The basics of settler colonialism in the U.S.

It’s impossible to understand the nature of the social, political and economic system in the United States without grasping the settler colonial nature of the state and society. The USA is and always has been an empire. Although European settlers and their descendants are the most privileged within the Empire, it is vital to remember that in an Empire, there are no citizens, only subjects.

Imperial privilege is one of a number of enforcement and compliance mechanisms for social control; those who are privileged have no rights, only privileges that can be revoked for disobedience, insufficient loyalty, identification with the oppressed, and other transgressions.

The basis of colonialism, particularly settler colonialism, and thus of racism, white supremacy and white-skin privilege, is the conquest of land and people. The US system in its entirety is built and based on the stolen lands of indigenous people, and the imposition of a system of private property in land, the demarcation of property lines, which laid the basis for the imperial state and the national borders.

As the Declaration of Independence makes clear, US conceptions of freedom are inextricably bound up with the “freedom” of conquest and expansion. One of the settler colonists’ key disputes with the British crown was the monarchy’s insistence on following its treaties with the indigenous First Nations, reflected in a willingness to limit settler expansion into Native territories to the west of the Atlantic seaboard settlements.

Jefferson, allegedly an opponent of a strong central government, leaped at the chance to acquire Napoleon’s “Louisiana Territory,” offering the opportunity for a vast expansion of the slave system, and outfitted the Lewis and Clark expedition to seek to map and claim the territories all the way to the Pacific (into areas claimed by other European imperial powers besides the French). Similar factors of British cooperation with Native American allies were central to the so-called War of 1812, though our schools usually teach that this was provoked by British impressment of US merchant sailors.

The colonized African people, kidnapped from Africa, traded for Amerindian slaves with the West Indies plantation colonies, or bred in captivity, developed a claim to the land they worked, particularly in the US southeast; many intermarried and combined with indigenous or tribal people. Fear of a combination between African slaves and indigenous nations was always a key reason behind US military action against “Indians,” such as Andrew Jackson’s illegal actions in Florida and against the Cherokee.

There is no mystery to this history. It’s the same one we are taught in school. It’s embodied in the US flag with its ever-increasing rows of stars. It’s “Manifest Destiny.” The question is only whether we glorify and embrace these conquests, and the militarism they require — or reject and seek to overturn them.

Consider the US annexation of Texas and conquest of most of northern Mexico. These were enormous crimes against humanity. Yet they are memorialized in the “Alamo,” institutionalized in the flag, and the basis for US global dominance. Picture a basically indigenous Mexico possessing all its national territory, including the oil wealth of Texas, the copper of Colorado, silver of Nevada and gold and agricultural abundance of California! What a different world it would be!

The war with Mexico set the template for all future US aggression. It was carried out by executive fiat and manipulation, and opposition collapsed once it was a fait accompli. Lincoln, who voted against a declaration of war as a Congressman, quickly changed his tune once the war began, and voted in favor of appropriations, to “support the troops.”

It needs to be pointed out that by capturing Texas and later adding the other Mexican territories, the US reintroduced human chattel slavery into an area where it had already been abolished to realize the full depth of the crimes against humanity embodied in US expansionism.

The addition of Alaska without consultation with the Inuit, the annexation of Hawaii over the opposition of the native Hawaiians (and over the refusal of the US Senate to ratify the treaty of annexation with the plantation owners oligarchy), and the conquest of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines — accepted by Spain but rejected by the indigenous populations — complete the picture. At this very moment, US republicans and Democrats (and their neo-colonial shadow-puppets) are debating how best to rationalize and sustain U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico over 115 years after the invasion, whether as a so-called “free associated state” or by outright annexation as the 51st state (and 51st star on the flag).

Another Year Older and Deeper in Shit

Well, oddly enough I started this blog one year ago and did nothing with it whatsoever. In the intervening year, the San Francisco Eight -- former Black Panther Party for Self Defense members and associates -- have been arrested and jailed on prohibitive bails on charges based on torture (both of some of them and of the sole state's witness, another former Panther associate). This is a clear attempt to legitimize the use of torture "domestically" within the US criminal "justice" system, just as it has been authorized internationally in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The empire becomes ever more seamless every day. The distinction between one side of the current border and the other is becoming increasingly meaningless. It is impossible to understand measures taken in the U.S., like the intense anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican crackdown or the growing militarization of police and schools and the surveillance system, without placing it in an international context -- such as the growth of revolutionary struggle in Mexico and across Latin America, the armed and civil resistance to U.S. occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.

Similarly, it is impossible to understand the strength of U.S. reaction internationally, the nature of the U.S. global empire, or the weakness of the U.S. "left" and domestic political "opposition," without understanding that inside its borders, the U.S. state is already an Empire of colonized people and nations, and conquered and annexed lands.

What we need to do, based on these understandings. is to chart a course to turn the contradictions and inherent weaknesses and vulnerabilities of such an Empire against it, to nurture in colonized people and their potential allies among the privileged-yet-exploited among the colonizing population a sense of their own potential, their power and creativity. We must overcome the defeatism engendered by past defeats of heroic but incomplete revolutionary struggles and upsurges.


I invite comment and criticism and contributions on this theme of domestic and international colonization as a strategy for liberation. I will be posting more regularly with comments and evidence myself.