Surely they have to understand that there’s no reason to trust a white man’s word in this day and age when so many treaties, agreements, and doctrines have been brazenly broken by said white men. I read this as a statement of enmity against the historically downtrod, frankly. Indigenous folk have just as much if not more reason to distrust this angle-- post-centuries of slavery, in their first gasps of being free men, Black folk only had Field Article 15 get rolled back before they were fucking us up with Jim Crow and the Black Codes. Indigenous folk done seen damn near every treaty they ever signed with a white man broken.
I don’t have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ response to this for you, in all honesty; but I myself say to all of this, the same thing I say to every other settler-leftist-- ‘show and prove.’ Show me the mettle of your works. Show me you’re willing to put your body on the gears and wheels, prove you’re willing to put as much of your transactional skin in the game as the oppressed around you have to live with being risked. Otherwise, just saying that you’re not a settler, with all the euro-supremacist puffery and arrogance that kind of thing requires, doesn’t make it so. Amerika is an abomination; and this angle of ‘seeing America as a reality’ tells me they’re trying to spitshine a turd and present it as ‘worth assimilating and subordinating into’.
"Have I, ever told you, the definition of insanity?"
Historically your distrust is well justified but you need to be careful to not slip into idealism by essentializing the “white man”. The actions and attitudes of specific groups do not stem from some inherent racial characteristics but from material incentives and interests. The strategic question that the decolonial movement needs to answer is how to align the interests of the colonized nations which yearn for emancipation and historical justice with those among the settler proletariat who also chafe under the oppression of the bourgeois state. There must be a recognition that the decolonization of the continent is also in the interest of the vast majority of the people whose oppression and exploitation under capitalism is being maintained through the spoils of external and internal colonization and imperialism.
I think where we disagree there is that where the law of the land is supremacy under a settler state, I consider that given kind of supremacy to be inherently essential to the settler in question until I’m given direct proof otherwise; (re: the ‘show and prove’ bit) because any lesser amount of vigilance is how you get chalk outlines, and we don’t have bodies to spare like that. The way these guys seemingly demand unfettered, uncritical, and accountability-lacking access to our emotional and strategic labor because “we’re not like the old boss, we promise”,reeks of a chauvinism that is near-inseparable from supremacy to me. It may not be burning crosses on the lawns, but it does ring a bit more an aggression than just micro, and leads me to believe that nothing but worse can be expected over time out of that corner of The Discourse™.
Naturally, there has to be a recognition of the mutual interests of decolonization; but that assumes that the supremacy has been worked out of the settler first, and we don’t even have a single accord with which to begin approaching that question yet. The one thing that’s certain is that this kind of statement in OP’s image absolutely screams “we’re not gonna self-reflect like that” to me. Why I say I don’t have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ take, tbh.
I can totally understand your concerns. I can only look at this from the outside since i have never lived in a settler state, but it seems logical to me that if there is to be an alliance between the indigenous people and the settler proletariat there needs to be some level of trust, and for that demonstrations must be made that the alliance will be mutually beneficial. It’s the same line of logic i follow when i arrive at the conclusion that communists simply must engage in labor activism and always keep pushing to improve the workers’ conditions no matter how “socdem” or reformist that may seem, because we must demonstrate to the working class through concrete actions that we are not only on their side but that their interest is best served by joining our revolution. Trust must be earned.
Surely they have to understand that there’s no reason to trust a white man’s word in this day and age when so many treaties, agreements, and doctrines have been brazenly broken by said white men. I read this as a statement of enmity against the historically downtrod, frankly. Indigenous folk have just as much if not more reason to distrust this angle-- post-centuries of slavery, in their first gasps of being free men, Black folk only had Field Article 15 get rolled back before they were fucking us up with Jim Crow and the Black Codes. Indigenous folk done seen damn near every treaty they ever signed with a white man broken.
I don’t have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ response to this for you, in all honesty; but I myself say to all of this, the same thing I say to every other settler-leftist-- ‘show and prove.’ Show me the mettle of your works. Show me you’re willing to put your body on the gears and wheels, prove you’re willing to put as much of your transactional skin in the game as the oppressed around you have to live with being risked. Otherwise, just saying that you’re not a settler, with all the euro-supremacist puffery and arrogance that kind of thing requires, doesn’t make it so. Amerika is an abomination; and this angle of ‘seeing America as a reality’ tells me they’re trying to spitshine a turd and present it as ‘worth assimilating and subordinating into’.
"Have I, ever told you, the definition of insanity?"
Very good point.
Historically your distrust is well justified but you need to be careful to not slip into idealism by essentializing the “white man”. The actions and attitudes of specific groups do not stem from some inherent racial characteristics but from material incentives and interests. The strategic question that the decolonial movement needs to answer is how to align the interests of the colonized nations which yearn for emancipation and historical justice with those among the settler proletariat who also chafe under the oppression of the bourgeois state. There must be a recognition that the decolonization of the continent is also in the interest of the vast majority of the people whose oppression and exploitation under capitalism is being maintained through the spoils of external and internal colonization and imperialism.
I think where we disagree there is that where the law of the land is supremacy under a settler state, I consider that given kind of supremacy to be inherently essential to the settler in question until I’m given direct proof otherwise; (re: the ‘show and prove’ bit) because any lesser amount of vigilance is how you get chalk outlines, and we don’t have bodies to spare like that. The way these guys seemingly demand unfettered, uncritical, and accountability-lacking access to our emotional and strategic labor because “we’re not like the old boss, we promise”, reeks of a chauvinism that is near-inseparable from supremacy to me. It may not be burning crosses on the lawns, but it does ring a bit more an aggression than just micro, and leads me to believe that nothing but worse can be expected over time out of that corner of The Discourse™.
Naturally, there has to be a recognition of the mutual interests of decolonization; but that assumes that the supremacy has been worked out of the settler first, and we don’t even have a single accord with which to begin approaching that question yet. The one thing that’s certain is that this kind of statement in OP’s image absolutely screams “we’re not gonna self-reflect like that” to me. Why I say I don’t have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ take, tbh.
I can totally understand your concerns. I can only look at this from the outside since i have never lived in a settler state, but it seems logical to me that if there is to be an alliance between the indigenous people and the settler proletariat there needs to be some level of trust, and for that demonstrations must be made that the alliance will be mutually beneficial. It’s the same line of logic i follow when i arrive at the conclusion that communists simply must engage in labor activism and always keep pushing to improve the workers’ conditions no matter how “socdem” or reformist that may seem, because we must demonstrate to the working class through concrete actions that we are not only on their side but that their interest is best served by joining our revolution. Trust must be earned.
You see the point I’m pushing here.
This