority, and to make laws and produce wealth; truths by which ‘we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying’” (p. 20).

The One True History also allows the other logics to continue unchallenged, despite their obvious contradiction. In a present that whiteness wants to imagine as post-colonial and post- racial, despite superficial liberal rejections of the current manifestation of these social harms in popular consciousness, the logics of Disappearance and Slaveability persist. The one-drop rule, for example, continues to define Blackness. Contemporary state leaders, such as former Prime

Minister Stephen Harper, absurdly claim without irony that Canada “has no history of colonialism” (Fontaine, 2006).

Implementing the One True History allows a society in which white supremacy can become the dominant metanarrative without widespread challenge. It may seduce Black, Indigenous, and racialized people, who then believe that hegemonic structures have no bearing on our lives, and that our social condition is determined solely by our own actions (commonly vocalized through ideas that we must “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps”). If Black and Indigenous are responsible for our own subjugation, and fail to advance politically and economically due to our own individual faults (Smith, 2010), then whiteness has no responsibility for its continued marginality and oppression. The One True History convinces society, including Black and

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Indigenous people that we are entitled to life, dignity, and “freedom” if we “do as we are told” and agree to surveillance and restricted social mobility.

ANTI-BLACKNESS

I invoke white supremacy and anti-Blackness as two distinct, but related, hegemonic systems because anti-Blackness has its own set of logics that are distinct from those of white supremacy.

While some may argue that anti-Blackness is, in and of itself, a logic of white supremacy (Smith termed it “Slaveability”), I believe that it is an interlocking concept in its own right—much more than simply a logic or strategy of white supremacy. Where white supremacy is invisible, anti-

Blackness is very visible and white people and non-Black racialized people readily participate in it. I argue that the foremost pillars of anti-Blackness are dehumanization, criminalization, and absence.

Dehumanization very literally makes Black people subhuman. Historically, Christian white colonizers and slavers declared Black people to be the cursed descendants of the Biblical Ham; a seeming endorsement of the subhuman status of Black people, and a divine justification for the subjugation of Black life. The effects of this historical myth persist today. Previously accepted as scientific fact within white societies through the dubious discipline of phrenology, and operationalized through eugenics, this logic informs several strategies of anti-Blackness. Because it positions us as inhuman, Black people’s lives become less worthy of protection, mourning, or indeed living, as the lives of non-Black people. Thus, when state forces from Brazil to Canada routinely take Black lives at alarmingly disproportionate rates, such phenomena very rarely prompt law-makers to protect Black lives.

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The second pillar of anti-Black racism that I identify is criminalization. In essence, it presumes

Black people to be a deviant group of people from whom the rest of society must be kept safe.

This logic uses the strategies of surveillance and incarceration to limit the freedom of Black people worldwide. Dionne Brand emphasizes this when she says, “the Black body is one of the most regulated bodies in the Diaspora” (p. 37). We are constantly presumed to be breaking rules for inherently evil purposes, and are consistently given harsher sentences than non-white people for committing equivalent crimes.

Anti-Blackness ensures that dominant society deems activities that Black people engage in as criminal. The societal consequences for Black people taking up these activities are markedly different from those for non-Black people. The best contemporary example is to compare the way North American society dealt with the crack epidemic in Black communities with how it addresses the ongoing opioid epidemic in white ones. North American states responded to the crack epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s in Black communities with strict criminalization, the “War on

Drugs,” and harsh prison sentences for Black people caught with the drug. Today, these same

North American states narrate the opioid epidemic, currently affecting millions of white users, as a public health crisis, not a criminal one. They discuss mental health crises, and prescribe medical supports for users.

Of course, this logic (which presumes Black deviance) has resulted in disproportionate incarceration rates of Black people across the Americas, as Angela Davis (2003) exceptionally documented. This logic allows non-Black people to divest themselves of any responsibility they may otherwise bear from their own investment in anti-Blackness. Instead, they can simply blame the supposedly criminal nature of Black people for our social, political and economic location.

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Finally, absence is a logic that absents Black people from history and culture, and assumes that

Black people have neither history nor land. As Fanon aptly put it, anti-Blackness encourages non-Black people to think that Black people have “no culture, no civilization, and no ‘long historical past’” (1952, p. 17). Though our history is continually erased by white supremacy, we are assumed to simply have no history of worth considering, no history that affects our lives today, and to have contributed nothing of value to humankind through anti-Blackness.

Those invoking this logic may claim that the mass enslavement of African people has long passed, and has nothing to do with our contemporary material social, political, and economic conditions. Or, they may suggest that we inherently lack value, and the proof is that we have never contributed anything of worth. This logic justifies the assumption that Black people have no motivation to take responsibility for our own subjugation. It assists in invisibilizing white supremacy as the real and obvious culprit.

This logic also assumes that Black people are landless. It precludes an analysis that we are colonized people whose Indigenous lands and bodies have been taken from us by white colonizers. Anything worth discussing in our histories comes at the point of contact and enslavement by white people, or engagement in wars that whiteness is responsible for on the

African continent. Indeed, Dei’s conception of the Land (2016) shows how even our spirituality and cultural artifacts are assumed to be not in and of themselves African, whether we are discussing rock music, American “folk” music, or Egyptian spirituality.

A careful contemplation of these logics reveals a troubling notion: all people, even those who are not white, can be implicated in the logics of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. White,

Black, Indigenous, and non-Black racialized people may all participate in white supremacy’s logics. Its hegemonic status is dependent upon mass participation. Even Black and Indigenous

38 people can become junior partners of the settler-master’s injustices against both communities

(Sexton, 2014).

Truly tackling white supremacy and anti-Blackness means attacking each of these pillars, without re-inscribing or strengthening another pillar. A failure to do so runs the risk of turning racialized and Indigenous people against one another, thereby contributing to the logic of white supremacy while attempting to attack another. Bonita Lawrence and Zainab Amadahy (2009) commit this error when they attack the logic of Disappearance, acknowledge the logic of

Slaveability, and contribute to the logic of One True History; as Chapter 6 discusses in detail.

THE UBIQUITY OF WHITENESS

Shome’s Outing Whiteness (2000) discusses Lipsitz’ description of how white people learn their

“possessive investment in whiteness,” in part, through popular culture. Shome further breaks down this possessive investment concept into the “sense of material and cultural entitlement that is enabled and the sense of social agency that is produced, when [white people] see the world constantly constructed in [their] image, through their needs, and through their frame of reference” (p. 368). This goes beyond the popular culture of the Americas, though it is where this discussion focuses. As du Bois noted and Leonardo referenced, “whiteness is a global phenomenon and there is very little space on the globe unaffected or unpartitioned by white power” (Leonardo, 2002, p. 33).

That being said, despite The Weather of white supremacy being so ubiquitous, it is a phenomenon that whiteness constantly contests. It effectively reifies the “Other” and refuses to make itself visible (Lorde, 1984 & Leonardo, 2002). In normalizing whiteness, white supremacy

39 invisibilizes itself; whiteness is considered natural, having total agency and freedom across the globe.

While non-white people demand social change across the Americas, white people constantly tell us to “go back” to where we come from. Such epithets of unbelonging are strictly reserved for non-white people, despite the fact that white people are not indigenous to the many places they have settled across the globe. This is because the unbelonging of white people is made invisible through the operation of the white supremacist system.

Several scholars point to the frustrating way that white supremacy evades logic (Leonardo, 2002;

DuBois, 1994; Fanon, 1952) and derives power from its ability to “usurp reason and rational thought” (Leonardo, 2002, p. 37). Whiteness denies that it is the object of concern; any claim of racist injustice “always becomes something that is about someone else, about something else, but never about itself” (Shome, 2002, p. 367). Fanon perhaps most adequately described the experience of encountering the maddening irrationality of racism as follows: “I personally would say that for a man armed solely with reason, there is nothing more neurotic than contact with the irrational” (2008, p. 98).

As Hurtado stated in Shome, “The claim of ignorance is one [of white supremacy’s] most powerful weapons because while you spend your time trying to enlighten me, everything remains the same” (p. 367, 2002). It also invisibilizes itself by making one of its resultant strategies, racism, the exclusive domain of racialized people. It “frames the issue of racism as the problem or realm of non-whites who are dissatisfied with their lot in life rather than a concern for the humanity of all people, including whites” (Leonardo, 33). But, of course, the power in racial relations rests largely with white people because of whiteness. White people are the ones with

40 the most power to shift the material realities of non-white people, and may therefore do so with the most ease.

MULTICULTURALISM AS A VEIL OF WHITENESS

Central to Canada’s brand of white supremacist colonialism, and often touted to differentiate it from that of the United States, is its reliance on multiculturalism. (Chapter 5 will highlight other ways in which Canada presents itself as morally superior to the United States on the issue of race.) I choose to focus on multiculturalism here because it is fundamental to the way that

Canada constructs itself. Multiculturalism operates as a perma-feature of our Canadian Weather.

Heralded as a progressive concept, Canada’s cultural mythology lauds multiculturalism as a harbinger of tolerance, equality, and social harmony. In fact, the very existence of Canada’s

Indigenous and Black populations are destabilizing antitheses to this cultural lore. Far from a progressive bastion of justice, multiculturalism is in fact a shield against legitimate claims of justice for Black and Indigenous people.

As Walcott (2014) reveals, Canada’s official Multiculturalism Policy—which Prime Minister

Trudeau (the first) enshrined in law in 1971—had nothing to do with racial equality or harmony between ethnicities. Rather, “the policy’s intent was to manage the non-French and non-English peoples of the nation” (Walcott, 2014, p. 127) and to ensure that in a rapidly diversifying post- war population, the English and French ethnicities would be accepted as “native.” Walcott

(2014) discusses a cultural shift in discourse from identifying the English and French settlers as

European races to differences in language. This discourse meant to designate white settlers as raceless and the “founders” of this land.

These “founders” have cleverly hidden a past of violent interactions with other races through a

Multiculturalism Policy that relies on a belief in Canada’s benevolence. It requires one to ignore

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Canada’s genocidal history with respect to Black and Indigenous communities, and additionally its violent treatment of Asian migrants. “Ultimately, the combination of positive, that is to say contrived, mythology and absented histories serves to marginalise, exclude, alienate, and pathologize,” says David Austin (2010, p. 23).

It is clear that a policy of multiculturalism is hypocritical, requiring a history of ultimate and fatal anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in order to exist. Walcott further identifies that, “from its very beginning…[Canada] had no intention of allowing those racialized as others to participate or shape what the nation might become” (2014, p. 131). As such, though multiculturalism portrays all those living above the 49th parallel as able to participate equally in a democratic system, it obfuscates Black and Indigenous struggles for change from mass social consciousness, and meets them with intransigence and victim-blaming. Indeed, multiculturalism works to “obscure differences arbitrarily imposed by white racist domination” (hooks, 339).

What happens to Black and Indigenous people under a system of multiculturalism? The state attempts to control Indigenous people, using the legitimacy it gains with the rest of the population through multiculturalism. It establishes control by handing out “rights,” while maintaining its white supremacist colonial status. As David Austin (2010) discusses, “‘First

Nations’ collective rights and identities are at times acknowledged by the state in return for, as

Glen Coulthard argues, tacit recognition and legitimisation of the state’s authority — but only in so far as Indigenous claims to land and identity do not fundamentally threaten state-corporate interests” (p. 22).

Multiculturalism specifically appeals to non-Black racialized people. It promises that they can participate in the nation-state as equals, distinguished from dehumanized Black and Indigenous communities (Smith, 2010). In creating the “model minority,” multiculturalism provides migrant

42 communities with a proximity to whiteness that relies on anti-Blackness. Model minorities are non-Black, non-white people who ascend or approach whiteness, because multiculturalism deems them socially, politically, and economically distinct from Black people.

Leonardo argues that this is a strategy (and I add that it is a strategy of the anti-Black hegemonic structure) meant to discipline non-white people and ensure that they accept the existing system.

It also seeks to weaken their interest in creating cross-racial solidarities. By allowing certain non- white communities to approach whiteness through an elevated material social, political, and economic status, the systems of whiteness and anti-Blackness can then compare Black communities with other non-white communities, claiming that any deficiencies Black people experience are of the latter’s own making. Just as white supremacy can fracture the working class by allowing white blue-collar workers to assume superiority over Black people with whom they share class affiliation, so too can multiculturalism fracture non-Black from Black racialized people in the struggle against white supremacy.

In North America, Asians are, to varying degrees, closer to whiteness than Black folks can ever be—by design. As Leonardo states, “today’s Asian-American student is commonly touted as the

‘model minority’…this favourable image is a commentary on the perception of African American and Latino students as less than ideal” (2002, p. 43). I do not mean to imply that white people

“think Asian-Americans are white or, for that matter that the latter consider themselves white”

(Leonardo, 2002, p. 44). However, multiculturalism’s model minority does provide an incentive for groups of non-white people to invest in whiteness. Those communities can either refuse it, or employ it to better their own individual lot in life—at the expense of Black people and those groups of people considered closer to Blackness.

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One might ask how such an analysis accounts for the social location of certain Asian communities in the Americas. In response, I quote Leonardo: “Asian immigrants, by and large, arrive to the

USA with a different class status and different material resources than their Latino counterparts.

As a result, they comprise a selective group of immigrants and have a different contact experience with American class structure, which puts them closer to white experience” (2002, p.

44). Importantly, this is a heterogenous group, varying in class, immigration status, geographies, and proximity to whiteness. It is folly to assume that Asians fit into a “pan-ethnic, Asian-American master narrative” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 23) simply because white supremacist discourse presents them as such.

In short, multiculturalism does not view racialized people as actors with agency. We exist as a force that threatens the mythology of white people as the legitimate source of power in this land, and as such, we must be controlled. Multiculturalism uses racialized people as tools against other racialized people to prevent mass organizing between different racialized groups.

CONCLUSION

Though I have specifically chosen to outline Canadian strategies for white supremacy because of my own social and geographic location, this work does not justify any claim that white supremacies and anti-Black racisms are markedly specific to any particular state territory. While local realities are important and indeed contextual, the idea that white supremacist colonial borders effectively partition any particular brand of white supremacy is as preposterous as presuming that capitalism can be state-specific in this globalized world. Scholars must be careful not to reify white supremacist structures such as nation-states in our understanding of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

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The climate of white supremacy is a hegemonic system that is, much like capitalism, adaptable.

Indeed, when contested, “instead of positioning itself as the “norm,” it begins to mark itself as the “other,” as “different,” as an identity in crisis and therefore having a particular location that, like minority locations, needs to be defended, salvaged, and protected” (Shome, 2002, p. 368).

White supremacy morphs much like capitalism:

in order to maintain its racial hegemony, whiteness has always had to maintain some

sense of flexibility…It must accommodate subjects previously marked as Other in order

to preserve its group power. In other words, for it to remain dominant, whiteness has to

seduce allies, convince them of the advantages of such an alliance, and sometimes be

able to forsake immediate advantages of long-term goals of domination. Nowhere is this

more pronounced than the literature on the induction of the Irish into the white race. To

a lesser extent, one can trace some of the same tendencies in the recent incorporation

of Asians into the American racial polity. (Leonardo, 2002, p. 41)

It also interacts with “other unequal social relations” and “secures its power in different ways through different sites” (Shome, 2002, p. 368). White supremacy interacts with other hegemonic systems, such as colonialism and anti-Blackness, to create a complex world system which particularly places, for example, the lives of Black trans women at risk. Of course, Kimberlé

Crenshaw’s (1991) concept of intersectionality (which Chapter 2 references) allows this understanding. It is crucial to understand that white supremacy interacts with anti-Blackness and colonialism to create the subject locations that Black people find themselves in, all over the world. In particular, this work sees it as crucial to understand these phenomena as separate and related.

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I want to close this chapter by emphasizing that these climates are ubiquitous. They can, much like the weather, consume us, or we can prepare ourselves to brave the elements—and we must prepare well, as the climate can be unpredictable. In her reflection on whiteness in the Black imagination, hooks tells us that “whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as a terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures.” But she also warns us that in our current society, “white and black people alike believe that racism no longer exists. This erasure, however mythic, diffuses the representation of whiteness as terror in the black imagination. It allows for assimilation and forgetfulness” (1992, p. 341). This assimilation and forgetfulness amongst Black people, Indigenous people or indeed any other people of colour ultimately works to reinforce the weather of white supremacy and anti-Black racism, and as such reinforces our subjugated positions vis-à-vis whiteness.

We must be diligent in refusing this quiet tactic of whiteness, and critically examine how this weather might be affecting strategies that we undertake in service of our communities. Our struggles must reject and contest whiteness, in order to make whiteness visible. It is when we contest the logics of white supremacy that “whiteness begins to mark itself, name itself, come out of its ‘hiding place’ if you will” (Shome, 2002, p. 368). In particular, as communities so at risk due to the positions that white supremacy and anti-Black racism places us, Black and Indigenous communities must be particularly careful not to become tools of these hegemonic structures, pitted to work against one another. To improve our chances of success in our separate but related struggles, we must come together where possible to prepare to brave against the weather together.

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3. DE/ANTI-COLONIZATION DISCOURSE: WHAT’S HERE? WHAT’S MISSING? CRITIQUES

This chapter discusses current de/anti-colonization discourse. With respect to this broader discussion of anti-Blackness and decolonization theory, it is important to fully understand the current scholarly discussions on decolonization, before the next chapter’s discussions about theorizing Blackness. Such de/anti-colonization discourse is very current in the academy, with theorists engaging each other back and forth. While I use “de/anti-colonization discourse” as a shorthand, the majority of theorists I am referring to would more likely refer to themselves as

Native studies scholars or settler colonialism scholars. While I will briefly touch on the differences between the two schools of thought below, I am referring to these fields together as de/anti- colonization theory.

Despite their differences in theoretical approach, I see both of these fields as activist fields. Their purpose is not to simply objectively record information but to have an impact on the academy and society. Veracini calls the field of settler colonial studies a heuristic tool, and insists that it is not a transformative one (2014). Still, I view virtually any approach centring Indigeneity and critiquing colonization within the academy as a decolonizing tool. The knowledge that such disciplines produce can be transformative when activated on the ground, regardless of their original intentions.

I also appreciate that, in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) words, “the development of theories by

Indigenous scholars which attempt to explain our existence in contemporary society (as opposed to the ‘traditional’ society constructed under modernism) has only just begun.” Much remains to be theorized. But this is true for certain Indigenous communities. Much remains to be theorized.

Indigenous Africans in particular have been contemplating their Indigeneity, dispossession,

47 colonization, and social and environmental relations for some time. I find both approaches helpful to my own thinking, but also incomplete.

As an example of what I mean, there are several ongoing debates about terminology for people living on land that is not of their ancestry, and who are not part of the dominant power structure.

In the context of Turtle Island,6 tensions arise as some theorists consider non-Indigenous racialized people to be settlers. The scope of this project does not consider non-Black people of colour and whether or not they constitute settler communities. I am interested, here, in those who theorize that Black folks are settlers.

ARE BLACK PEOPLE SETTLERS?

The first time I consciously considered this question was the summer of 2010. I was on the west coast, in Coast Salish territory, at a private event at a new acquaintance’s home. The guests all sat in a circle outside to introduce ourselves to one another, and the host asked us, along with our names, to identify whether we were Indigenous or settlers. Those were the only two options, and I felt myself become immediately uncomfortable.

As I waited for my turn to introduce myself, I interrogated my feelings of unease. Was I unwilling to accept that I was a settler? No. That was not the source of my discomfort. My experiences as a Black woman on this land had taught me quite roundly that I do not have the same “rights” as white people, despite my citizenship. I did not have the same power as a settler, and had never been accepted as belonging to the Canadian state, let alone been able to exercise power in the same way that settlers do.

6 I want to acknowledge, here, that “Turtle Island” is not a universal Indigenous term for North America. I invoke it here as a resident of the traditional territories of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee people, both of whom use the term Turtle Island to refer to North America.

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I then considered my history. Black people did not arrive willingly to the West. The people who brought us here did not consider us people, they considered us fungible property (Hartman,

1997). Without having read any formal theory about the subject at the time, I concluded: if the options are simply settler and Indigenous, and a settler constitutes someone who does not reside on their own land, then there is nowhere on this Earth that I am from. How can I be a settler if I come from nowhere? When it was my turn to introduce myself, I simply stated my name.

Several theorists have suggested different frameworks through which to understand the African diaspora in the Americas, including as arrivants, chattel, slaves, and settlers (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Each of these categories has different implications as to how the relationships between the categories are theorized, what their power is theorized to be, what responsibilities they owe to

Indigenous people and what dominant society owes them. Such lack of clarity and theorization surrounding how to understand Black people is an example of what I mean when I stated that I find the de/anti-colonization approaches helpful, but incomplete.

In recognition of the incompleteness of the current literature, this chapter will also engage in important critiques of de/anti-colonization theories, inquire about ideas that require further theorizing and development, and questions that must be considered in order to engage in de/anti-colonization actions in ways that will consider the subject position of Black people.

DEFINING INDIGENOUS

I first engage with the literature that attempts to define Indigeneity. Again, “Indigenous” is a very contested and contestable term. There is no concrete, cross-discipline agreement over what

49 it means, nor who or what it refers to. As Sium, Desai and Ritkes say, the definitions of both

Indigenous and decolonization remain “open and, to a certain extent, unknown” (2012, p. 2).

A cursory look at the etymology of the word tells us that it has a Latin root, meaning “born or originating in a particular place” and having “sprung from the land.”7 An inadequate definition, to be sure, but the root denotes the primary consideration for the subject category of

“Indigenous”: people with a particular relationship to a particular land.

Even this particular invocation is fraught with contestation, for the conception of land itself is undertheorized. I tend toward Dei’s conception of the Land, which recognizes the Land to be far more than what neoliberal, white supremacist thought has reduced it to. For Dei, “Land is not simply a fixed physical space/place…The Land as a place called home also has come to mean a social space” (2016, pp. 1-2). Land comes with not only a physical connection, but a spiritual, cultural, and social connection. It is part of our construction of who we are.

Dei’s concept of Land gives new meaning to the idea of having “sprung from” it. But this is still a very open category that does not pinpoint concretely what we mean when we say “Indigenous.”

And we may not need to struggle to create intransigent categories; people are complex and our categorizations are rarely fixed. Sium, Desai, and Ritke recognize that “often only Western cultures are allowed to be diverse and contradictory, while Indigeneity is expected to be ‘pure’, of one mind and aesthetic, and easily identifiable” (2012, p. 8). It also is important to note for the purposes of this discussion that one may be Indigenous to a place but refuse one’s

Indigeneity. There is a conceptual distinction wherein Indigeneity references one’s identity.

WHO IS INDIGENOUS?

7 Taken from: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Indigenous

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In Red Skins, White Masks, Glen Coulthard engages in a lengthy Hegelian analysis grounded in

Fanonian theory (2014) to create a discourse-based understanding of who or what is Indigenous.

Coulthard first cites Hegel’s theory of recognition; for Hegel, “one becomes an individual subject only in virtue of recognizing and being recognized by another subject” (2014, p. 28). In essence, one’s stated subject position can only become the stated subject position if, and only if, another subject recognizes that position. This has implications for freedom, since a subject can only be considered “free” or “liberated” if another subject outside the subject position of the original subject considers that original subject to be free.

Interestingly, for the purposes of this thesis, Hegel considers the idea of this recognition through a consideration of the subject positions of master and slave. Fast-forward to a contemporary version of Hegel’s analysis of recognition and power: we see that the apparatus of the state has a significant role to play in mediating recognition, through such tactics of official state- sanctioned multiculturalism policies; or, as this work discusses in more detail later, gestures toward reconciliation. Referencing both Hegelian theory and Fanon’s theories on psychosis,

Coulthard goes on to describe how a dissonance between the way a subject recognizes themselves, and how the state or society recognizes a subject or group of subjects, can be dangerous: “nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning one in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (2014, p. 30). For Coulthard, and perhaps for Fanon and Hegel, the recognition of the Indigenous subject is crucial to determining who ultimately is Indigenous and who is the settler. Additionally, what the

Indigenous subject is recognized as is critical to the Indigenous subject’s own identity formation.

This sense of self, which the state’s processes of misrecognition can significantly distort, is a necessary phenomenon for the colonizer, who “relies as much on the ‘internalization’ of the

51 forms of racist recognition imposed or bestowed on the Indigenous population by the colonial state and society as it does on brute force” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 20). This is reminiscent of

Veracini’s observation that contemporary society’s concept of “Indigenous” is tied to “a perception of vulnerability. Fragility fundamentally defines the ‘Indigenous,’ both in its relation against settler colonisers and against the emerging nationalist majorities of the post-colonial world” (2011, p. 4). For Fanon (2008), only undoing the material effects of colonization can remedy this psychological “alienation”, in addition to ameliorating the psychological effects that plague the misrecognized.

As discussed above, I understand the subject position of Indigeneity to have a particular connection with a particular Land, as Dei (2016) defines it. To use Coulthard’s analysis, I also understand the position of Indigeneity to be predicated upon a relationship and a framework of recognition of the Indigenous subjects by those subjects recognized as non-Indigenous. These open and contestable observations of what is ultimately Indigenous leaves us with some critical questions that have yet to be thoroughly theorized in the de/anti-colonization disciplines.

Sium, Desai and Ritkes ask “Can we articulate a diasporic Indigeneity?” (2012, p. 8). The question is crucial to our understanding of the subject position of settler. If settlerhood is simply constructed by virtue of not being on one’s land, is it possible to consider an Indigenous person, who has been moved against their will from their traditional territory to another, to be such a settler (within the confines of settler-defined “Canada” for instance)? Is it possible to consider someone who is Black, who the settler has similarly moved, to be such a settler? If Indigeneity is connected to both occupation and displacement (Sium, et al, 2012), how is the Indigenous subject constituted when moved from traditional lands and “brought into other Indigenous

52 contexts” (2012 p. 8)? Do they lose their Indigeneity? Dei stresses that they do not: “our

Indigenousness resides in the body, history, and in cultural memories” (2016, p. 2).

Dei stresses the need to understand “Indigenous” as an international category, and considers how to “conceptualize Indigenousness broadly in ways that simultaneously encompass land dispossession through settler colonialism, as well as loss of land, displacement, stolen peoples and mobility of peoples through the history of enslavement and human trafficking” (2017, p.

102). This distinction is crucial in a North American context. By broadening the understanding of who is Indigenous to include Black people, Dei is, by extension, broadening the responsibilities that any de/anti-colonization project must consider. “There are multiple responsibilities for

Indigenous and colonized bodies in terms of…identifying with Indigenous sovereignty rights globally. Neither settlement in a place nor claims to an Indigenous Land on our own soils can absolve us of such responsibility” (2017, p. 103).

Tiffany Lethabo King also engages in these important questions when she posits that under colonization, Black and Indigenous peoples bodies are “incarcerated by nature.” She states that this is “partially achieved by the discursive construction of the native as a ‘person who is born and thus belongs to a certain place,’ and is in fact over-determined by that place.” The

European, on the other hand, can be of a place; but is not incarcerated by it like the Native.

Their settler “Indigeneity” offers them “unfettered mobility” as well as unfettered self- actualization. Native people do not acquire this through their Indigenous status. Upon encountering the settler (who becomes Indigenous) the Native experiences their Indigeneity as non-existence and death. The clearing also shapes Blackness as it carves out the settlement- plantation” (2013, p. 95).

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WHAT IS COLONIZATION? WHO IS COLONIZED?

This work’s next question is: what constitutes colonization, and who is colonized? Much like capitalism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, or patriarchy, colonization is a totalizing hegemonic system upon which our political, economic, social, and spiritual selves are constructed. The colonial system intersects with capitalism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other such totalizing hegemonic systems to distribute a varying array of privileges to different subject positions. Its most privileged subject is the wealthy, white, land-owning, Western European man.

Furthermore, colonization has determined the framework of relationships between particular peoples, lands, the “natural world,” and “civilization” (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Colonization distributes the white supremacist concept of land as property, and sovereignty over everything, atop the land that the colonizer claims for themselves. Many scholars cite Patrick Wolfe’s famous declaration when defining colonialism, and I will repeat it: colonialism must be understood as a structure, not simply a one-time event (1999). Colonialism is ongoing; we have yet to enter some post-colonial phase.

Colonizers employ a number of strategies to eliminate the relationship that the Indigenous inhabitants have with the Land in order to complete their colonization project. Recent de/anti- colonial discourse has seen a growing trend that decouples colonization (where an exogenous entity occupies a particular land) from settler colonialism (Veracini, 2011; Wolfe 1999; Lethabo

King, 2013). This is the distinction (though there is much overlap) between settler colonial studies and native studies that I referenced earlier.

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Lorenzo Veracini, in the inaugural issue of the Settler Colonial Studies journal, pioneers a compelling case for the decoupling of colonialism and settler colonialism in order to sustain an approach “to the decolonization of settler colonial formations” (2011, p. 1).

As mentioned above, Veracini states that colonialism is “primarily defined by exogenous domination.” He goes on to state that it “has two fundamental and necessary components: an original displacement and unequal relations. Colonisers move to a new setting and establish their ascendancy” (2011, p. 1). Under settler colonialism, the colonizer remains within the occupied lands and dominates from within. “If I come and say: ‘you, work for me’, it’s not the same as saying ‘you, go away’” (2011, p. 2).

Veracini insists that the similarities between the concepts of colonialism and settler colonialism are solely the establishment of previously external domination: in both cases, colonizers and settler colonizers “move across space.” Most thought-provoking about his discursive extraction of settler colonialism from colonialism is the idea that colonialism “reproduces itself, and the freedom and equality of the colonized is forever postponed; settler colonialism, by contrast, extinguishes itself. Settler colonialism justifies its operation on the basis of the expectation of its future demise. Colonialism and settler colonialism are not merely different, they are in some ways antithetical formations” (2011, p. 3).

Settler colonialism eventually wishes to end its relationship with the Indigenous population, through ultimately disappearing them, whether through assimilation, miscegenation, genocide or any other form of disappearance. As Tuck and Yang put it, “the settler wants to be made

Indigenous” (2014, p. 8). Only at that point will the settler-master have a claim to the land that cannot be challenged by Indigenous presence. Returning to the definitional question, then, of what “Indigenous” means, we must be careful about accepting settler-master definitions of the

55 term that serve the ultimate goal of becoming Indigenous. To accept settler-endorsed definitions of “Indigenous” that deny African Indigeneity and dispossession is to assist in the settler-master’s Indigenous “becoming.”

While Veracini’s concept is interesting, and helps define how “settlement structures the Settler’s relationship to the Native” (Lethabo King, 2013, p. 92), the conceptual distinction he makes between colonialism and settler colonialism is both too intransigent and incomplete. Briefly, his insistence that the similarities between the two distinct forms of colonization end at dominance and travel makes too strong a statement. What binds the two concepts together is the colonizer’s drive to extract wealth (including from wealth-generating enslaved Black people) and other benefits from their colonized realms.

Retaining the perspective on these concepts as different strategies for colonialism helps identify colonization as a complex, transnational, interlocked system that requires attack on all fronts if de/anti-colonization efforts are to succeed. One cannot simply rhetorically attack the settler colonial state of America, without considering ongoing colonialism in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands, for example.

Additionally, Veracini’s framework for colonialism and settler colonialism does not consider Black colonized people who were trafficked and enslaved en masse at all. Where does the subject position of the settler-master (Wilderson, 2010; Lethabo King, 2013) fit into this paradigm? Is there another category, yet to be defined? If the colonized are those who are made to work for the colonizer from afar and the settler colonized are those who are made to disappear for the good of the colonizer, what of those who are colonized and stolen?

What are we to make of the Caribbean, where the term ‘settler’ hardly describes the type of colonization, and yet the Indigenous population still Disappeared, and a formerly enslaved

56 population continues to be colonized by various states? How are these populations to be theorized, when much of their connection to their ancestral homelands have been irreparably severed (though not completely), and there is no place to return to? How are we to theorize

Black populations that constantly experience recognition as being in excess, exterminated, incarcerated, and made to flee? Is this not also forced removal by the colonizer?

For Tuck and Yang, these considerations would fall under the category of settler colonialism:

Settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labor of chattel slaves, whose

bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless. Slavery in settler

colonial contexts is distinct from other forms of indenture whereby excess labor is

extracted from persons. First, chattels are commodities of labor and therefore it is the

slave’s person that is the excess. Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own land,

the slave’s very presence on the land is already an excess that must be dis-located. Thus,

the slave is a desirable commodity but the person underneath is imprisonable,

punishable, and murderable. The violence of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes

them deathlike monsters in the settler imagination; they are reconfigured/disfigured as

the threat, the razor’s edge of safety and terror. (2012, p. 6)

Again, while this is helpful, it does not fully consider the subject position of the enslaved person, who is human, despite the settler-master refusing to see them as such. The enslaved person is also a colonized person who comes from a place that is also colonized. Settler colonialism, as

Veracini describes it, is not the only factor that creates the subject position of the enslaved Black person. External colonization also plays a role.

Theorists should be cautious not to reinscribe the oppressive notions of the settler-master when trying to make sense of the world. The next chapter discusses how failing to recognize Black people as from a place, and with a history, can reinscribe some of the genocidal (Churchill, 2004)

57 strategies that the settler-master uses against us.89 Additionally, theorists should not reduce the

Black experience to the service of capital and capitalism. Economics cannot describe the fulness of our lives, both as we struggle and as we thrive.

Veracini attempts to strengthen his point by theorizing the differences between a successful decolonization strategy against colonialism versus settler colonialism:

If colonialism is defined by exogenous domination, a genuine postcolonial and

decolonised condition should require that at least one of these prerequisite conditions

cease to exist. The exogenous coloniser should depart, or, alternatively, the equality

between former coloniser and former colonised should replace a relationship of

domination.

However, as colonialism is structurally unlike settler colonialism, the decolonisation of

one circumstance should differ from the decolonisation of the other. We know how one

works, at least in theory (the colonial state, for example, is turned into its postcolonial

successor), but we do not yet exactly know how the other should appear. (2011, p.5)

Here, Veracini overstates his case. A genuine decolonized condition, under his concept of colonialism, cannot emerge with a simple departure—or relationship of equality—without considering time, history, globalism and other interlocking hegemonic forces. As Wolfe stated:

“Settler colonialism is a global and transnational phenomenon, and as much a thing of the past as a thing of the present. There is no such thing as neo-settler colonialism or post-settler

8 As a note on genocide, I have read scholarship that diametrically opposes Smith’s logics of Slaveability and genocide (2010). I see both the process of enslavement (which results in social death) and the colonization of Indigenous people as genocide. Churchill (2004) describes three types of genocide, as the United Nations originally defined it, to include “‘slow death measures’: i.e., “subjection to conditions of life which, owing to lack of proper housing, clothing food, hygiene and medical care or excessive work or physical exertion are likely to result in the debilitation [and] death of individuals…sterilization…all policies aimed at destroying the specific characteristics by which a target group is defined, or defines itself, thereby forcing them to become something else…forced transfer of children,…forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of the group…prohibition of the use of the national language…” (pp. 5-6, 2004). What has happened and is happening to Black people is also genocide, though the strategies and tactics levied upon Black populations are different than those used against Indigenous populations in a North American context. 9 As a further note on Churchill, I am aware of questions that have been raised regarding Churchill’s identity. Churchill’s identity, community, and relations are not mine to police. His theorizing is sound and the content of his work has been indispensible for the development of my own theorizing.

58 colonialism because settler colonialism is a resilient formation that rarely ends” (in Lethabo King,

2013). The same can be said for colonialism itself. Like settler colonialism, colonialism is a resilient formation that has never entered the “post-” or “neo-” stage, despite the ivory tower’s claims to the contrary.

Like settler colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and other hegemonic totalizing structures, the strategies of colonialism merely shift, achieving their ultimate purposes in different ways. Decolonized conditions do not simply emerge with a colonizer’s departure.

Colonialism can survive the exit of the colonizer: states throughout the Caribbean and Africa are proof of that. In former European-occupied colonies, the colonizer continues to maintain a relationship of power because of global white supremacy and, in the case of majority-Black states, anti-Blackness.

Both colonialism and settler colonialism require a strategic posture of abolition (Sexton, 2014), that seeks to overthrow the systems that structure our relationships worldwide. A posture of abolition necessarily considers all systems that enact themselves upon Black people or the formerly enslaved, and would seek a revolution across all hegemonic oppressive systems. The following chapter will discuss this strategy; here, suffice it to say that because of their interlocking and interdependent nature, effective strategies toward ending all kinds of colonialism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy must consider one another. These hegemonic systems are interlocked and interdependent: to consider one, without the rest, will result in failure.

Tiffany Lethabo King’s critique of settler colonial studies states,

though theorizations of settler colonial relations still tend to pivot around the

Native/Settler binary, Native feminists are able to situate settler colonialism/colonialism

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in relationship to slavery. Within Native feminist thought, settler colonialism does not

become a closed system or formation (2013, p. 10).

CONSTRUCTIONS AND EXPERIENCES OF BLACKNESS AND INDIGENEITY

Much has been written about the different logics that colonization, anti-Blackness and white supremacy use against the Black and Indigenous people of the Americas (Wolfe, 1999; Tuck &

Yang, 2012; Lethabo King, 2013; Wilderson, 2010, 2013, 2015; Sexton, 2014; Spillers, 1987) so I will summarize them briefly here.

In brief, these logics constitute Black people such that the slave multiplies and becomes fungible. The one-drop rule best expresses this logic. Blackness and therefore enslaveability is transferred from mother or father to child in all cases. Even if the amount of actual African ancestry is so remote as to constitute one drop, the child is considered Black and therefore enslaveable. This logic increases the number of enslaved people available for the settler- master’s exploitation and use.

In turn, Indigenous people are logically constituted as subtractive (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Day,

2015; Wolfe, 1999; Veracini, 2011). In contrast, the logics concerning Indigenous people are constituted such that the Indigenous people disappear. The rule of blood quantum best expresses this logic. The logic of blood quantum only allows the transfer of Indigenous identity in very specific circumstances. Blood quantum laws allowed the settler-master to reduce

Indigeneity, such that they would have a more legitimate claim over the land. “Non-Indian ancestry compromised…Indigeneity, producing “half-breeds,” a regime that persists in the form of blood quantum regulations” (Tuck, Yang, 2012).

Beyond these examples that locate our difference, I am interested in our shared experiences as colonized people. When reading literature by primarily North American Indigenous scholars, it

60 struck me that much of their experience of oppression expressed mirrored my own experiences.

Certainly, as an activist in the city of Toronto, I am acutely aware of the similar social locations that Black and Indigenous people occupy. For me and the teams that I work with, this has created a politic whereby we find it necessary to not simply ally with one another, but to struggle against our related oppressions together.

The similarities point to the importance of a de/anti-colonization strategy that similarly considers and centers both Black and Indigenous people. Any de/anti-colonization project would be incomplete without such an alignment, and risks reinscribing oppressions on either group. In this section, I will discuss the settler-master’s strategic attempt to erase both Black and Indigenous history and culture, Tuck and Yang’s conception of “settler moves to innocence,” and the settler strategy of the politics of recognition.

I do this by employing Jacqui Alexander’s (2005) palimpsestic method, as quoted in Tiffany

Lethabo King (2013):

Time is scrambled and palimpsestic, in all the Worlds, with the pre-modern, the modern,

the postmodern and the paramodern coexisting globally. But it is not only the global

coexistence of different technologies of time telling that is of concern to us here. The

central idea is that of the palimpsest—a parchment that has been inscribed two or three

times, the previous text having been imperfectly erased and remaining and therefore

still partially visible...The idea of the “new” structured through the “old” scrambled,

palimpsestic character of time, both jettisons the truncated distance of linear time and

dislodges the impulse for incommensurability, which the ideology of distance creates.

(p. 219)

The coming pages will take texts that discuss the ways that hegemonic forces constructed Black and Indigenous people in the past and palimpsestically collapse them upon understandings of our contemporary conditions to eliminate distance and colonial time, and reveal similarities.

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In Decolonizing Methodologies, Native Studies feminist Linda Tuhiwai Smith outlines some of the ways in which settler colonial strategies were used in order to supplant Indigenous ways of life with settler ideology. One of the strategies that she discusses extensively is the “negation of

Indigenous views of history.” In constituting the Indigenous population as “savages,” Tuhiwai

Smith states, Indigenous views “were regarded as clearly ‘primitive’ and ‘incorrect’ (2013). From her reading, this negation of Indigenous history continues to this day.

Her words resonate when I consider Black communities. Such colonial, white supremacist assumptions continue to have currency among the dominant white population of the Americas today, and there is a clear linkage to how colonialism constructs African and Afro-descendent people throughout history.

One of the settler-master’s strategies to justify taking Indigenous land is the myth that

Indigenous people do not know how to properly care for land. The myth assumes Indigenous relationships with land are primitive, and thus not conducive to the European settler paradigm of land ownership, wealth extraction, and accumulation. Similar myths conceptualize Black people to be so primitive as to be bestial; non-human. Such a primitive status allowed the settler-master to see Black people as fungible, and to treat them like chattel.

More than just disavow the history of both populations, colonists actively attempted to erase our histories and supplant their own. In some cases, our cultures have suffered irreparable harm and are unable to recover knowledges that were lost.

Colonizers employed strategies such as residential schools, taking Indigenous children from their communities and attempting to destroy their sense of self through a re-education program that even prominent figures in Canada’s reconciliation discourse have acknowledged to be

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“genocidal” under international law10. Children were not permitted to speak their own languages, wear non-Western attire and were subject to horrific psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. As a result of these practices, Indigenous language use has significantly diminished. For a culture with an oral tradition, this is a devastating loss that carries with it the loss knowledge, history and ways knowing.

For Black people, the settler-master simply erased our history prior to enslavement. As Fanon states, Black people are considered to “have no culture, no civilization, and no ‘long historical past’” (1952, p. 17). We were also prevented from speaking in ancestral tongues and in the

Americas there has been a near universal elimination of ancestral languages. Children were also often ripped from their relatives and sold away, enduring untold abuses. Enslaved people were not permitted to receive education beyond training for the settler-master’s tasks. Hailing from ancestry with a rich oral tradition, this is again a devastating loss.

Within Black communities in the Americas, knowledge of ancestral relationships is often unknown, and near impossible to determine. The settler-master wrote the history books, preventing both communities from contributing to what Tuhiwai Smith calls the totalizing discourse of history, or the One True History logic I reference in Chapter 2. The settler-master was able to ensure that his own version of history endured where ours was lost.

Today, these settler-master crimes continue. State institutions remove Indigenous and Black children from their homes and put them into care, where they suffer unspeakable abuse at alarming rates. Educational material prioritizes settler-master, white supremacist, and anti-Black history, ways of knowing, and knowledges. The outcomes of Black and Indigenous experiences with knowledge and history, as we come into contact with the settler-master, are similar.

10 See: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/residential-schools-findings-point-to-cultural-genocide-commission-chair-says- 1.3093580

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As Tuhiwai Smith explains, “Coming to know the past has been part of the critical pedagogy of decolonization. To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges. The pedagogical implication of this access to alternative knowledges is that they can form the basis of alternative ways of doing things” (2013). For both communities, the struggle to reveal lost or hidden knowledges — wake work (Sharpe, 2016) — has long been a decolonization practice.

In Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, Tuck and Yang describe a number of “moves to innocence” that settler-masters make in order to “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” Again, Tuck and Yang’s descriptions of the settler-master’s moves to innocence vis-à-vis Indigenous people struck me by their similarities with the Black experience. Tuck and Yang describe several strategies, such as nativism, settler adoption fantasies, colonial equivocation, free your mind and the rest will follow, a(s)t(e)risk peoples and reoccupation. I summarize each here.

Nativism induces the settler-colonizer to concoct stories of a distant Indigenous relative in order to prove that they have a blood relation to Indigeneity. Similarly, Black people constantly experience non-Black people who problematically consume, reproduce and pretend to be Black

(e.g. Rachel Dolezal), or will otherwise assume what they deem to be a Black personality in order to claim some sort of kinship.

Settler adoption fantasies involve creating fictitious tales, in which Indigenous communities adopt them after they have rejected their own culture, proving themselves to be better

Indigenous people than Indigenous people themselves. This clichéd story has been told again and again, and remains popular in films from Last of the Mohicans to Avatar.

Similarly, there are many stories in the white cultural milieu of whiteness insisting that “we are all

African”, or white fantasies of being accepted into Black culture, much like the pop culture train

64 wreck that was Miley Cyrus, circa 2013. This is also evidenced in the countless times Black people have heard white people justify their use of the n-word by stating that they ‘use it around their friends,’ or that they are ‘basically Black.’

With colonial equivocation, the settler-master attempts to “[homogenize] various experiences of oppression as colonization” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 17). With this statement, Tuck & Yang primarily refer to non-Black people of colour, queer people, and otherwise marginalized people who adopt a posture of innocence (Amadahy & Lawrence, 2009) by likening their experiences to those of Indigenous people. This process is one of the methods of creating model minorities.11

Again, similarities can be drawn to the Black experience, with model minorities upheld as the proof that the subjugation of Black people is self-inflicted. We are constantly told of Irish enslavement, or the Holocaust, pointing to white groups who have suffered and recovered. The implication is that the non-recovery of Black folks must be our own fault; a conclusion that fully denies that we all live under a system of anti-Blackness.

White poverty also conflates the experience of white people with the experience of Black people under capitalism, without consideration for anti-Blackness, white supremacy, or colonialism.

Needless to say, the systemic destructive effects are not the same. Finally, there is a constant application of the term “racism” to describe experiences that simply have nothing to do with racism at all. Tales of “reverse racism” and calls to cease being “racist against ‘X’” are examples of this type of equivocation.

11 By model minority, I am referring to non-Black people of colour to whom white supremacy and anti-Blackness provide more privileges. Because of this, they tend to fare better than Black and Indigenous people even while living in racist contexts. White supremacy and anti-Blackness mobilize these identities in order to make the absurd suggestion that, because they are in a better social location than Black and Indigenous people, the society itself is not unjust. The deficiencies of Black and Indigenous people are inherent to their being.

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The “free your mind” category of settler moves to innocence describes a process where the settler-master will commit to decolonization, but will only commit to “decolonizing the mind” (p.

19) as though such a practice is the only thing necessary to end colonization. Similarly, Black communities experience a barrage of non-Black people who are willing to say, “Black Lives

Matter,” but are not willing to resource struggling activists; are not willing to use their power to end or even merely call attention to systemic injustices that we face; and most importantly, are unwilling to give up their comforts in order to radically struggle for a new world with Black and

Indigenous peoples.

Tuck and Yang’s concept of “a(s)t(e)risk peoples” denotes how “Indigenous peoples are counted, codified, represented, and included/disincluded by educational researchers and other social science researchers” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 22) while also erasing their actual presence in the educational realm. This has the effect of concealing the erasure by masking it with these categories of marginalization. The following chapter shows how part of the nature of anti-

Blackness is constant erasure.

At the school where I currently study, there are few courses through which one can study Black people at the graduate level. There are no courses on Africa in the School of Global Affairs.

Black people are rarely, if at all, discussed in primary and secondary school curricula in the province where I live. We are the subject of scholarly research in a manner similar to the problematic anthropological engagements with Black people in the past, often unable to participate in the construction of research about us due to the multiple forces that often prevent us from accessing post-secondary education. That is, if research about us is able to attain

66 funding. As a minority population, about whom research carries little capital value, it is difficult to procure any interest from research fund granting institutions.

The final move to innocence that Tuck and Yang describe is that of the renewed movement to redistribute wealth and seek rights for workers. They argue that “the pursuit of worker rights…and minoritized people’s rights in a settler colonial context can appear to be anti- capitalist, but this pursuit is nonetheless largely pro-colonial” (2012, p. 23). Referencing the

“Occupy” movement, they go on to state that “the ideal of ‘redistribution of wealth’” (2012, p.

23) camouflages how much of that wealth is land, Native land.

For Black and Indigenous communities, such a discourse of redistributing wealth, solely focused on workers’ rights and poverty, also conceals how much of the wealth is free Black labour. Often, raw materials also derive from majority Black lands, and comes at the expense of the health of

Black and Indigenous people. The often-dangerous by-products of wealth accumulation end up in Black and Indigenous environments, poisoning us through environmental racism.

The final similarity I consider (this is not an exhaustive list) is the politics of recognition that

Coulthard describes in Red Skins, White Masks (2014). Much like a move to innocence,

Coulthard discusses the settler-master strategy of simply recognizing Indigenous communities, as if this is the sole requirement to engage in decolonization. He states, “many colonized societies no longer have to struggle for their freedom and independence. It is often negotiated, achieved through constitutional amendment, or simply ‘declared’ by the settler state and bestowed upon the Indigenous population in the form of political rights” (p. 38). For Coulthard, this type of lip service can also occur through minor “reformist state redistribution schemes like granting certain cultural rights and concessions to Aboriginal communities via self-government and land claims packages” (p. 35).

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Such settler-master political posturing is evident in Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has shed tears and apologized for past wrongs, promising that respect for sovereignty and a nation- to-nation relationship between Canada and Indigenous nations would follow. During the course of this superficial public-relations initiative, the settler-master state fails to intervene in the spate of Indigenous youth and child suicides. It denies access to basic needs; continues to support mining, pipeline, and tar sands operations that destroy Indigenous lands; and even berates

Indigenous youth who question these inconsistencies at public town halls (CBC News, 2017).

Similarly, majority-Black states and regions all over Africa, the Caribbean, South America and the

United States have been apologized to and have seen settler-masters seemingly generously grant independence, promise reparations and invariably provide mechanisms with which to address the wrongs they have committed, like affirmative action programs. But, and especially in the case of granting independence, these promises never seem to materialize in real de/anti- colonizing forms.

The settler-master invents institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary

Fund to continue the very anti-Black, white supremacist colonial injustices they were supposedly apologizing for! As Coulthard states, the measures “at best address the political economy of colonialism in a strictly ‘affirmative’ manner…Although this approach may alter the intensity of some of the effects of colonial-capitalist exploitation and domination, it does little to address their generative structures, in this case a capitalist economy constituted by racial and gender hierarchies and the colonial state” (2014, p.35). The power dynamics behind these recognition processes ensure that, as stated by Fanon, the subjugated group will maintain its subjugated position, as it remains reliant on the dominant power to maintain these minor structural changes

(1954).

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Beyond these examples of similarities between Black and Indigenous communities, the moves to innocence and critique of recognition that Tuck, Yang, and Coulthard describe are also important examples of what de/anti-colonization is not. In the following section, I will discuss a few different approaches to de/anti-colonization and their implications for Black people.

APPROACHES TO DE/ANTI-COLONIZATION

Literature in native studies and settler colonial studies both rely on the theorizing of Frantz

Fanon, but also do not adequately consider or theorize the subject position of Black people under colonialism and the other hegemonic structures that that interlock with it. I do not state this as a criticism: just as I am focusing on the plight of my people, many Indigenous writers have focused on their communities as a point of departure. I mention this to identify work that needs to be done within the field.

Interestingly, Frantz Fanon and his writings have laid the basis for theorizing for another academic discipline: Afropessimism. Grounded in the Fanonian conclusion that the only ethical way forward is to struggle to destroy the current world order, Afropessimism has thought through the subject position of Indigeneity and concluded that the position of abolition is the only option for both Black and Indigenous people. While I do not consider myself an

Afropessimist, for reasons that I will explore in the coming chapter, this conclusion and its accompanying critique of sovereignty as an de/anti-colonizing goal strikes me as the way forward.

Glen Coulthard (2014), Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012), and Taiaiake Alfred (2008) appear to agree with the Afropessimist view, or at the very least, the Fanonian conclusion. For Fanon, abolition becomes the way forward. In turn, that objective guides those fully considering Black

69 and Indigenous identities together. Tuck & Yang write: “Enslavement is a twofold procedure: removal from land and the creation of property (land and bodies). Thus, abolition is likewise twofold, requiring the repatriation of land and the abolition of property (land and bodies).

Abolition means self-possession but not object-possession, repatriation but not reparation” (p.

30).

What the process of abolition will look like is unknown, and I would argue that it does not need to be known. The idea that we need a detailed map of what the de/anti-colonization process will look like, and how the final abolition landscape will be structured is a liberal, modernist view that upholds white supremacist thinking and delegitimizes our efforts. But we must remember that capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism and anti-Blackness are constantly recreating themselves, and certainly did not anticipate its current iteration at its beginning. All human systems are constantly creating and recreating themselves; abolition as a state of human existence should not be expected to be different. But we can make inferences and suggestions as to what the process could and should look like.

As academics especially, we must be critical of the “front-loading of critical consciousness” (Tuck

& Yang 2012, p. 19), as a mode of de/anti-colonization. This, for me, is an important component of a de/anti-colonizing practice, but must be wedded with activist practices on the ground.

Community critical consciousness is important to challenge internalized oppressions in our communities and to understand the impetus for taking action. But critical consciousness alone will not lead to a state of abolition. More than just conscientization, we require praxis in order to change material conditions for oppressed people. “Too often decolonization becomes reduced to efforts to ‘decolonize the mind’ - those of us in the academy are often particularly guilty of

70 this — and fails to recognize the very real, very physical effects that colonization has on peoples”

(Sium, Desai & Ritkes, 2012, p. 5).

Native studies feminist Linda Tuhiwai Smith also recalls Fanon when she makes the important point that decolonization “does not mean and has not meant a total rejection of all theory or research or Western knowledge. Rather, it is about centring our concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes” (2013). This is an important reiteration of Fanon’s conclusion that as we struggle through our current conditions, we must be wary about romanticizing a past from which to return, and we must also be wary of believing that the past is absent from the present (see

Chapter 4). We are struggling for liberation of each piece of ourselves, including what we have become under these hegemonic systems. There may be some usefulness in certain parts of

Western theory, but we must center ourselves.

But when we refer to centering, who are we referring to? Several scholars have concluded that decolonization requires the centering of Indigenous thought and Indigenous frameworks (Dei

(2014), Tuck & Yang (2012), Tuhiwai Smith (2014), Sium et al (2012). For Indigenous African perspectives on this piece, see Abdi, 2005; Biraimah, 2016; Chillisa, 2011; Gumbo, 2016; Kanu,

2005; Emeagwali, 2014). My insistence is that Black people be included within this centering framework.

Again, including Black experience within understandings of colonization leads us to center the livelihood of all Black and Indigenous peoples the world over—abolition. I worry about other conclusions that appear when Black people are not considered. For example, Wilderson (2010), referencing Taiaiake Alfred (2008), states quite controversially: “sovereignty is an inappropriate concept for Indigenism because the notion of an Indian ‘state’ is an oxymoron. Traditionally,

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Indigenous governance elaborates no absolute authority, coercive enforcement of decisions, hierarchy, or separate ruling elite. Sovereignty, for Alfred, is an exclusionary concept rooted in adversarial and coercive Western notions of power” (Wilderson, pp. 183-184, 2010). Tiffany

Lethabo King also remarks: “Native feminists have often asked whether the settler nation or nation-states in general should even exist, which travels far beyond merely critiquing settler colonial states” (2013, p. 13).

The next chapter will take up this critique, but its implication is strong. De/anti-colonization cannot take the form of replacing the position of the settler-master with Black or Indigenous

“skins”, to reference Fanon. Changing the identities at the helm of unjust power structures will still reproduce an unjust power structure. The goal must be to fully dismantle the systems as they exist and create an unrecognizable futurity rooted in abolitionism.

CONCLUSION

Fanon famously stated in his opening to Black Skins, White Masks, “It is no longer a question of knowing the world, but transforming it” (1958, p. 1). This chapter has considered models of de/anti-colonization theory while considering Black subjectivity, in order to think through how we might (re)orient our struggles toward full transformative system change. In doing so, it has asked some tough questions. Does the theory adequately consider Black people? How do we define

Indigeneity? Are Black people Indigenous? Have we lost our Indigeneity? Is there a diasporic

Indigeneity?

These questions are important. If de/anti-colonization theory understands Black people as

Indigenous, or does not, each creates specific models for how Black people should be engaged in a project of de/anti-colonization. These options determine whether or not theorists judge

72 de/anti-colonization to be complete without considering Black people; and whether or not they, in some way, centre our experience with settlers.

Are Black folks Indigenous? It is a question that, at the conclusion of my theorizing for this project, I am unable to answer, in part because the definition of “Indigenous” is so incomplete, open and contestable. Not considering Black people Indigenous to a place would reify the anti-

Black notion that we are without history, only engageable after their contact with white supremacy, settlers, and enslavement. I firmly reject this, and believe strongly in our Indigeneity to a place, and in Dei’s conception of Indigeneity as an international category.

However, the subject position of Black people all over the world is ill-defined by Indigeneity alone. The system of anti-Blackness constitutes us differently, though similarly. The responsibilities that dominant society owe to Black people through abolition are indeterminate.

The responsibility is abolition itself. What we have lost is indefinable; we cannot recapture it and dominant society cannot give it back to us. We are Indigenous, but to leave it at that would be to misunderstand the system that constructs the settler-master as the antithesis to Blackness, along with the conclusion that the only ethical path toward justice for all oppressed people is abolition. Too much academic space delineates differences between Black and Indigenous people, finding examples of where either community has aided the settler-master in colonizing and enslaving logics. These discussions are necessary and important, but they must not come from the posture of innocence, as Lawrence and Amadahy state in Indigenous People and Black

People in Canada: Settlers or Allies? (2009).

These conversations generously understand the power relations that continue to structure our actions toward one another in our struggle for survival. While having them, we must also commit

73 to discuss our shared experiences under the hegemonic systems that see both our communities at the bottom of the global human lowerarchy. These discussions must take place with our eyes fully fixed on the ultimate goal of abolition.

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4. BLACKNESS: WHERE DO WE APPEAR? HOW DO WE APPEAR? WHAT’S MISSING?

…they felt happy for us, we were still alive. Yes, we are still alive we said. And we had returned to thank them. You are still alive, they said. Yes we are still alive. They looked at us like violet; like violet teas they drank us. We said here we are. They said, you are still alive. We said, yes, yes we are still alive. How lemon, they said, how blue like fortune. We took the bottle of rum from our veins, we washed their faces. We were pilgrims, they were gods. We sewed the rim of their skins with cotton. This is what we had. They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen.

(Dionne Brand, Verso 55, in Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 2016, p. 17)

In my near 13 years as a student at the University of Toronto, I have experienced frustration, sadness and absolute rage at the way that this institution erases Blackness. In the year that I joined the School of Graduate studies, I was incensed to discover that there were only two graduate-level courses in which one could study Blackness at the largest university in Canada, often touted as its best.

As an undergraduate representative on the students’ union, I argued with the former President of the University, Dr. David Naylor, that the African and Caribbean studies programs (so underfunded at the time that one could not graduate in the typical four years because not all required courses were offered each year) were worth supporting as much as European Studies,

French Studies, or German studies. The President of the university was brutally honest in his disinterest. This university had a particular history, he said; he could not anger European Studies by taking their funding and injecting it into African and Caribbean Studies. If students truly wanted to study these disciplines, they should go to schools with a different history, such as York

University. My colleagues and I were shocked at his frankness, but I appreciated his honesty. This was an institution that was not interested in engaging with Blackness.

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In our first year of graduate studies, my resistance sister, Yusra Khogali, and I started a resistance organization on campus. United with Black students across the United States and Canada, we demanded changes to the University of Toronto that would benefit the Black students who were here, and the Black students who wanted to be here but for whom anti-Black structural barriers prevented their admission. The administration, meeting us, was intransigent. With the help of supportive Black faculty like Alissa Trotz, Melanie Newton, George Dei, Rinaldo Walcott, Stan

Doyle Wood and Beverley Bain, we were able to secure some meetings with the campus administration to make our case for necessary structural changes.

We were rebuffed time and again, until we finally secured a commitment to have the university collect race-based data on the student population and teaching staff, after threatening to collect the data ourselves (which we argued would be simple, as the population is so low). After they agreed, they immediately started to renege on the commitment, so we contacted the media to announce that the University had committed to collecting this data. This, we assumed, would force the university to honour their commitment, despite their resistance.

The article, published in the Toronto Star, released with the University of Toronto’s comments, did not reflect their resistance. They positioned themselves as our partner, creating a false written narrative of the efforts we undertook, which will remain in print as long as we can imagine.

These experiences, and countless others, led me to start thinking about the ways that an academic institution systematically erases Blackness. While committing myself to learn as much about Blackness as I could in the academy, I was troubled by how the academy (and, as I realize now, the dominant society) constructed Blackness: our existence begins at contact with

76 colonizers. I did not experience a construction of Blackness that recognized our humanity at all, let alone our existence prior to being stolen from our ancestral lands.

Rarely did any discussion of colonization consider Africa or the Caribbean, with the notable exception of classes I took with Black professors. We were only ever encountered through anti-

Blackness and enslavement, white supremacy, and capitalism: not colonialism, not as colonized. I wondered to myself if this was because the academy understood us to be ungeographic, landless, and without history.

Given the historical and present condition of Black people the world over, I expected to see significant contributions in the academic literature’s descriptions of colonialism. Everything from the rebellions of enslaved people, to the independence and pan-African movements of the mid-

20th century, to the scramble for Africa, to the anti-colonial successes of Haiti and Ethiopia, suggest that Black people represent a significant contribution to the de/anti-colonial discourse.

But besides the notable exceptions of Frantz Fanon, George Dei, and Frank Wilderson, academia tends to categorize our contributions outside of discourses of de/anti-colonization, and more in the totalizing disciplines of Black Studies, Africana Studies, or African-American studies. We also appear in the academy with respect to studies of liberation movements, anti- racism and Black feminism. To put it simply, the academy rarely understands Black people as colonized people. Instead, it reifies Black people as people without history, landless and enslaved.

The academy is primarily interested in Black people after colonial contact with white supremacy.

The academy’s failure to engage with Blackness ignores how colonialism heavily impacted Black people. We were dispossessed through colonialism, and should be active subjects in any

77 discussion about what decolonization and anti-colonizing practices look like. This accepted construction of Black people may well be due to our own tendencies to struggle for reparations under the framework of the current system design; a strategy that I do not necessarily quarrel with, but critique in this chapter.

Regardless of the reasons for constructing us in this manner, we must never forget that the academy is a colonial institution of white supremacy. It dictates what is useful to enter the canon of knowledge through who it hires, what disciplines it develops, what it teaches, who it teaches, how it teaches and what research it funds.

REVEALING BLACKNESS: BLACK FEMINIST METHODS

These are the absences that I argue it is necessary for us to awaken, to see, to uncover. Our work to reveal ourselves as fully human, with histories beyond the Door of No Return, is crucial de/anti-colonizing, abolitionist wake work. The last chapter discussed questions of Indigeneity and de/anti-colonization as primarily Indigenous authors inform them. In this chapter, I ask how

Black people have constructed ourselves in the academic literature, with a mind toward abolition as a de/anti-colonizing liberatory practice and conclusion. Methodologies developed by Black women’s scholarship are important, here. I now consider the methods of Dionne Brand, Christina

Sharpe, Tiffany Lethabo King, and Jacqui Alexander.

In her masterpiece In the Wake, Christina Sharpe wrestled with how to “articulate a method of encountering a past that is not past” (2016, p. 13). She references Dionne Brand’s A Map to the

Door of No Return as “an unscientific method” of “blackened knowledge” that comes from the

“historical rupture” of Blackness (2016, p. 13).

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Tiffany Lethabo King’s In the Clearing references her struggle to decolonize sight, what we see and how to see Blackness. She offers a different way to see when she rejects the “penetrative,”

“masculine,” Western eye that “scans and surveys from an all knowing vantage point of authority” (2013, p. 69). She instead calls for a decolonizing of sight, “developing the capacity for your eye to be passive.” Lethabo King references Yoruban cosmology when she insists,

“seeing is a process of synthesizing multiple senses. Seeing is recognition of the whole self and all of its capacity and ways of knowing. Decolonization requires a sight that can see, discern and be open to the multiple things that are occurring within oneself and others. Decolonized sight, along with its other senses, seeks out healing” (2013, p. 71).

Jacqui Alexander, as quoted in Lethabo King, seeks a palimpsestic methodology. This palimpsestic approach removes the requirement to rely on a white supremacist, colonial construction of time. Instead of seeing our history as a series of connected events that occur in a linear fashion (as dominant, conventional wisdom expects from us), Alexander brings time and space together from different eras, recognizing that the past is still with us, and refuses to distance the historical and the contemporary, creating a tesseract-like methodology she refers to as the palimpsest:

Time is scrambled and palimpsestic, in all the Worlds, with the pre-modern, the modern,

the postmodern and the paramodern coexisting globally. But it is not only the global

coexistence of different technologies of time telling that is of concern to us here. The

central idea is that of the palimpsest—a parchment that has been inscribed two or three

times, the previous text having been imperfectly erased and remaining and therefore

still partially visible...The idea of the “new” structured through the “old” scrambled,

palimpsestic character of time, both jettisons the truncated distance of linear time and

dislodges the impulse for incommensurability, which the ideology of distance creates. It

thus rescrambles the “here and now” and the “then and there” to a “here and there”

and “then and now” and makes visible what Payal Banerjee calls the ideological traffic

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between and among formations that are otherwise positioned as dissimilar. Using the

social formations we have designated as colonial, neocolonial and neo-imperial is not to

suggest a logical teleology in which one form of state morphs into the other. Instead, we

want to hold onto the historical specificity through which those various social relations

are constituted at that same time that we examine the continuity and disjunctures of

practices within and among various state formations. These practices are neither frozen

nor neatly circumscribed within temporalities that never collide or even meet.” (in

Lethabo King, 2013, p. 219)

Each of these theorists struggle to counteract the absence of Blackness, throughout the academy and beyond. Traditional methods of study in the academy cannot adequately reveal the knowledge that we seek. Indeed, they were created to absent Blackness, to “force us into positions that run counter to what we know”. We face “absences in the archives,” “accumulated erasures, projections, fabulations, and misnamings…silences, absences and modes of dis/appearance” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 12,).

Our history is “constituted by silences, erasure, omissions and things that are in fact un- representable” (Lethabo King, 2013, p. 88). Dominant society systematically absents Blackness and this palimpsestic, decolonized sight, blackened knowledge wake work is what I employ in this chapter. We must awaken and see differently to reveal what white supremacy and anti-

Blackness erases. I engage with where Black people are present in the academy, and awaken the places where Black people are absent.

Writing Blackness “must somehow be indexical of that which exceeds narration” (Wilderson,

2011, p. 126). For me, this harkens back to what Lethabo King has called for with respect to

Yoruban cosmology, sight and cognition. My work investigating Blackness seeks to be available and appreciated beyond the academy and understood with decolonized sight. I hope that my

80 contributions in this chapter can inform a new way of thinking, and action, that contributes to transforming the world (Fanon, 1958).

I will also theorize about what the phenomenon of absented Blackness in de/anti-colonization discourse could mean, what questions and discussions it erases, and where this absenting might come from. In an anti/decolonizing revolutionary practice, what debts should dominant society repay to Black people? How do we engage the privilege that settlers and colonizers alike have gained through the fungibility (Hartman, 1997; Patterson, 1982; & Wilderson, 2010) of

Blackness? How do we theorize a decolonization practice that recognizes the Land (Dei, 2016) as far more than just the dispossession of geographic space when engaging with Black people?

How do we recognize that the benefits of Black labour have surpassed borders in such ways that settlers and colonizers the world over have benefited from our colonized status?

Here I will introduce the problems of engaging with Blackness within strictly defined, imperialist, white supremacist borders, and the limitations that places on our de/anticolonial theorizing. To do so would reify the colonial project within a supposedly de/anti-colonial framework, making the latter fundamentally flawed.

Tiffany Lethabo King (2013) has accomplishes fascinating work in her efforts to uncover what has not been said about Black enslaved women. She very intentionally and firmly grounds herself in thinking about Blackness through the lenses of both enslavement and colonization, asking the question, “what happens when we think about the plantation as a result of settler colonial spatial patterns? What is possible when we ask, how is Native subjectivity and space obliterated by the plantation?” (p. 32).

Lethabo King discovers that, using her passive viewing method, a history beyond the Door of No

Return can be read through Black women’s bodies. She allows the history of the gendered

81 practice of indigo production among enslaved Black women to enter her eyes, to see humanity beyond the violent existence of an enslaved woman performing dangerous agricultural work.

Lethabo King begins by seeing characters with indigo-stained hands in Julie Dash’s film

Daughters of the Dusk, and engaging the historical archive of indigo production, a supposedly

“white” invention. Embarking upon a palimpsestic reading of multiple texts, including archival documents from settler-masters, she discovers that settler-masters specifically sought Black women from West Africa for their prior expertise with indigo production, something white agriculturalists did not have the agricultural wherewithal to properly harvest. Lethabo King’s incredible revelation rewrites “agricultural history to bring Black expertise and labor into the frame…it exposes the limits of white agency and subjectivity and renders visible the Black bodies, Black knowledge and Black labor required for ‘white’ inventions like indigo” (2013, p.

89).

Lethabo King also recognizes important elements in the ways that the existence of blackness constructs whiteness. Continuing Fanon’s ideas of whiteness existing in relation to Blackness,

Lethabo King sees the ways that Black women’s bodies became united with nature in the eyes of the settler-master. Though the settler-master would take credit for Black women’s agricultural work, they did so while constructing Black women as inhuman. The settler-master’s distance from nature is constructed as superior. Black people become a referent for what the white person is: we are “merged with nature and the settler maintains a safe distance from nature while claiming Black (forced autochthony) and Native (autochthony and Indigeneity) embeddedness for themselves” (Lethabo King, 2013, p. 107).

This process of revealing that Lethabo King engages in again unveils important and necessary

82 historical information about the colonization of the Black subject that de/anti-colonial studies must take up.

What is hidden is that settlement is not just the making of a physical location for the

Settler; rather, what is concealed is the simultaneous process of the Settler rooting in

order to launch. Settlement is the subjugation and sinking/fixing of others into a state of

flux (death, fungibility) in order for the Settler to transcend into a state of humanness. As

the ultimate self actualizing human, the Settler can actually overcome the particularity of

place (body, gender, race, abject sexuality) and launch into universal and abstract space

(humanness). (p. 98)

The settler-master required Black people for this project of rooting. “As geographic—dark— matter and material under settlement they make space possible but cannot occupy it” (2013, p.

96). Settlers could not simply arrive on empty land, as in their fictive history; they had to engage in a genocide of Indigenous people. And likewise, they did not just take land and become wealthy, they had to engage in a conjoined genocide of Black people. Settlers did not perpetrate this genocide solely upon the millions of Black people who did not survive the journey through the middle passage. They also accomplish it through the social death of those who they enslaved and the social death of the descendants of enslaved Black people. Settlers required Black people to work the land so that they could root themselves and become fully realized (and actualized) in the settler construction of humanity. The wealth, and the debased version of humanity, that these violent processes generated funded imperial efforts of colonizing states across the world. The genocides and dispossession of colonized Indigenous people on their land, and colonized and enslaved Black people removed from our lands, developed the wealth that reified imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness.

But to assume that the enslavement of Black people is solely about capitalism is a mistake. This

83 oft-alluded to anti-Black Marxist view erases a crucial perspective. Afropessimist Frank Wilderson rightly identifies how incommensurable that view is with the fact that

it would have been far easier and far more profitable to take the white underclass from

along the riverbanks of England and Western Europe than to travel all the way to Africa

for slaves…late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the direct

relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of slavery, i.e.,

the reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex has, once again, as its structuring

metaphor and primary target the Black body (Wilderson, 2003, p. 73).

The choice of Black people was an inconvenient option for enslavement and the unspeakable evils of colonialism. That the Marxist—and the dominant—understanding of Blackness does not consider this is an example of gaps and absence in Black histories that lead to irrational conclusions. The struggle to make meaning from such an incomprehensible history could drive one mad (Fanon, 1958).

AFROPESSIMISM

Wilderson’s critique of Marxism’s limited ability to explain the institution of slavery, Tiffany

Lethabo King’s use of the term “social death,” and my consistent use of the term settler-master, all come from the Black studies discipline of Afropessimism.12 Afropessimism is a discipline within Black studies that takes its foundation from Fanonian thought and extends the historical process of enslavement into the present day.

Hartman says of the subject position of slavery: Afropessimism denies that emancipation ever happened. Today, on a global level, the theorists of Afropessimism believe that Black people

12 Settler-master is a term I borrowed from Lethabo King, who in turn borrowed it from Frank Wilderson. The usage allows the reader to conceptualize that “the master and the settler were not only intimate friends but in fact are the same person” (p. 33, 2013).

84 remain enslaved, that we have not been given back our lives since they were stolen through various slave trades. Because anti-Blackness constructs Black people as devoid of humanity,

Afropessimists see Black people as socially dead, living in the afterlife of slavery. “Slavery is not a loss that the self experiences—of language, lineage, land, or labor—but rather the loss of any self that could experience such loss”(Sexton, 2014, p. 165).

As a body of work, I find Afropessimism a remarkable framework to explore Blackness and colonialism. Afropessimism engages with colonialism as a necessity; it seeks the abolition of the current world order, including the hegemonic structures of capitalism and colonialism.

(Coulthard’s discussion of Frank Wilderson is an example of work emerging from engagement with Afropessimism.) I will quote Wilderson at length, referencing Orlando Patterson’s three

“constituent elements” that define the Afropessimist concept of social death below. For

Afropessimists, this shows that, perhaps palimpsestically, the social condition of enslavement continues today:

One is gratuitous violence, which means that the body of the slave is open to

the violence of all others. Whether he or she receives that violence or not, he

or she exists in a state of structural or open vulnerability. This vulnerability is

not contingent upon his or her transgressing some type of law, as in going

on strike with the worker. The other point is that the slave is natally alienated,

which is to say that the temporality of one’s life that is manifest in filial and

afilial relations—the capacity to have families and the capacity to have

associative relations—may exist very well in your head. You might say, “I

have a father, I have a mother,” but, in point of fact, the world does not

recognize or incorporate your filial relations into its understanding of family.

And the reason that the world can do this goes back to point number one:

because you exist in a regime of violence which is gratuitous, open, and you

are openly vulnerable to everyone else, not a regime of violence that is

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contingent upon you being a transgressed worker or transgressing woman or

someone like that. And the third point is general dishonor, which is to say,

you are dishonored in your very being— and I think that this is the nature of

Blackness with everyone else. You’re dishonored prior to your performance

of dishonored actions. (Frank Wilderson, Interviewed by Soong, 2015)

Each of these conditions describe Black people’s current state of being around the world. We are subject to gratuitous violence on the plantation, in the master’s home, in domestic service, as we work in agriculture, in war zones, as we seek refuge from our homelands, as we are hunted by police, and as we are forced to struggle against one another in precarious scarcity.

When ships, doors of no return, auction blocks, corporal punishment from the master, lynching, border policies, incarceration, war, and children’s aid societies rip Black people apart from one another, we are natally alienated. Dominant society does not even read Black children as children at times; instead interpreting them as much older and bigger than they actually are.

And Black people experience general dishonor in multiple ways. Dominant society interprets

Black people as angry, ungrateful, lazy, criminal, without knowledge or the capacity to think, ugly, and undesirable. None of these lists are exhaustive.

For those who would say that the institution of slavery was simply about the exploitation of labour, Wilderson would retort that not all enslaved people were forced to work. He would also challenge the idea that an enslaved person has a relationship to work akin to the exploited wage labourer. If the enslaved person is not an exploited labourer, it follows then that the experience of the enslaved person does not follow the same logic that an anti-Black Marxist analysis of enslavement would assume.

Rather than experiencing alienation and exploitation, enslaved people experience

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“accumulation and fungibility (as Hartman puts it): the condition of being owned and traded”

(Wilderson, 2010, p. 14). While the wage labourer produces excess profit for the capitalist, enslaved Black people are excess in and of themselves (Wilderson, 2015, p. 18).

Black women were constructed as excess after the non-event of emancipation. Hartman provides a clear example of this when she discusses how Black women in particular were constructed as domestic workers after the non-event of emancipation: “The systematic violence needed to conscript black women’s domestic labor after slavery required locking them out of all other sectors of the labor market, a condition William Patterson described as economic genocide”

(Hartman, 2016, p. 88). Lethabo King further describes how Black people are excess when she tells us about Black Codes of the Antebellum South of the United States (2013). Black people around the world today face the same “open vulnerability to violence,” natal alienation, and general dishonor as did enslaved Black people on plantations (unknown, 9, 2017).

Another one of the tenets of Afropessimism, which references Fanonian thought, is that the settler-master becomes the settler-master through the existence of the enslaved and the dispossessed (dispossessed referring to both Black and Indigenous communities). “Ontological

Whiteness is secured not through its cultural, economic, or gendered identities but by the fact that it cannot be known (positioned) by genocide or by accumulation and fungibility.” In fact, whiteness needs to construct these ontological positions of non-being (genocide and fungibility/accumulation) to itself exist. It “is parasitic because it monumentalized its subjective capacity, its lush cartography, in direct proportion to the wasteland of Black incapacity” (Lethabo

King, referencing Wilderson, 2013, p. 111).

Despite this, another central tenet of Afropessimism reinforces the claim I made in Chapter 2:

87 anti-Blackness is its own oppressive hegemonic system. Afropessimism

makes a critical shift in focus by moving away from the Black/white binary and reframing

it as Black/non-Black in order to deemphasize the status of whiteness and to center

analysis, rather, on the anti-Black foundations of race and modern society (unknown,

2017, 9).

This is an important discursive shift, because other disciplines within Black studies and critical race theory tend to focus on the former binary. Important information can be gleaned from both frameworks, but Afropessimism’s focus on anti-Blackness as a separate, entangled system is relatively new.

I have previously stated that I do not consider myself an Afropessimist. While I am fundamentally bound to the conclusion of Afropessimism—that we require abolition of the all existing totalizing entangled social, political, economic and cosmological systems to rupture the subject position of

Black people—this school of thought seems to suggest that any changes we make to the system between now and the abolition are for naught. “It is not rooted in hope of winning” (Sexton,

2014, p. 169). I must disagree with that approach, or I cannot do the resistance work that I am engaged in on a daily basis. I do not believe that we are all necessary martyrs in the fight for abolition.

Wilderson refers to Black people as uncartographic (2010). I agree with him that anti-Blackness constructs Black people as such, and dominant society certainly reifies us as such. But we are not actually without geography (as I will discuss at length in the coming chapters). While I agree that anti-Blackness constructs Black people as socially dead and non-human, I refuse to refer to Black people as slaves, as Afropessimists do. We need not reinforce the ways that dominant hegemonic structures construct Black people as slaves by using hegemonic frameworks. As

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Black people, we know we are more than slaves and should insist on alternative, life-affirming frameworks.

I think that our own capacity to imagine new futurities through our resistance struggles, our art, our creativity and our survival is, palimpsestically, abolition. We are calling forth abolition and creating abolitionist moments and have been for hundreds of years. We must not get trapped in the settler-master’s time continuum in waiting for abolition to arrive in a linear fashion, and rejecting all efforts as fruitless until that time arises. We may be socially dead in relation to non-

Black people. But we are not actually dead. We are still alive.

They said, you are still alive. We said, yes, yes we are still alive. How lemon, they said, how blue like fortune. We took the bottle of rum from our veins, we washed their faces. We were pilgrims, they were gods. We sewed the rim of their skins with cotton. This is what we had. They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen.

ANTI-BLACKNESS AND COLONIALISM: ENTANGLED SYSTEMS

What does all this mean in the context of de/anti-colonization struggles? I will start with a passage from Lethabo King’s In the Clearing: “If the coloniality of slavery and settler colonialism are viewed as distant and therefore unrelated, this viewpoint frustrates efforts to develop frames to analyze them together and understand their relationship to one another” (2013, p. 133). My struggle in this and the previous chapter, which has plagued me for some years, is with how distantly the academy constructs these two systems to exist from one another. But the proof of their entanglement, that they are interlocking structures, is in the experience of Black people worldwide throughout time.

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I agree with King when she concludes, “slavery and settler colonial power are terminal and ongoing in the US. I also argue that slavery and settler colonialism as ongoing forms of death- making power make the Black and Native alliances [possible]” (2013, p. 123). Many scholars have considered Indigeneity and Blackness from their respective subject positions (Sharma and

Wright, 2008; Day, 2015; Sexton, 2014; Wilderson, 2003, 2010, 2011, 2015; Amadahy &

Lawrence 2009; Lawrence & Dua, 2005; Coulthard, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2012). I fear that more often than not, we do not speak to each other in ways that bring forth alliances (at least in the academy) between Black and Indigenous people. Such conversations require us to see dispossession, colonization and enslavement simultaneously. This is difficult:

the power of settler colonialism’s and slavery’s spatial and ontological formations does

not appear on the landscape with equal intensity, in the same hue, or equally positioned

on the landscape. At times the productive and repressive power that makes the slave

will be the foreground color and the power of settler colonialism will provide a bit of

texture. The texture in the background is just as crucial as the foreground color (Lethabo

King, 2013, p. 32).

I hope that my writing can contribute to alliance-building. Like Lethabo King, “I am interested in making settler colonial power visible when we think slavery and its repressive and productive

(discursive) power is the only force operating at the scene…and that anti-Black racism’s productive and repressive power are also in play when the settler is eliminating the Native and clearing the land.” (2013, p. 20-21).

Much like how Lethabo King and Wilderson refer to the settler-master in order to bring forth a recognition that these were the same people, Lethabo King has conceptualized a new space through which to consider colonialism and Blackness: the settlement-plantation. Through this

90 newly constructed space, she is able to bring into relation the subject position of the Indigenous person living under settler colonialism and the Black person. The settlement

is an ongoing formation that exists into the present day. Most importantly, the

settlement is the site of the clearing — in its verb form — of the Native and the site of

self actualization for the settler. At the site of the settlement, Native space and time is

obliterated (as body and landscape) and the settler comes to know himself and gains

spatial coordinates. The settlement-plantation functions as a spatial unit that turns Black

bodies into non-human bodies. The settlement/plantation also turns Black non-human

bodies into property and into forms of space or spatial potential (2013 pp. 39-40).

Her notable method of simultaneously seeing has produces a succinct new way of speaking about what we must understand: our relationships to land, dispossession, the settler-master and the slave-plantation are all intimately related and entangled. I admire and share her goal of wanting to “call forth a space of radical entanglement where Black and Native survival depend on one another” (2013, p.127).

WHEN WE DO NOT SEE EACH OTHER: STRATEGIC ANTAGONISMS

With this method firmly in mind, I want to turn my attention toward some of the tactics that Black and Indigenous people have employed when we do not ally, and do not recognize our subject positions as intimately related. In particular, I want to discuss the tactics of reparations and sovereignty.

I will preface this by saying that I believe in incremental struggle, and either of these tactics may very well prove to be useful in an ultimate goal to bring forth abolition. Indeed, anything that provides more capacity for our subject positions to organize, I believe, can be a worthy

91 endeavor. It is obvious to me that both tactics can very well do that. However, they both require a healthy amount of reflection and criticism due to their potential to create serious antagonisms if they are not rooted in a tradition of abolitionism.

These antagonisms result from lacking simultaneous sight as conceptualized by Lethabo King, who states:

More often than not, Black people strive to become citizens and try to settle the land

and make a place for themselves pushing the genocidal machine along. Native people

often find it necessary and strategic to seek recognition from the Settler nation,

elaborating a discourse of nation-ness that Blacks, specifically African Americans, find

impossible to access. (2013, p.90)

Here, Lethabo King is critiquing a Black liberation strategy that reoccupies the land in service of white supremacist and settler logics. She is also critiquing an Indigenous liberation strategy where white supremacist, colonizing states recognize Indigenous groups as equals, thus solidifying and reifying white land possession and bordered territories. That process reifies Black subjugation, for Black people of the diaspora cannot participate in it. In both cases, Indigenous and Black people risk upholding the settler-master’s dominance and power against one another.

Black people must be cautious in conceptualizing the responsibilities owed to us, as people who live through the tragic injustice of social death. Should we merely construct the land as a plantation, and our only relationship to land being where the settler-master places us; and should we further conclude that eliminating social death requires the same relationship to the land that the settler-master has, we engage in a problematic, undertheorized, and dangerous tactic. “Reparations in the form of property in the context of a settler colonial nation where

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Native people are meant to disappear and Black people are made fungible by Settler-Masters” antagonize Black and Indigenous relationships (Lethabo King, 2013, p. 116).

Such a strategy would create an incommensurable antagonism between Black and Indigenous people, among Black Indigenous people, and would fundamentally endanger Black people. To replace the settler-master, as land-owning Black people in the white supremacist conception of land-ownership, would still require the disappearance of Indigenous people.

More than that, we must never forget that the settler-master is the same being. No matter how much power the settler-master seemingly bestows upon us, the master is constructed through

Blackness. This is why, though we may be licensed, Black people do not enjoy the same access to freedom of movement in vehicles as non-Black people. Though we may be citizens, dominant society still considers Black people as landless, and our existence in any place is always tenuous.

We may have history, but dominant society continues to absent it, and the settler-master will never seek to reveal it. Will reparations as they have currently been constructed change our exposure to violence? Our natal alienation? Our general dishonor? If not, we will remain socially dead, regardless of whether or not we ever obtain reparations.

It is possible to win or seize reparations and to use the power that we garner from reparations in order to continue the struggle toward abolition. If a reparations project is rooted in a recognition that the settler is the master, we must mobilize any power that manifests (and it may not manifest) from reparations to eliminate the settler-master, thereby eliminating the hegemonic structures that create our subject position as socially dead. Should we focus on mobilizing power in this way, we do not create an antagonism with Indigenous people because we will not be seeking to replace the settler-master or their relationships to land. We will be seeking to

93 completely eliminate them. Black resistance struggle “that is not grounded in the movement for settler decolonization… is a wager for black junior partnership in the settler colonial state”

(Sexton, 2014, p. 155).

Similarly, “if Indigenous sovereigntists expect Black community support of nation-to-nation negotiation processes regarding land, resources, and reparations, we have to recognize how

Blacks become completely disempowered in that process” (Lethabo King, 2013, p. 211). Sexton clearly articulates this antagonism when he states, referencing Hartman and Wilderson, that “any politics based in resurgence or recovery is bound to regard the slave as ‘the position of the unthought’” (2014, p. 165). It is this very thing that worries me about sovereignty struggles: remaining absented by similar liberation struggles and relegated to the position of the unthought.

Fred Moten asks the critical question, “what if the problem is sovereignty, as such?” (Moten in

Sexton, 2014). What would sovereignty struggles mean for Black people? Could it eliminate the entangled and interlocking outcome of the condition of social death under colonialism, anti-

Blackness and enslavement? Would the Black subject remain colonized, if, for example, sovereignty is achieved through a nation-to-nation relationship where white states maintain their dominant position and treat Indigenous nations as equals? What if, for example, treaties between white settler-masters and Indigenous people, like the Two-Row Wampum13—that do not consider Black life—are upheld? What, then, happens to Black people? Is it even possible for

13 The Two Row Wampum is an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and European settlers. The beaded belt through which the agreement is recorded depicts two parallel rows of purple beads, meant to represent two nations (Europeans and the Haudenosaunee) travelling side by side, but never interfering with one another. For more information, see: www.akwesasne.ca/node/118

94 such a condition of equality between settler-masters and Indigenous nations to exist? Would either party consider or support a struggle for Black sovereignty?

Black people do not have the same relationship to dispossession that Indigenous people do.

The severed relationship between diasporic Black descendants of enslaved people and their ancestral lands—in the white supremacist, colonial sense of the term land—is near complete.

And although the geography of Indigenous people and the settler-master are “radically incompatible,” the very fact that they have a geography “is never in question” (Sexton, 2014, p.

166). Therefore, sovereignty or a nation-to-nation relationship based on geographic reclamation is not a possibility for Black people, and will not end our colonized positions should Indigenous groups win it as an end goal.

Again, it is possible to achieve some form of sovereignty that Indigenous nations do not accept as an end goal, but instead encourages Indigenous sovereigns to galvanize power to continue toward true abolition. Otherwise, much like the strategy of reparations, the strategy of sovereignty could “both leave the colonizer intact and may even rely upon his continued existence for matters of recognition and redistribution” (Sexton, 2014, p. 156). It could in turn leave the continued exploitation of Black people intact.

I say all this not to lay blame or to point fingers from a “posture of innocence” (Amadahy and

Lawrence, 2009). Instead, I wish to engage in a reflexive practice in recognition that while we may not know what abolition is, we have an idea of what it is not. We have to acknowledge to one another that Indigenous people “can take on an anti-Black politic,” engage in anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism and become “junior partners” of the master. Black people can also take on

95 an anti-Indigenous politic and become “junior partners” of the colonizer. But they cannot “do it from the same structural position in which nonblack and nonnative people of color enact it”

(Lethabo King, 2014, p.234).

The hegemonic systems that constrict and take our lives are also powerful ideologies that indoctrinate subjugated and non-subjugated people alike, for our entire lives. Shedding such ideology in the service of fighting for abolition is a never-ending, imperfect, uneven process. It is difficult. Difficult questions are necessary, and disciplined reflections may occur in which we realize things about ourselves, observing thought processes that are difficult to accept. But this is the cost of fighting for abolition, a condition of the Weather in which we live (Sharpe, 2016).

CONCLUSION

This chapter has shown how Blackness as an identity and a subject position is affected by a myriad of hegemonic, constricting forces that construct us in ways that amount to social death from the subject position of dominant power. The discussion, in both the last chapter and this one, show that true de/anti-colonization is abolition, and fully centers the subject positions of both the Indigenous person and the Black person.

We must be critical of the ways that anti-Blackness and white supremacy construct Black people, obstructing the perspective that we are a colonized people with a history, an ancestry, and a culture that goes beyond our contact with the settler-master. We must ensure that our understandings and critiques of the logics of white supremacy, the logics of anti-Blackness, the logics of imperialism, the logics of settler colonialism, and the constituent elements of social death, become our ideological bases for analysis. We must also remain steadfastly committed to eliminating these logics. As Afropessimists have theorized, an end to Black suffering means the

96 end of the world. “The Human [settler-master] need to be liberated in the world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world” (Wilderson, 2011, p. 145).

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5. UNBORDERABLE: DIASPORIC BLACKNESS

When I started the Black Lives Matter–Toronto project, I knew from its inception that we needed to challenge the world’s conception of anti-Black racism in the Americas as a problem exclusive to the United States. Beyond even that instinctual responsibility, I felt intellectually and ideologically that my own social location, and the space and place that I inhabit, meant that I had a duty to disrupt the Canadian narrative. In that story, anti-Blackness—and indeed,

Blackness—simply does not exist. I felt very strongly that our experience needed to be connected to the experiences of our Black kinfolk South of the 49th parallel.

We could not orient ourselves to resist a singularly “Canadian” anti-Blackness; our “terrain of struggle” had to be much broader (McKittrick, 2006, p. 44). Though I did not understand it as such at the time, this was a demand for a radical, geographic shift in our understandings of

Blackness in the Americas.

Our first action captured the frustrations of a community that was as upset about Michael

Brown’s murder by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson14 as they were about Jermaine Carby’s murder by Peel Regional police officer Ryan Reid.15 At the time, Canadian news media was eager to tell the story of how Wilson had shot Michael Brown to death and left his body laying in the street for hours in the majority-Black city of Ferguson, Missouri.16 They saturated the airwaves with the story, airing footage of his covered body lying in the street, questioning Wilson’s actions and airing footage of the anti-racist resistance actions that had erupted across the United

States.

14 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-cop 15 https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/05/13/officer-who-shot-jermaine-carby-says-he-wouldnt-do-anything- differently.html 16 https://www.census.gov/2010census/popmap/ipmtext.php?fl=29:2923986

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That same Canadian media was much less inclined to tell the very similar, and far more local, story of Jermaine Carby. Jermaine Carby was a passenger in a car, who police shot in a suburb of Toronto. He was not being pursued by police, and was not a suspect in any crime. A police officer had simply decided to card17 Jermaine Carby, decided he was a threat, and as with so many other cases of Black interaction with police, shot him to death. Even the notoriously toothless police watchdog body of Ontario declared irregularities in the way the police had handled their interaction with Jermaine Carby.18 Yet, the watchdog decided not to lay charges against the officer, and media barely reported on the story.

Such was the context behind the first demonstration held by Black Lives Matter — Toronto. And in every facet of that first action, we made sure to name the similarities between the two heinous ruptures of Black life, and ensure Jermaine Carby’s story was told. In advertising for the event, in the literature we distributed, in every media interview, and when speakers addressed the demonstration, we elevated Jermaine Carby’s story alongside Michael Brown’s.

Beyond a simple act of solidarity or desire to hear our stories told, this insistence on elevating the local context of anti-Blackness and relating it to an experience elsewhere represents a radical concept. Try as it might, white supremacist imperialism cannot border Blackness. The strength and very existence of the African diaspora is a threat to bordered containment of Blackness throughout the globe. As put by Katherine McKittrick, “black geographies demonstrate both the limitations and possibilities of traditional spatial arrangements through the ways the Black

17 Carding is a practice of street-checking employed by police officers in the City of Toronto, and the Province of Ontario more broadly. The practice permits police officers to arbitrarily stop people on the street to demand identifying information. The information is then put into a police database, which can affect job prospects and other opportunities in the future. Various studies by the Toronto Star have shown that the police stop Black people more than non-Black people. For reference: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2012/03/09/known_to_police_toronto_police_stop_and_document_black_and_br own_people_far_more_than_whites.html http://www.aclc.net/wp-content/uploads/Deputations-to-TPSB-April-4-2012.pdf 18 https://www.siu.on.ca/en/news_template.php?nrid=2343

99 subject is produced by, and is producing, geographic knowledges” (2006, pp. 6–7). By naming

Canadian anti-Blackness alongside American anti-Blackness, we were eviscerating the mythological strength of the border, a colonizing force, in containing anti-Blackness south of the

49th parallel.

More than just a conceptual truism, our “Afroglobal framework”—a term this thesis coins—is a radical commitment. We must rigorously refuse white supremacy’s attempts to illogically separate our struggles through all-too-convenient borders, false histories, and warped geographies. Black kinship across white supremacist borders is not simply imagined; the Black diaspora’s connection to each other throughout the globe is a central tenet of Blackness, and this shared experience and connection represents a threat to the rigidity of borders outside just the global Black community.

I do not wish the reader to misinterpret what I have said above as refusing to understand the local particularities of Black struggles. Our experiences are necessarily localized and fundamentally shaped by local events, local manifestations of white supremacy, and local governments. But our experiences across borders are so connected as to obliterate the reality of borders for our people. This chapter poses a question of geographic scale.

McKittrick tells us that geographic scales “range from the psyche to the global”, and that

“nuanced connections can be made between and among these scales” (2006, p. 74). We must remember that white supremacy and colonization strategically organizes our world through state borders, and that the very demarcation of “national” geographic boundaries is guaranteed by the trade of Black people and through enslavement (McKittrick, 2006, p. 77).

We therefore cannot only consider the scale of the state in our organizing, any more than we can allow ourselves to be restricted by the scale of the body, community, or region. The colonial

100 state is not the most relevant nor is it the preeminent level of analysis when it comes to

Blackness, and the more we realize this, the more we can put the resulting possibilities for resistance into action.

What happens when we make connections between the resistances we create locally to resistances we could insist upon creating on a global scale? What possibilities and knowledges can be derived from unravelling “what is beneath and beyond existing geopolitical landscapes”

(McKittrick, 2006, p. 100), an orientation that I am terming Afroglobal?

HAITI, A CASE STUDY IN AFROGLOBAL ORIENTATION

As I write this, the Government of Canada is conducting an operation that is likely the largest mass arrest of Black people in its history. Haitian asylum seekers are attempting to escape deportation authorities in Trump’s America by crossing the border en masse. RCMP officers meet and arrest them. According to the media’s abbreviated narrative, Haitian asylum seekers are fleeing the Trump administration’s repeal of a law meant to shelter them after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

But a rigorous commitment to Afroglobalism, a palimpsestic approach, and a refusal to understand this event through the convenience of white supremacist, colonial borders reveals a much more complicated and nuanced narrative of Blackness. Haitian history includes forcible removal from lands, families, communities, languages, religions and customs between 1669 and

1864 (Geggus, 2001).

Throughout that time, these African people were traded across the Americas between colonies and jurisdictions. In landing on the island of Hispaniola, they are likely to have been under the ownership of Spanish or French human traffickers and traders. In the case of the French, the ships carrying cargo that included Black slaves moved from as far South as the Antarctic France

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(contemporarily located in Brazil) to as far North as New France (contemporary Québec) and as far East as The New Hebrides (contemporary Vanuatu). The relations and kinship between the contemporary Black communities in each of these places, and everywhere in between, are real, although white supremacist global colonization obscures our ability to trace them.

The ancestors of those under French control on the island of Hispaniola fought and defeated their captors, creating the first free Black republic, Haiti—named in honour of the people indigenous to the land on which they reside. The French (still in control of various jurisdictions in the Americas, from St. Martin to New Orleans to Quebec) threatened to declare war and overtake the island unless the Haitians paid France for the loss of capitalist gain. France demanded a bounty of the equivalent of $21 billion as compensation for lost slave labour, lost raw materials, etc.19 The Haitians agreed to pay the debt to avoid more loss of life among their people.

For decades into the 20th century, the Haitian state was made to buttress France. France used its spoils to finance projects that benefit global capitalism to this very day, including the Panama

Canal: built by Black labour, using money generated through enslavement. This context explains how the world’s first free Black republic was prevented from developing a prosperous state. With so much money owed to extortionist France each year, how could Haiti hope to develop a sustainable infrastructure capable of protecting its inhabitants from the natural disasters to come?

Sensing a threat to Western capitalism, France, the United States, Canada, and Brazil joined forces to oust democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, who

19 Sommers, Jeffrey. Race, Reality, and Realpolitik: U.S.-Haiti Relations in the Lead Up to the 1915 Occupation. 2015. ISBN 1498509142. Page 124.

102 could very well have changed the trajectory of Haiti from an exploited state to a thriving one.

This affront to Black sovereignty sparked a refugee crisis across the Americas, with Haitians seeking refuge in the very states that were colonies of France dozens of years earlier. But now, states like Canada and the United States, parts of which were previously French colonies, have relatively new borders conveniently drawn to erase the culpability and responsibility of these former French jurisdictions in the crisis.

To recapitulate this complex, Afroglobal, anti-colonial reframing of history: Haiti’s infrastructure problem was caused by the trafficking and exploitation of Black people and Black sovereignty by

France, the United Kingdom and Spain. Haitian people enriched the world by helping to finance the Panama Canal, responsible for six per cent of the world’s total maritime trade, through the bounty paid to France.20 Later manifestations of these same colonies of the United Kingdom,

Portugal, and France (Canada, Brazil, and the United States, respectively) interfered in Haitian sovereignty, sparking a refugee crisis.

The infrastructure problem became a more acute, urgent crisis with the devastating earthquake of 2010, resulting in the death of over 300,000 people,21 and a renewed refugee crisis, with tens of thousands of people seeking refuge in the jurisdictions they had financed and built: the

United States and Canada. And now, years later, a white supremacist narrative explains to us how both the Canadian government and the American government have revoked their ‘kind gift’ of refuge to the Haitian people seeking asylum from a ‘long-past earthquake.’ They intend to deport these empty, history-less, “unsuffering” (McKittrick, 2006, p. 70) Black Haitians who conspire to “overstay their welcome” and take advantage of Canadian and American lands

20 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/what-the-new-panama-canal-tells-us-about-globalization/ 21 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-haiti-quake-anniversary/haitians-recall-2010-quake-hell-as-death-toll-raised- idUSTRE7094L420110112

103 illegally—an anti-Black narrative that clearly does not withstand a critical Afroglobal, palimpsestic view.

This palimpsestic, spatial scale-crossing narrative of Haiti is just one history, laying bare how the

African diaspora’s very existence reveals borders to be fraught with inconsistency. Black people’s histories are the proof that borders exist on a logic of thinly-veiled, white supremacist, colonial terror, and are respected only when convenient. The Afroglobal point of view contains innumerable histories and geographies (Lethabo King). In order to reveal these Afroglobal narratives, we must understand the processes that allow white supremacy to present Blackness in such an ahistorical, ungeographic way.

BLACK GEOGRAPHIES

This chapter heavily relies on Katherine McKittrick’s book Demonic Grounds. McKittrick’s writing has helped me to develop my own theories and is a novel, interdisciplinary approach to engaging anti-racism, feminism, Blackness, de/anti-colonialism, African-Canadian history, and cultural studies with her formal discipline of geography. Geographic concepts that are relatively absent from my own studies provide a language with which to fully articulate the ideas of this chapter.

White supremacist logics mark Blackness and Black people as ungeographic (McKittrik, 2006,

Wilderson, 2010), regardless of what borders we reside within. As they demarcated African people, and we became Black, we were “anchored to a new world grid that is economically, racially, and sexually normative, or, seemingly nonblack; this grid suppresses the possibility of black geographies by invalidating the subject’s cartographic needs, expressions, and knowledges” (McKittrick, 2006, p. 3).

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The white supremacist demarcation of the world into nation-states has created a landscape that is an assumed “transparent” geography. Such geography, as McKittrick describes, assumes the guise of being both naturally true and innocent; the construction of the land, and the geographic make up of space and place, are supposedly apolitical and objective.

An Afroglobal paradigm shift would consistently and systematically contest the assumed

“transparent” white supremacist geography that McKittrick describes. It would actively refuse to simply accept the demarcation of the globe as it is currently presented to us. This global terrain of political struggle can—and should—create new strategies for radical resistance struggles. An anti-racist, Black feminist interrogation of the geography reveals to us that while transparent space in fact “hierarchically positions individuals, communities, regions and nations, it is also contestable — the subject interprets, and ruptures, the knowability of our surroundings. What this contestation makes possible are ‘black geographies,’ which I want to identify as the terrain of political struggle itself” (McKittrick, 2006, p. 6).

I began to think concretely about these concepts when Black Lives Matter Network held its second “national” convening. There is a certain seduction in assuming that “space ‘just is,’ and that space and place are merely containers for human complexities and social relations”

(McKittrick, 2006, p. xi). Of course, as described above, space and how it is defined in and of itself is an incredibly political process and cannot simply “just be”. I came face-to-face with the

“seduction” that McKittrick describes during this convening.

Black Lives Matter is a largely United States-based movement. It makes sense for much of its focus to be contextualized in a United States context. But at this national convening, two Black

Lives Matter chapters outside of the United States were present: Black Lives Matter–Toronto and

Black Lives Matter–United Kingdom.

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As I described earlier, our presence elicited tensions between those solely committed to organizing on a nation state-wide scale and those who insisted that anti-Blackness must be confronted on a global level. Those of us from Black Lives Matter–Toronto and Black Lives

Matter–United Kingdom quickly made connections with folks who had an Afroglobal frame, but were having difficulty establishing an Afroglobal paradigm shift within their local chapters. We forced the conversation about global organizing at the convening.

The lack of an Afroglobal perspective, and the obfuscatory function of transparent space, were negatively affecting our ability to create anti-imperial, cross-border resistance strategies. It became clear that an unquestioned framework of white supremacist borders clearly affected our understanding of history, of Black settlement and responsibility to Black people worldwide.

At one point during the convening (which occurred prior to Donald Trump being elected the 45th

President of the United States), attendees suggested that, should Trump be elected, the movement should consider a present-day Underground Railroad of Black people from anti-Black

America to Canada. Those proposing the idea assumed that Black people would escape many of the injustices that Black populations face in America.

When those of us from Canada challenged this notion, we met with resistance and confusion from some attendees. Canada did not have the same history with slavery, some attendees insisted. The Black people of Canada were privileged, because we had all had the means to emigrate from other places in the world. Canada was peaceful and simply accepting of difference, and would be welcoming to Black people seeking refuge.

I was also personally challenged by some attendees on my ability to fully appreciate anti-Black racism as a person of Jamaican heritage. An attendee argued with me that Jamaicans did not have the same experiences with slavery as Black Americans, and that is why so many Jamaicans

106 are privileged enough to travel to other locations to live. I was disturbed at the power of a border to so effectively shape our understanding of our own kinship and shared histories.

White supremacist borders had seemingly obfuscated the pan-African organizing that our elders and ancestors had engaged in across lands. I was disturbed that these myths had any cachet, and was horrified at how widespread they were. The idea that the 49th parallel—an imaginary line drawn to benefit the colonizing relationships of the United States, the United Kingdom, and

France—could not only erase hundreds of years of history of enslavement, human trafficking, and anti-Black racism, but could also provide a smokescreen to the continuing injustices that

Black people in Canada face today was powerfully troublesome.

Those of us at the convening who reside outside the United States’ borders became acutely aware of how white supremacy boxed us into borders, through myths that hid our collective experience from one another. Possibilities from our perspective were not immediately obvious to those who did not have an Afroglobal orientation.

I was especially concerned about what that would mean for our organizing strategies. Would those of us residing in the centre of global white supremacist, imperialist power understand that we would be implicated in the destruction of Black life elsewhere, if we were simply content to struggle for Black life within the borders where our centuries-long struggle had landed us?

These discussions came to play a significant role in the proceedings of the convening, as we collectively decided that it was necessary for our movement to reject white supremacist geographies and struggle for global resistance to anti-Blackness. We declared that we could not be a movement fighting for Black liberation, while ignoring the white supremacist and global anti-Black functions of the American empire.

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I tell these stories, without critiquing the American movement or painting it with broad strokes.

These are just a few of the conversations that catalyzed my own thinking on the subject of Black geographies and Afroglobalism. These assumptions and erasures can be found throughout the diaspora whenever a critical engagement with geography and history is lacking.

McKittrick addresses this when she says:

Reconstructing what has been erased, or what is being erased, requires confronting the

rationalization of human and spatial domination; reconstruction requires “seeing” and

“sighting” that which is both expunged and “rightfully” erasable. What you cannot see,

and cannot remember, is part of a broader geographic project that thrives on forgetting

and displacing Blackness. (2006, p. 33)

McKittrick’s call for a different sight is reminiscent of the methods of Lethabo King, 2013;

Alexander (in Lethabo King), 2013; Sharpe, 2016; and Brand, 2001—as Chapter 4 describes.

Ultimately, we did force a confrontation of the sort McKittrick describes, and for the better. Our common struggles and debates at this second Black Lives Matter convening shifted the movement toward a commitment to global resistance organizing.

THE WHITE SUPREMACIST CONVENIENCE OF BORDERS

The abbreviated narratives I detail above have a convenient white supremacist, anti-Black, geopolitical function. Such narratives in the Americas are conveniently spun to suggest that the

“bad,” racist people exist south of the 49th parallel, and the “good” people exist north of the border. After all, the mythology will suggest, issues of anti-Blackness (like police violence) can be traced back to an enslavement project that did not occur north of the border.

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Yet, if we palimpsestically examine our geo-histories, the logic disintegrates. The issue of police violence in the Americas existed before the borders separating our various jurisdictions were concretized. At the time, there was simply a landmass invaded by white settlers who committed various types of genocide, brutalization and theft to acquire their wealth. They then set up various institutions in an attempt to control and protect what they deemed their “property”, including Black people, through slave patrols and police. Across the landmass, local settlements learned from each other and replicated the strategies that worked. The Toronto Police Service is older than the Los Angeles Police department (Morgan, 2016), and both services predate the

49th parallel’s concretization.

Though white folks in their various European and “New World” allegiances could and would set up shop wherever they wished on the land mass and respect the borders they declared out of convenience to each other or out of respect for the spoils of war, Black folks had no such luxuries. We were asylum seekers everywhere on the landmass, bordered or not. Our history is full of examples of our people ignoring such borders, whether by air, land or sea, in order to survive. Consequently, slave patrols, police officers and contemporary governments were and are content to obliterate the supposed strictness of the borders in order to control our bodies, and secure white supremacist, capitalist wealth, and such activity continues to this day.

A critical examination of the convenience that a white supremacist colonial border provides to a specific brand of Canadian anti-Black racism is important to interrogate, here. Around the world, dominant society understands Black people as landless and ungeographic. As this thesis previously discusses, our Indigeneity is typically unconsidered, as are all our cultural and spiritual relationships with Land (Dei, 2002). It is part of our construction as subhuman (Wilderson, 2010).

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In Canada, we are not only landless, Canadian mythology strips us from any historical existence on this land.

Because of the convenient ways that the contemporary borders have been drawn, white supremacist society can falsely claim that anti-Black racism is not an issue here, above the 49th parallel; there were too few Black people here and the scale of enslavement was minor, or so the myth goes. These borders create an effective framework, that neglects to interrogate the fact that anti-Black enslavement and trafficking occurred before Canada was considered Canada.

Black geographies of the Americas are and always have been connected across the landmasses.

On a Black terrain of struggle that is Afroglobal, we resist the reification of the 49th parallel— contesting Canada’s erasure of our existence. “Black Canada is not invisible, nor is it…simply in

Canada; rather, black Canada exhibits stories, places, and spaces that are materially detectable in the local landscape and through and beyond the nation-state” (McKittrick, 2006, pp. 102-

103).

Settler-masters used the Trans-Atlantic trade to traffic in Black people and goods, and enslaved

Black people were trafficked multiple times for multiple reasons beyond jurisdictions. And the reasons Black people were trafficked “were attached to local, community, familial and personal interests. Increasing home or field labor, bankruptcy, sex and rape reproducing the slave population, selling “unruly” resistant slaves, breaking apart slave allegiances…” (McKittrick,

2006, pp. 71). Regardless of the reasons, the forced movements benefitted white supremacy and colonization.

Only when Black people moved ourselves were these movements on the terrain of struggle, for the purposes of resisting our conditions. This remains true today. So many of the reasons that

Black people have come to be in Canada begin in other lands. Black geographies above the 49th

110 parallel extend from Maroon communities of Jamaica to Nova Scotia; from Somalia to the

Greater Toronto Area, and everywhere in between. Black Canada is global as, indeed, are the entirety of the Black Americas.

It follows that we must contest colonial borders when we consider Blackness, “because they do not sufficiently speak to the ways in which black geographies in Canada are made and upheld.”

Our diasporic identities drive how we got to this landmass — whether within or beyond the framework of “Canada”—and how we exist on this land. Anti-Blackness was a large-scale economic, political and cultural strategy of the United Kingdom, France, Spain, what would become the United States, and other European states. It remains this way. The entire strategy of enslavement, of “purchasing fertile slaves and fertile lands advanced several economies”

(McKittrick, 2006, p. 78), fully informed whether or not those economies would shift into their own nation-states or not.

Why would we consider Black experiences as fundamentally different because some colonizers and slave owners had an allegiance to the United Kingdom over here, others to France over there, and others to a “new world” over there? As McKittrick puts it, “traditional geographies did, and arguably still do, require black displacement, black placelessness, black labor, and a black population that submissively stays ‘in place’” (2006, p. 9).

As a final note on a critical geographic history: the Afroglobal framework, charting a Black terrain of resistance, has a scope that by its very nature is unavailable to us in its entirety. Some of our geographic knowledge is lost (Wilderson, 2010; Lethabo King, 2013). So much of our ancestor’s survival as trafficked people was dependent upon our particular understandings of geographic knowledge being clandestine. Indeed, writing our geographic history and knowledges in the

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Americas could mean death or capture, whether we consider the Underground Railroad, maroon communities, Assata Shakur’s escape from prison to Cuba, or undocumented migrants.

Reconstructing what has been erased, or what is being erased, requires confronting the

rationalization of human and spatial domination; reconstruction [requires “seeing” and

“sighting” that which is both expunged and “rightfully” erasable. What you cannot see,

and cannot remember, is part of a broader geographic project that thrives on forgetting

and displacing Blackness. (McKittrick, 2006, p. 33)

I recall this quote to stress: though these geographies are unwritten, uncovering them reveals to us the importance of considering the possibility for Black resistance and liberation beyond the borders that white supremacy draw and concretize on top of us.

Consider the kinship relationship between Black peoples across the world borne out of a similarity of experience, regardless of our geography. The shared experiences are the reasons why the murder of young Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown—stories elevated worldwide by the powerful media of the United States—can spark Black Lives Matter movements in the United

Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Black struggles are similar and related, regardless of a white supremacist geographic construction that conveniently suggests that they should not be.

RESISTANCE ACROSS BORDERS

These linked experiences of anti-Blackness, struggle, presumed landlessness, presumed subhuman-ness, and oppression create a terrain of resistance that can look similar across vast geographies and histories. Our lived experiences and the systems under which we reside have very unique local contexts, and yet, they are consistent across geographies because our bodies have become mapped onto the white supremacist landscape. Where white supremacy permits

112 us to be is geographically consistent with respect to political power, economic power, surveillance, pollution, health outcomes, and educational opportunities — the list goes on.

It only makes sense that we should resist our oppressions locally, globally and in every jurisdictional level in between. We have historically and contemporarily continued to do incredibly resilient work: naming, denouncing and resisting these processes on a local, statewide, and sometimes national level. So far, we do not use that kinship to challenge colonial border policies, or to organize on a global scale, in this current iteration of the Black liberation struggle.

An example of this mapping historically is clearly outlined when McKittrick engages in an excellent interrogation of space and the mapping of the human body with respect to the

“auction block” of slavery:

the human-commodity is put on display and the auction block serves to spatially

position black men and women as objects “to be seen” and assessed. Even private

auctions were strikingly public, requiring a seeable, measurable black body. Regardless

of the type of auction block, the enslaved woman, man, child, or family is rendered an

intelligible, transparent commodity. Without a doubt, the body on the auction block is

rendered an object; geographically, black men, women, and children become part of

the slave trade landscape, like other objects for sale. (2006, p. 72)

Traversing history, we can see how this geographic mapping has morphed contemporarily when a Black life is “captured”, interrupted, or is not where the penal system requires it to be. The way the evening news often depicts Black people is a contemporary representation of how anti-

Blackness spatially positions and assesses Black people. When media discuss our deaths, when

113 we are sought after for arrest, or when we are arrested, they choose particular representations of

Black people.

These depictions consistently describe us as delinquent and relegate us to particular spaces— whether those spaces are prisons, police cars, rundown public housing, refugee camps, ships or other such insecure, oppressive spaces. This is how we are objectively marked as landless, delinquent and dangerous. There is a certain carceral worldwide geography that an anti-Black system reserves far Black people alone, across the globe.

Wynter clearly articulates the consistencies of these geographies: the

criminalized majority of Black and dark-skinned Latino inner-city males now made to man

the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex, together with their female peers—the

kicked-about welfare moms…that [are] internal to (and interned within) the prison system

[are part of a geography, a] global archipelago…of the so-called ‘underdeveloped’ areas

of the world—most totally of all by the peoples of the continent of Africa (now stricken

with AIDS, drought, and ongoing civil wars, and whose bottommost place as the most

impoverished of all the world’s continents is directly paralleled by its Black Diaspora,

with Haiti being produced and reproduced as the most impoverished nation of the

Americas). (Wynter in McKittrick, 2006, p. 132)

The stark truth of these observations have particular contemporary meaning. In over 10 years of the International Criminal Court’s existence, only Africans have been brought to trial22. The

United Nations monitor on extreme poverty recently visited an area of Los Angeles densely populated by homeless Black people, and released statements about the crisis of homelessness.

The resultant press conference highlighted a concern that the area’s inhabitants’ political and economic rights are potentially being violated on a systemic scale23. American lawmakers

22 See: http://www.latimes.com/world/africa/la-fg-icc-africa-snap-story.html 23 See: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-un-skid-row-20171211-story.html

114 suggested that United Nations troops be sent into majority-Black areas of Chicago on peacekeeping duties to curb gun violence24.

SETTLEMENTS OF REFUGE

The way Black people across the landmass of North America have been treated upon creating

“settlements of refuge” is also a good example of how Black people resist borders to sustain

Black life. I use the term to distinguish between the reasons that Black people settle in a space— for refuge—and the reasons for white supremacist, colonizing forms of settlement. Black people’s systemic movement patterns across the globe are typically in search of refuge: whether due to escaping enslavement, environmental disaster, economic instability in exploited states, war, etc.

Across North America Black settlements of refuge were razed and destroyed across official state jurisdictions. From Africville and Hogan’s Alley to Greenwood, to Oakland, settler-masters have consistently made Black settlements of refuge inhospitable for Black folks. Even in contemporary times, the processes of gentrification, environmental racism, and economic collapse are destroying Black settlements of refuge, and actively attacking our ability to create thriving Black- majority communities.

Communities like the Bloor and Bathurst Area in Toronto and cities like Detroit are examples of areas where the processes of gentrification, environmental racism, and economic collapse push

Black inhabitants out. We can expand these conclusions about Black settlements of refuge to majority-Black settlements in the Caribbean and South America. I have already discussed the case of Haiti. Consistently, forces of white supremacy and colonization exploit the places we inhabit.

24 See: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-un-skid-row-20171211-story.html

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Whether colonialism strategically entangles with enslavement or neoliberal contemporary structural adjustment programs of international organizations claiming to work for the betterment of exploited states, it impoverishes and creates destitution wherever Black people live. Even the not-for-profit industrial complex, a system of largely white institutions ostensibly created to provide relief from disaster and poverty-related problems, destabilize and recolonize economically exploited states of non-white people (particularly in Africa). Anti-Black systems are implemented wherever we settle, constantly forcing us to seek refuge, no matter where we are.

Certainly, local realities are particular. The jurisdictions of Canada and the United States, for example, use different strategies with which to attack Black settlements of refuge. In Canada, as

I discussed above, the white supremacist mythmaking projects of the “nation of Canada” has falsely mapped Canada as white, non-Black space that was empty prior to the arrival of white colonists. Canada’s contemporaneous reconciliation projects are revising its mythology to accept that terrible things occurred in its past to Indigenous people. Canada’s mythmaking constructs itself as regretful of the colonial processes that require reconciling. It also presents such colonial processes as distant past, despite its ongoing investment in a colonial project.

In Canada, quiet concealment and erasure of history is the government strategy on state, provincial and municipal scales. McKittrick describes several examples of Canada’s careful elimination strategy as follows:

Concealment is accomplished at least in part by carefully landscaping blackness out of

the nation: specifically, the demolition of Africville in Nova Scotia and Hogan’s Alley in

Vancouver; threatening and administering black diaspora deportation; the renaming of

Negro Creek Road to Moggie Road in Holland Township, Ontario; the silence around

and concealment of Canada’s largest unvisible slave burial ground, Nigger Rock, in the

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eastern townships of Quebec; racist immigration policies; the ploughing over of the

black Durham Road Cemetery in southwestern Ontario; the relocation, and recent

renaming, of Caribana; and the commonly held belief that black Canada is only recent

and urban. When considered alongside other practices of discrimination, economic

injustices, and racial-sexual oppressions, landscaping blackness out of the nation

coincides with intentions to put blackness out of sight.

Unseen black communities and spaces thus privilege a transparent Canada/nation by

rendering the landscape a “truthful” visual purveyor of past and present social patterns.

Consequently, “truthful” visual knowledge regulates and normalizes how Canada is seen

— as white, not blackless, not black, not non-white, not native Canadian, but white.

“Other” geographic evidence is buried, ploughed over, forgotten, renamed, and

relocated; this illustrates how the practices of race and racism coalesce with racial and

racist geographic demands. (McKittrick, 2006, pp. 96-97)

In contrast, the United States’ mythology with respect to Black communities is similar to the mythology Canada is newly creating with Indigenous populations: terrible things happened in the past for which the US is sorry, but those occurrences are over; goes the myth. Such different historical myths with respect to Black people have resulted in different strategies for targeting and eliminating Black settlements of refuge.

In the United States, forceful destruction has been the strategy. Multiple examples exist of white civilians and either the federal or state government becoming involved in razing Black communities, presumably as way of containing and constraining Black communities.

It is no accident that Greenwood, one of the cities in Black American history that a white riot razed, was once deemed the “Black Wall Street” of Tulsa, Oaklahoma. Free Black towns were a threat to white supremacy. White people distributed photos and memorabilia of the terror inflicted upon Black people when the town was razed as if to say “Negroes beware” (Archer,

2006).

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“Often, but not always, the only recognized geographic relevancy permitted to black subjects in the diaspora is that of dispossession and social segregation” (McKittrick, p. 4, 2006). The examples above have the effect of keeping Black life within a “third world” space across the globe. Even the ways in which the prison is marked a space meant for the Black person to inhabit under anti-Black colonialisms is a reconstruction of a third world place through incarceration (McKittrick, 2006). Whereas

businesses and products cross borders freely under neoliberal policy, humans are

allowed movement based on their capitalist utility. Neoliberalism has exponentiated

what has been a historical commodification of immigrant laborers. When the economy

has changed and certain occupations have fewer vacancies, Canada has returned to

more restrictive immigration and temporary work permit policies. Refusing to grant

citizenship or status to unauthorized immigrant workers guarantees the material benefits

of cheap labor while avoiding many of the costs associated with recognition of worker

rights. (Dei, p. 41, 2017)

The construction of Black people as landless and without place continues throughout time: across the border, within the border, and by the states that police the border. We continue to provide non-Black society, and white society in particular, an anti-human through against which to define themselves (Dei, 2017, Wilderson, 2010, Fanon, 1958).

CONCLUSION

We resist through our continued existence, and through migration, as “landless” people with no legitimate claims to space anywhere to move, and seek new settlements of refuge. “These historical practices, of vanishing, classifying, objectifying, relocating, and exterminating subaltern communities, and desiring, rationally mapping, and exploiting the land and resources, are ongoing, firmly interlocked with a contemporary colonial agenda”(McKittrick, p. 95, 2006).

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The strategies are different, so when resisting these issues on a local scale, the strategies should naturally be particular to each space. But we should be aware that the outcomes are similar. This similarity of outcome, regardless of the strategy of the anti-Black state force, could be a serious threat to white supremacist borders.

Our resilience across our terrain of struggle belies the fragility of colonial state borders. Should our resistance frameworks become Afroglobal, we could develop cross-border de/anti-colonial methods to protect our communities from white supremacist destruction and to create sustainable, Black shelter and sustainable, healthy Black communities.

The United Kingdom’s imperial colonization project created multiple contemporary states. These states continue to work closely with the UK and similarly to replicate their control of Black bodies across the landmass. Does it make sense to respect their separation through borders, helping to prop up a mythology of Canada’s innocence? Does it make sense to respect the borders in our analysis of the data surrounding violence against Black lives across the Americas? What does this mean for theorizing Blackness beyond physical borders? It makes far more sense to consider the experience of Black folks in spite of the border.

For example, why would we limit ourselves to examining data regarding police violence at a federal level? The local data is necessary and important for the various strategic measures we may use to fight anti-Blackness. But we should be collecting continent-wide, hemisphere-wide, and global information to inform us as to the full scope of anti-Black racism’s hold on our existences. Stunting our data collection and analysis, simply because of imaginary lines drawn across the land between disputing European settler colonists, plays into white supremacy.

Similarly, conceptual borders between different Black and African people through the divide- and-conquer strategies of colonialism must be interrogated. Such conceptual border-

119 reproductions conveniently serve the settler-master. The theorizations of Blackness, as separate from Africanness, as separate from Caribbean Blackness, as separate from Indigeneity, are in and of themselves anti-Black. Should we accept these settler-master conceptual categories, using logics of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, we again play into white supremacy.

And what of the struggle for reparations? If we continue to engage in a reparations project as an incremental step toward abolition as described in the previous chapter, does it make sense to leave European colonizer states off the hook and focus our demands for reparations only on a state-wide scale? To do so would be a serious strategic and conceptual error.

Our subjugation is not bordered, and we should not be fooled by white supremacist geographies into limiting our terrain of struggle to the terrain of our subjugation. Those who came before us in the Pan-African movement knew this. Paul Gilroy has said that “the realm of freedom is conceptualized by those who have never been free” (1994).

White supremacy, anti-Blackness and colonialism have created a geography that continually reproduces white freedom and Black captivity. In our struggle to conceptualize our liberation we must understand the various tools that white supremacy has used to manufacture our subjugation. Developing our own tools in resistance will require envisioning possibilities beyond those parameters. We must understand our history in a palimpsestic way, and resist the temptation to understand the world through white supremacist notions of linear time and distance.

“Black and African peoples [like other Indigenous peoples] have always recognized

multiple readings of our world. We also recognize contestations, contradictions and

complexities of culture, the past history. But we resist amputations of our past, histories

and cultures not because we want these to imprison us. It is because they offer

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important lessons that can contribute to new imaginaries and new futurities for us. Our

present is very much inclusive of the past and the future ahead of us” (Dei, p. 36, 2017).

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6. ANTI-BLACK ANTAGONISMS IN THE ACADEMY25

Chapter 2 argues that those of us struggling against white supremacy and anti-Blackness must be vigilant to avoid replicating the logics that these hegemonic systems use in our work, lest we unwittingly reinforce their power. The absenting of Blackness in academic colonization discourse can inadvertently support the logics of these hegemonic systems.

This chapter engages with some of the antagonisms that have arisen in the academy as a result of absenting Blackness and theorizing decolonization through the logics of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. I will critique texts that unwittingly demonstrate the dangers of absenting

Blackness. I will also demonstrate that anti-Blackness reveals itself in certain texts that claim anti/decolonization intentions. This chapter will analyze writings from Bonita Lawrence, Enakshi

Dua, and Zainab Amadahy (2005, 2009) in particular. I will also engage with The White

Possessive by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015).

My critique will be quite impassioned. As Fanon once said, “scientific objectivity is barred to me” for I am speaking of my own family and community. My perspective on this matter is as a

Black, Afrikan woman who is an activist and feminist who deliberately moves through the world in the pursuit of anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-heteropatriarchal communities. As a diasporic

Black descendant of enslaved people, I purposefully and reflexively struggle against white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

I am a first-generation immigrant of Jamaican descent, who grew up working-class. I purposefully and politically define myself as Afrikan and reject any notion that Blackness across the Americas and Europe is not tied to the ancestral experiences of the enslavement and

25 This chapter adapted from “Indigenous & Black Solidarity in Practice: #BLMTOTentCity,” by S. Hudson in Newton, J. & Soltani, A. (Eds.), New Framings on Anti-Racism: Volume 2 – The New Futurity (pp. 1-17), 2017, Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Copyright 2017 by Sense Publishers. Adapted with permission.

122 genocide process. I also reject the notion that the severance of Black people in the Americas from their Indigeneity means that African Black people and Black people of the Americas are inherently different in their Blackness or Africanness, such that we cannot be allied.

The critique below is as a result of my own experiences and disappointments, when folks I could be allied with in the struggle against anti-Blackness and white supremacy do not appear to share the same commitment to rejecting these systemic injustices. It is also a critique borne out of gaps in critical engagement in academic discourse that I find disheartening. I orient myself here not to excuse the tone of the discussion below, but to contextualize my location and to make clear that my knowledge is both studied and embodied26.

Much of the discourse surrounding potentialities for Black and Indigenous solidarities in the

Americas resides in the academy. It is crucial to shared and develop such discourse both within and outside the academy, through on-the-ground struggle; a praxis exercise. Some discourses within the academy contemplating decolonization with respect to Black communities are highly problematic, and rely on white supremacist logic to create a narrative wherein Black presence and Black historical and present experience of genocide in the Americas is positioned as subordinate to Indigenous struggle (Churchill, 1983; Lawrence and Dua, 2005; Lawrence and

Amadahy, 2009). As Smith argues, these analyses fail to take into account the “intersecting logics of white supremacy”:

…when Native struggles become isolated from other social-justice struggles, Indigenous

peoples are not in a position to build the necessary political power actually to end

colonialism and capitalism. Instead, they are set up to be in competition rather than in

solidarity with other groups seeking recognition. This politics of recognition then

26 This is not a race to the bottom. I simply wish to point out the fatal errors that can occur when we rely on logics of hegemonic oppressive forces that we are attempting to challenge.

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presumes the continuance of the settler state that will arbitrate claims from competing

groups.(Andrea Smith, 2010, p. 7)

Claims in Lawrence’s, Dua’s, and Amadahy’s discussions of Indigeneity and Blackness are anti-

Black, and squarely in the service of white supremacist and anti-Black logic (2009). They rarely place blame or responsibility on whiteness, white supremacy or colonization; instead opting to critique and blame Black scholars.

Many of their questionable claims could still produce an analysis that places the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the colonizers. Shockingly, they almost entirely place blame on the shoulders of Black people struggling for liberation (2005, 2009). In order to make such offensive claims and place the blame for them in such an offensive place, they must use the logics of white supremacy and anti-blackness.

I begin my analysis by critically examining Lawrence and Amadahy’s article. From the beginning, the authors make the claim that Black and Indigenous people are engaged in a race to the bottom to claim superiority in their experiences of colonialism, and therefore innocence in any discussion of either group’s implication in oppressions of which they might be responsible. They offer no proof of this claim, and posture as though they are interested in its implications from both sides. The rest of the article goes on to critique Black thought and activism to be a settler and neo-colonial project with no critique of Indigenous communities whatsoever. This belies the purpose of the article: to critique Black, anti-racist thought from a position of superiority and innocence itself.

The erasure of Black histories and thought throughout the article that produce this critique makes it unequivocally clear that this critique comes from a place of anti-Blackness. Additionally, the outrageous claim that the Black voice in anti-oppression writing is “hegemonic,” a flagrantly

124 inappropriate use of the term, is also an example of anti-Blackness in this article. Perhaps most offensive, the authors criticize Black struggles for not lamenting the loss of Indigeneity, and the trauma of being ripped away from the land that defines our identities, in a painfully ignorant understanding of Black struggles.

Lawrence and Amadahy describe the movement of recently escaped or freed Black refugees27 across the land masses and sea from what is now referred to as the Caribbean and from what is now referred to as the United States to Canada as a project of settlement (2009). This claim does not recognize that throughout the times they refer to, Canada did not even exist in the way that it does now. This framing relies on the One True History of white supremacist logic and the absence of anti-Black logic. These lands were, by and large, colonized by either of Britain,

America, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands or France.

It did not matter where the escaped Black refugees were heading—they were escaping certain indignity, enslavement, injustice, racism, and death to get to certain indignity and racism, and uncertain injustice and death under the rule of white colonizers in every instance, unless they gained passage to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Black refugees escaped across imaginary borders that had not yet been cemented in the global consciousness as they are for many today.

The authors chisel these borders onto their history in an anti-Black project of ascribing blame and a colonizing identity to Black people. Even if the borders had been drawn up throughout the history of slave escapes, why would one reference them in a decolonization practice? It only serves to recolonize the land and the people who have experienced the grave genocidal projects of the colonizer in its imagining.

27 I refer here to escaped enslaved people as refugees, as this most accurately describes their global location and predicament.

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In another example, Lawrence and Amadahy describe immigration to Canada as white-only, completely erasing the history of enslavement on this land, again relying on the anti-Black logic of absence and falling prey to the white supremacist logic of inherent slaveability (2009). Black people were brought to Canada enslaved. There were not cotton fields and cane fields, but then, as today, there was work to be done that white supremacy deemed unfit for white hands.

This retelling of history serves the colonizer. It absolves white people in Canada of their responsibility to Black people, and denies the very simple truth that the wealth amassed across the colonies through the enslavement of Black people and the dispossession of Indigenous lands were not hindered by imaginary lines. The cane fields of Jamaica benefited the fur traders of Canada. Academics and activists alike should not allow the colonization of the land limit our contemporary critical analysis (Austin, 2010).

In Lawrence and Amadahy and Lawrence and Dua, the authors also only recognize the damage to Indigenous value systems, language and ideals that colonialism has caused. They engage in the logic of absenting Black experiences with colonialism when they conspicuously forget to recognize the damage to Black value systems, along with the near complete erasure of Black language and culture amongst the African slave-descendent diaspora, that colonialism has caused. These writers also claim the Indigenous experience as unique in its “targeting of

Aboriginal people for destruction as peoples,” “removing people from land,” “removing children through child welfare,” etc.

The way that the authors describe these acts as separate and distinct from the experience of

Black people is painfully ignorant, and aids the colonizer in its use of white supremacy as a strategy for colonization. It again positions Black people as though we did not exist prior to

126 enslavement, and were not also dispossessed, targeted for destruction, removed from our land, and have our children stolen from us by the state across the Americas.

This strange refusal to contemplate the similarities of both peoples’ experiences with colonization continue when they attempt to implicate Black African elites in colonial projects in

Africa. There is no similar discussion or research about Indigenous involvement in land agreements. Nor should there be, in a contemplation that includes an understanding of relationships of power between whiteness and exploited states and people throughout the world. Invoking Black African elites is a common anti-Black tool of white supremacy, diluting the urgency and gravity of the mass enslavement and genocide of Black people. It was disturbing to see it referenced in this way in colonization and anti-racism discourse.

Critiquing academic literature produced by Black anti-racist theorists themselves, Lawrence and

Amadahy negatively appraise the writing of Black anti-oppression theorists by stating that white liberals accept Black counter-hegemonic writing with open arms, and do not do so with respect to Indigenous writing. The authors do not offer proof for this claim, but posit that there is something inherently suspect or beneficial to White liberals about Black anti-oppression writing vis-à-vis Indigenous writing. This is absolutely refutable. It is also anti-Black in its conspicuous attempt to force a non-existent relationship between Black struggles for liberation with whiteness.

The authors speciously critique Black freedom struggles by claiming that “Black struggles for freedom have required (and continue to require) ongoing colonization of Indigenous land.” This is an outrageous claim. In my chapter on Black geographies, I hope I have eviscerated any notion that Black liberation could be dependent upon a white supremacist partitioning and possession of land.

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Lawrence and Amadahy also criticize what they term as the Civil Rights movement when they state that it “focused on …equity witin the laws, economy, and institutions of the colonial settler state” (2009, p. 128) This is an ahistorical reading of history that focuses on specific tactics that specific groups of Black Americans have used in their efforts to address urgent threats to their livelihood. In so doing, the authors rely on absenting other manifestations of American Black liberation movements: such as the Southern Freedom Movement, the Black Panther Party, the

Nation of Islam, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Malcolm X Grassroots

Movement, and Cooperative Jackson, just to name a few American-based organizations (to remain within their scale of reference). These cannot be so easily dismissed as employing a strategy of meliorism.

In another example, Amadahy and Lawrence construct a competition between Black and

Indigenous struggle in their conclusion that “whatever emerges from relationship-building between Black and Indigenous communities should take place” within a fundamental framework of how Indigenous peoples relate to non-Indigenous peoples (2009). This erases the importance of Black healing and Black frameworks for solidarity and attempts to establish power relations between the two diverse groups. It also negates Black and African claims to Indigeneity. From my own on-the-ground experience, I suggest that groups engaged in this coalition building between Black and Indigenous resistance movements should acknowledge that both groups have anti-white supremacist strategies for relationship-building which could mutually foster strength in a common struggle for decolonization and liberation.

Sharma and Wright’s critique of Lawrence and Dua traces the idea of the settler-colonial category, including all non-Indigenous people, back to a post-Multiculturalism Policy, neoliberal time. They relate it to the popularity of racist “ideologies of incommensurable ‘differences’

128 among ‘cultures’.” The authors conclude by rejecting arguments from Lawrence and Dua, stating that “we are especially interested in liberatory strategies of critique and practice that do not reproduce the ruling strategies of colonial modernity, the colonial state and nationalisms, and that open up spaces for radical critique and resistance” 2009, p.122).

In academic discussions surrounding decolonization, it is crucial to involve discussions of the responsibilities white settlers have to both Black and Indigenous groups, as the two groups that the white supremacist state has widely disposed of and brutalized through genocide. In so doing, we can recognize a historical truth that white supremacists have manipulated both

Indigenous and Black people in ways that are counterproductive to each other’s struggles

(Wigmore, 2011). We must be conscious not to reproduce these missteps lest we continue to work in the service of white supremacy.

The academy has raised important questions, many of which have yet to be thoroughly theorized. For example, Lawrence and Amadahy question what relationships should be forged by people “forced to live on other peoples’ lands” in order to resist colonial settlerhood in their contemplation of Black and Indigenous communities (2009, p. 14). If we are to recognize white supremacist logic, we should push this question further: what relationships should people living on and benefitting from the capital that Black enslaved labour has generated, for centuries, forge with Black communities to resist colonial settlerhood, white supremacy and capitalism?

Amadahy and Lawrence acknowledge that Black people do not have recognition as a nation, and are disempowered in a nation-to-nation strategy in the negotiation of reparations. They understand that there is no consensus (and barely even a discussion) about what decolonization looks like for formerly enslaved, colonized Black people living in the Americas. These are useful

129 contributions because they allow for a critical contemplation about strategic alliances that could be made in ongoing and future struggles for liberation for both Black people and Indigenous people.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work, The White Possessive, similarly (but with more complexity) employs logics of white supremacy and anti-Blackness in order to make claims about the lack of attention paid to colonialism and Indigenous genocide by Black “whiteness” theorists. Moreton-

Robinson forces theorists such as W.E.B. DuBois and Toni Morrison into this category of whiteness theorists (a category I strongly question whether they would take up on their own), and then criticizes them for not considering Indigeneity in their consideration of how the construction of Blackness makes whiteness and the American state (p. 48, 2015).

Moreton-Robinson goes on to state that Toni Morrison, in particular, discursively silences Native

Americans in her text Black Matters when she leaves Indigenous people “outside the scope of

[her] analysis” (p. 49, 2015). It is very difficult for me to accept that these celebrated thinkers, foregrounding their embodied and studied knowledge of Blackness in a climate in which

Blackness is constantly absented, silence Indigenous people, particularly as Black people reside within that category of Indigenous.

No Indigenous people have such power, worldwide. It is whiteness that silences and absents both Indigeneity and Blackness. Subaltern people writing from their embodied experience and social locations is a critical anti-racist discursive methodology which Moreton-Robinson seems to be missing. By considering Black people as merely what white people enacted upon us— enslavement, and nothing more—Moreton-Robinson employs the anti-Black logic of absence.

In particular, Moreton-Robinson incorrectly cites Cheryl Harris’ work Whiteness as Property.

Moreton-Robinson states that Harris “argues that whiteness became a form of property originally

130 through the appropriation of Indigenous people’s lands and the subsequent enslavement of

African Americans” (2015, p. 53, emphasis added). Harris’ work does not ahistorically present the appropriation of Indigenous land and the enslavement of Black people as stand-alone events with a linear relationship. She stresses, in fact, that these processes worked together to solidify whiteness as property. More importantly, she never, ever invokes the term African Americans, as the people who were enslaved, as this would be categorically incorrect: Africans were enslaved.

Harris, in fact, never mentions African Americans in her entire examination.

As I have emphasized throughout this work, Black people are often taken up through the anti-

Black logic of absence, with our Indigeneity and connection to a history beyond enslavement erased. Conceptualizing the dispossessed, enslaved Africans of the Americas as simply “African

American” slaves betrays a reliance on white supremacist borders, which also reinforce the ahistorical way in which Black people’s histories are absented. Moreton-Robinson rightfully states that “repressing the history of Native American dispossession works to protect the white self from ontological disturbance” (2015, p. 51). I would add that so, too, does repressing the history of Black dispossession.

Rather than forcing a positioning of Indigenous liberation as irreconcilable with Black liberation, using the logics of white supremacy and anti-Blackness as the above theorists have done, Verna

St. Denis takes a different approach. She discusses how Indigenous and anti-racist education can unite in their tasks. St. Denis’ understanding of the politics of identity and anti-racism as a tool for liberation as also anti-colonial is useful. She acknowledges that members of a particular identity are attempting to reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness, in opposition to dominant oppressive characterizations, through their engagement with anti-racism and the politics of identity. To St. Denis, the goal is greater self-determination. She understands that

131 colonized people should not be held individually responsible for colonial practices in her discussion of damaged Indigenous culture.

This is directly oppositional to Amadahy and Lawrence’s approach with Black colonized peoples.

Unlike St. Denis, Amadahy and Lawrence refuse to acknowledge the racialization of Indigenous people in their anti-Black critique of anti-racist approaches to anti-oppression. St. Denis offers very useful tools when she states that:

ignoring the production of racial identities, whiteness remains at once invisible and a

marker of difference in a Canadian context…but we cannot escape our history of

racialization that was integral to Europe’s colonization of Canada and Aboriginal

peoples…we need to acknowledge the analysis offered in anti-racist education because

it offers a way to explore how practices of racialization have positioned Aboriginal

people differently and sometimes against each other at the expense of a common goal

of challenging our marginalization. An anti-racist analysis can provide a common ground

for building alliances for those concerned with the impact of racism and white

domination on Aboriginal people. (2008, p. 1085)

Dei makes the point more forcefully when he states, “racism and slavery are fundamental to settler colonialism and to all colonialisms. To dismiss or ignore racism and slavery in decolonization scholarship is to engage in anti-Black invisibilization and dehistoricization” (2017, p.108). St. Denis also states that

by acknowledging a common experience of colonization and racism, educators can

enact solidarity and join together to challenge racism and racialization. Coalition and

alliances can be made within and across the diversity within Aboriginal and non-

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Aboriginal peoples lives through a common understanding and commitment to anti-

racist education. (2008, p. 1087)

Dei (2017) adds to this critique when he states:

claims to Land must not operate with hegemonic orthodoxies or from a hegemonic

knowledge base…the dispossession of Indigenous Lands everywhere is intertwined with

racial, gender, class and sexual biopolitics. Race need not be pitted against Land or

Indigeneity and vice versa (p. 75).

I think these frameworks for considering race and Indigeneity are far superior to using the colonizers tools to critique Blackness, as I think Amadahy, Dua, Lawrence and Moreton-Robinson have done. I again invoke Sharma and Wright, when they caution against “pitting one racialized, ethnicized, nationalized, and gendered group of expropriated commoners against another in the struggle for decolonization”.

This issue of pitting Black and Indigenous communities against one another has predictably bled outside the academy and has had some currency in the media. A popular article by Scott

Gilmore in Maclean’s Magazine,28 which was shared amongst my peers in 2015, exemplifies how this issue is taken up in a mainstream Canadian context. The title of the article already betrays its reliance on white supremacist borders: “Canada’s race problem? It’s even worse than

America’s.” It goes on to compare the condition of Black life in America with that of Indigenous life in Canada, relying on the all-too-convenient border, erasing Black life above the 49th parallel and Indigenous life below it in the process.

Academics and activists alike must be vigilant against constructions such as these, which serve to erase whole populations and experiences while reinforcing logics of white supremacy. We can

28 http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/out-of-sight-out-of-mind-2/

133 only do so if we have rigorous discipline in understanding and eschewing the logics of white supremacy and anti-Blackness in our own work.

BLACK AND INDIGENOUS SOLIDARITY IN PRACTICE

On Friday, March 21, 2016, Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU) announced that no charges would be laid in the homicide of Andrew Loku, a Black migrant, at the hands of the

Toronto Police Service. The police watchdog agency had released a bare-bones public report, justifying its decision to safeguard the police officers responsible for his death from a thorough investigation in a court of law.29

Black Lives Matter activists convened a meeting of activists and decided: we would camp outside of City Hall and create a tent city. After the first few nights, heavy-handed police repression led to the action moving from Toronto’s City Hall to the Toronto Police Headquarters.

After the police attacked protesters and confiscated our tents, the action, originally intended to last 12 hours, became an indefinite expression of what a community could look like.30

Though the majority of the inhabitants of Black Lives Matter–Toronto’s Black City were Black, we made space for allies of all stripes, and all inhabitants were supported and valued. Of our allied participants, the solidarity and support of the Indigenous community was key to our action and to the ability of organizers to recognize the resistance action as a site of possibility for transformative change.

29 (2016, March 18). “Investigation Finds No Grounds for Criminal Charges in Fatal Shooting of Andrew Loku”. Special Investigations Unit. Retrieved from: http://www.siu.on.ca/en/news_template.php?nrid=2578 30Hudson S. & Diverlus, R. (2016, March, 21). Toronto Police attack peaceful Black Lives Matter Toronto protestors. Retrieved from: http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/toronto-police-attack-peaceful-black-lives-matter-toronto- protestors-573027871.html

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As our contemporary situations exist in Canada, the police brutality resistance refreshed by the actions of Black Lives Matter–Toronto was an ideal issue with which to create a coalition. As

Trask notes, resistance movements with small populations and border constrictions must build coalitions with other groups in order to be successful, and to effectively challenge the settler colonial genocidal state (Trask, 1991). The state targets Black and Indigenous bodies for policing, incarceration and surveillance like no other body in existence on this land. Black and

Indigenous populations are chronically overrepresented in prisons, police stops and in communities regularly under surveillance by police officers. The very existence of Black and

Indigenous people destabilizes the Canadian state. An alliance, therefore, has powerful possibilities for movement-making and resistance actions.

This is the context under which Black and Indigenous communities came together to create

Black City. Quite frankly, there was no pre-established plan for a strong Indigenous presence in the action—which, again, was never expected to last more than 12 hours. But after we moved to our new location outside the Toronto Police Services headquarters, and committed to remaining in the space for as long as we could to demonstrate the power of our community, a solid and permanent Indigenous presence developed amongst our allied groups. The relationship that developed was one that would not have been possible without the theoretical framework that underpinned our actions.

When our Indigenous allies came to join us at the camp, a relationship developed that respected our specific histories and relationship to the space and the issues at hand. Throughout waking hours, a Mohawk Warrior Flag, an Iroquois Confederacy Flag, or a Two Row Wampum Flag flew atop the highest point of the space, flown relentlessly by an Indigenous ally. In their other hand was a photo of Andrew Loku.

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A space was carved out specifically for Indigenous members of Black City, and Indigenous medicines were brought to the space every day. The Indigenous community entered into conversation with us, so that we could establish a respectful process for using the space that we intended to honour, in the ways that the traditional caretakers requested. Indigenous activists cleansed the space each day with sage and medicines, and established expectations for the

Indigenous community’s ceremony and interactions with police officers, should they arise.

Similarly, upon entering the space, the Indigenous community respected our goals and our plans for using the space. We made clear that our community project would accept all allies into the space, and that we had measures in place for interactions with the police for Black participants.

Each day that we extended the action, we entered into dialogue with our Indigenous allies.

Processes for food, diverse spiritual practices, health and healing were negotiated together. And our Indigenous allies always respected our decision-making processes and our place at the centre and as the leadership of the space. Our partnership was very visible and intentional, once established.

This partnership felt natural. But we must recognize that it is a partnership that must be intentional and continually renewed. Black communities can be anti-Indigenous, and Indigenous communities can be anti-Black. It is crucial for both our communities to resist the myths sold to us by the state, lest we end up tacitly supporting white supremacist logic.

If Black communities buy into the Disappearance logic, Blackness upholds white supremacist settler colonial logic. If Indigenous communities buy into Slaveability logic, Indigeneity upholds white supremacist settler colonial logic. If either community buys into the One True History logic,

136 we are tacitly supporting white supremacist settler colonial logic at the cost of erasing our shared histories.

Shortly after the close of Black Lives Matter–Toronto’s Black City, a state of emergency was announced in the Northern Ontario First Nation of Attawapiskat.31 The community has been devastated by the continuing Canadian colonial project, leading to a spate of suicide attempts by youth as young as nine years old. The declaration of a state of emergency came as Black

Lives Matter–Toronto was holding a private healing and debrief session for participants of Black

City. The Indigenous participants notified us prior to the closing ceremony they were leading.

They let us know that we had inspired them, and might need our solidarity in the coming days.

Our coalition had been crucial to Black organizing in the city of Toronto, and sparked Black organizing in Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Hamilton and Halifax. Shortly thereafter, an

Indigenous activist group called upon us to support another occupation action: #OccupyINAC.32

Toronto organizers in coalition with Black Lives Matter—Toronto occupied the Indigenous and

Northern Affairs Canada office.

And once again, our mutual solidarity was impossible to ignore. The presence in the media, social media, and physically on-site made it clear: Black activists would be using their own resources, contacts, and tools to benefit the Indigenous community. It did not stop there. Similar to Black City, actions and organizing were sparked across the country in Vancouver, Winnipeg,

Ottawa and Halifax. During both of these actions, each group acted with a respect and solidarity

31 Forani, J. (2016, April 10). Attawapiskat in state of emergency following rash of suicide attempts. The Toronto Star. Retrieved from: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/04/10/attawapiskat-in-state-of-emergency-following-rash-of- suicides.html 32 Da Silva, C. (2016, April 13). Idle No More, Black Lives Matter protesters demand action on Attawapiskat suicide crisis. CBC. Retrieved from: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/protesters-occupy-Indigenous-northern-affairs-office- 1.3533662

137 for the other that lent to our ultimate success in mobilizing our respective communities, forcing power-holding decision-makers to move.

It is clear to me that Indigenous liberation struggles and Black liberation struggles are related and intertwined decolonization struggles. True decolonization requires the liberation of Black people and the liberation of Indigenous people, everywhere. Andrea Smith’s concept of white supremacist logic makes it clear that the struggle for Black and Indigenous freedom requires liberation for each group. This concept is clear in on-the-ground struggle. The academy should be cautious to ensure that in discussions of these concepts, it is not reinscribing colonial relationships onto colonized bodies. As put by Leonardo, “a critical race perspective cannot be guided by a white perspective” (p. 46, 2002).

It bears repeating: Indigenous activists making Black activists essential coalition partners through the Occupy INAC action is an anti-colonial, revolutionary act that renders the settler colonial state impermanent. The potential of both of our groups, to enact transformative change by continuing to work in coalition, is boundless. We should roundly reject white supremacist logics that see us competing with each other for scraps at the bottom of the white supremacist lowerarchy. We should never forget that in some ways, we are the most dangerous groups to the white supremacist state structure. Our very existence proves its injustice and attacks its legitimacy. The possibilities stemming from our solidarity and coalition are nothing short of revolutionary.

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7. CONCLUSION

This thesis has been an active resistance project. As a grassroots activist and an academic, I have a particular embodied and studied knowledge about the kinds of strategic theorizing that could be helpful to the current iteration of the Black liberation movement. Over the course of my work, it has become abundantly clear that we need to wrestle with colonialism and anti-Blackness.

Putting the body of work on de/anti-colonization theory together in conversation with that of

Blackness will create new knowledges. This project has continued the work of other theorists who had the same objective. There is more to be done.

We need to be vigilant in our rejection of white supremacist, anti-Black logics in our theorizing and in our strategies for liberation, and truly understand the context in which they operate to benefit the settler-master. In preparing for, rejecting and contesting the Weather (Sharpe, 2016) that is whiteness and anti-Blackness, we make these hegemonic systems visible, and are more effectively able to avoid employing their logics.

Putting these disciplines in conversation with one another invites some challenging questions for further study. Questioning and troubling concepts like Land, colonization, Indigeneity, geography, borders, and time are all theoretical challenges that arise when we refuse to absent

Blackness using the tools given to us by Black feminist theorists. This work employs the undisciplined, “blackened” method of Brand as Sharpe (2016) describes it, the wake work of

Sharpe (2016), the palimpsestic reading of Alexander, and the decolonized sight of Lethabo

King (Lethabo King, 2013). These tools uncover what relying on the demarcations of white supremacist, colonial, anti-Black constructions of land, geography, identity, and time obscures from our consciousness.

139

Critical engagements with these concepts show that too much academic space has been used to deepen the divisions between Black and Indigenous communities—divisions that ultimately serve the settler-master (Wilderson 2010). If we recognize the context or Weather in which we consider these concepts, and refuse to employ logics of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, we can “see” that Indigenous and Black liberation struggles are related and intertwined de/anti- colonization struggles. True de/anti-colonization requires the liberation of Black people and the liberation of Indigenous people, everywhere.

Such critical engagement has also led me to reconsider the strategies of sovereignty struggle and reparations for de/anti-colonization and Black liberation. What is the use of these strategies if they rely on the futurity of the settler-master? Where does the struggle for Black reparations leave Indigenous land-dispossessed people? Where does it leave Black and Indigenous people the world over, whose dispossession relies on the existence of an imperial, capitalist America?

What good is a reparations project devoid of an Afroglobal framework, that recognizes that the settler-master operates on a scale far greater than the state? Likewise, where does the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty leave Black land- and body-dispossessed people? If the concept of sovereignty relies on outside recognition of the settler-master, and the settler-master constructs himself through the subjugation of Blackness, where does that leave Black and Indigenous people the world over? He will need to continue to subjugate them in order to retain power.

I conclude that these strategies can be incrementally useful, but only through a posture of abolition as the end goal. The power harnessed through such strategies must be employed in a struggle for transforming the word in its entirety, and creating an unrecognizably alternative futurity where Blackness and Indigeneity are centrally considered (Fanon, 1958). While I agree with the Afropessimist idea that an end to Black suffering means the end of the world

140

(Wilderson, 2011), my ultimate conclusion differs from theirs. I employ a politics of possibility: an optimistic framework without which my work as an activist to bring forth this futurity would not be possible. What good would the work of liberation activists be if we didn’t believe that what we were struggling for was possible?

The questions that I have wrestled with are hard, complex questions, and I hope to see more people using the tools that Black feminist theorists have devised for us, awakening to the world that the Weather and colonized sight have obscured from us. These methods for thinking through a Black futurity can significantly shift the orientation of grassroots organizing on the ground, and they have done so for me. We cannot afford to rely on white supremacist, anti-Black logics that lead us to false conclusions, divisions amongst colonized people, and divisions amongst Black people, in the service of the settler-master. Our liberation depends on the ability to “blacken knowledge” (Sharpe, 2016) and imagine our futurity outside of the logics that construct the world system we exist in today.

“So we are here in the weather, here in the singularity. Here there is disaster and possibility. And while ‘we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.’” Inner quote: Dionne Brand, in Christina Sharpe, 2016, p. 134

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