Trump tells minority Congresswomen to "go back where they came from"

[The Romulan Republic]

So... any comment on the link I posted a while back regarding Senator Warren's policy plan on Native American relations? I fully expect the "decolonization" side to say that it doesn't go far enough, but I'm curious as to whether this proposal would be regarded as a step in the right direction, or as something that would have unintended negative consequences or for some other reason be unacceptable. Since this is an actual concrete policy proposal that might (in some modified form) conceivably be put into law (contingent upon the outcome of the 2020 election), and might actually have a substantial effect on peoples' lives and rights, not a remote hypothetical that is unlikely to be realized, for good or for ill, in the foreseeable future.

I've held off on comment because I'm not an American and don't know the context on the ground tremendously well (despite claims to the contrary, I'm happy to admit it) but we did study Oliphant here as one of the potential ramifications of adopting a US sovereignty model, so the proposal of resolving it is a tremendously positive step. There can, of course, always be more - and there must be more than what Warren proposes to achieve genuine justice - but each step towards it is still welcome.

The idea of having a separate criminal justice system operating on tribal land within the United States makes me uneasy, as I subscribe to the view that one of the fundamental purposes of the law is to create a consistent, level playing field to which all citizens of a country are equally accountable, and by which they are all equally protected, and that therefore law should be consistent across the county, rather than having different legal systems for different territories or different groups of people. And yet, I'm aware that that's kind of a theoretical point in the US as it is- we already have wildly different legal systems depending on what state you're in (fucking states' rights, ruining the US since 1776), so Native lands might as well have their own sovereign criminal system too. Especially as under treaty we already regard them as sovereign, and that shouldn't just be in name only. Indeed, as an advocate of the rule of law, I am obligated to take the view that the US should honour its legal treaty obligations to the best of its ability, barring a renegotiation of those treaties or (hypothetically) a situation where our treaty obligations are in conflict with the Constitution or with fundamental human rights (I am not arguing that that is the case here).

Certainly more can be done. Even if this were the perfect bill (and it isn't), Justice is an ongoing process, as is reform. There's never going to be one fix and then its all solved.

However, she definitely doesn't go far enough in regards to infrastructure projects. Reserving the right of the US government to refuse permits where tribal sovereignty is infringed is a poor substitute to giving said tribal nations a blanket veto to be supported unconditionally by the federal government.

I would agree that the norm should be "the tribal nations don't want it, we don't do it on their land", and that that should be upheld by the Federal government.

On the positive side, taking steps to protect infrastructure funding for Native Americans from budgetary fights is a very good step. I also like the inclusion of a period for public input, although I feel that this is a point where the proposal as described should go further, mandating not just a public input period but direct, in-depth discussions with the tribes. Any policy should be drafted with the input of the public and particularly the Native population. Otherwise, I feel that it will simply be another imperialist policy imposed from on-high, ostensibly "for their own good".

So yeah, its a work in progress, but I think that the policy proposal as currently described would be a net positive.

[Darth Yan]

If constitutional guarantees, international treaties, and the cultivation of a national spirit that emphasises justice and the rule of law is impossible, then we’re all fucked anyway. And no - Broomstick really didn’t. If you read the four posts I pointed her to (again, so much for the ‘carefully read all the posts’ nonsense...) you’ll see a number of points made she in no way addressed and examples she raised again without the slightest acknowledgment they’d already been discussed.

If you’re going to bow out and concede, bow out and concede.

There are always going to be unethical shitheads. And going back to the wolves and sheep analogy.....natives are 2% of the pop. Unless restrictionsyiud refuse to are placed the majority WILL swamp then out. You also didn’t acknowledge that in some cases tribal conflicts were basically suppressed. Even if a treaty were reached not everyone would agree to honor it.

Also the idea that white colonialism is unique is horseshit. The Qing Chinese wiped out 80% of the Dzungar Mongolians and than settled the land with Chinese people. That is pretty much what the white colonialists did to the natives but you’d refuse to see it that way. The doctrine of discovery is basically a prettying up of the real reason lands were stolen; greed and bigotry

So no. What you and Straha are doing is arguing that the US is uniquely evil (Straha says the us is fundamentally racist and thinks racism is evil so it’s a natural conclusion. That you think dissolving the us is the only real way implies you agree) and must be dissolved.

While I do think the bundajeeling thing is weird Broomstick has more knowledge about the situation I. The US than Straha and Loomer, who have a hatred towards the US.

Before I actively write up a post responding to this, I'm going to ask you something. Are you prepared to engage in a full and frank debate, in good faith, as opposed to the kind of come and go sniping you've so far focused on? The condition of the thread's return was an end to the shitposting, so if the answer is no, I think it's probably best that we simply ignore one another going forward. If the answer is yes, I'm happy to engage in that debate. I just don't really want to encourage further nonsense.

Frankly I’ve got a lot of other stuff in my life (looking for a job, making my new appartment livable) so we probably should ignore each other

[Straha]

So, Loomer has addressed this post already, I thought there might be a couple things to add:

I'm dropping the subject of whether or not the treatment of indigenous people in Australia is genocide or not. I had a response to your comments on that in mind but preparing it led me to do some research into the actual numbers involved and I am now switching between horror and denial and neither emotion is conductive to a rational discussion. If you know of a good research paper that would demonstrate that 10 out of every 11 removals of indigenous children from their parents custody are unjustified I would be interested in seeing it.

If you're interested in this in an American context, Ward Churchill's book on the Indian Boarding School system is fascinating. It was only in 1979 that Native parents were given control over their children that trumped external influence, and that Native Nations were recognized as having an interest in the welfare of children. That law is currently under attack by the Goldwater Institute, funded primarily by christian fundamentalists who want to adopt Indian children and raise them as christians.

3) History, true justice involves right relationship and relationships spread through time, so a truly just relationship must be just over its entire length. Two reciprocal injustices (as Straha suggested with the idea of weighting African American votes as 20) do not make justice, often they actually move us further from it.

Two questions on this:

1. Why do you think my proposal represents an injustice?

2. How do you provide justice for people who have had their voice suppressed in a democracy? Given that governments are supposed to represent the will-of-the-people, and laws and policies enacted by governments become the basis for future laws and policies, how do you provide a justice that is both forward facing in intent and retroactive in content?

1) If conquest requires correction how do you determine who is the just owner of any part of Europe? Something like 3000 years of written history records a lot of conquest and the heirs in the first cases are impossible to identify.

No one is taking a position about conquest in this thread. Conquest did not take place with regard to Native Folk in the United States. The Discovery Doctrine and the concept of Terra Nullis meant that there could be no conquest of a people because, in a real sense, there were no people, legally speaking, to conquer in North America when Europeans arrived.

This is important because in European law (and pretty much every other legal system as well), conquest had legal frameworks that controlled what conquerors could do. In other words, the people who were conquered had rights that they could enforce in courts. Tied to that, because conquest recognized pre-existing legal and political structures, continuity of law and ownership was often preserved. Effie pointed out somewhere in this thread about how Aztec people (and later the Inca) were able to use this concept to sue in Spanish courts for their rights.

The U.S. has actually dealt with conquest, and did so early in its history. Both during the Revolutionary War, where the revolutionary government took over loyalist states and cities, and the Mexican-American War. Both times legal continuity in terms of land ownership, contracts, etc. was maintained. Crucially, citizenship and access to courts was granted in both cases, with Mexicans in conquered territory being given the option to become American citizens. And it was understood that the Army during the conquest and the national government post-conquest had an obligation to respect and protect the lives of civilians.

None of those things happened with Native Americans because they were never recognized as a conquered people. Indeed, from the outset of American law, they were never recognized as separate nations but instead as domestic dependent nations, which is a phrase that makes no sense especially in the context of nations with whom the USA ratified treaties. Yet, it forms the basis of a ripe part of American jurisprudence. (If you ever want to see deeply frustrated judicial opinions, read Supreme Court cases about Native Law. Every other one involves a justice on either side complaining about how precedent towards Native Americans makes no sense and is deeply damaging for both Natives and the United States. But, they also recognize that there's no way to fix the contradictions without overturning massive amounts of precedent. You can almost hear the justices weeping.)

[loomer]

Time for another general post...

This (the distinction between conquest and colonization on the legal grounds of the occupiers) is also why, despite the reality of frontier wars, terms like 'settler-colonial' aren't just euphemisms as has been suggested elsewhere, or attempts to 'pretty up' what happened (if anything, people who know what said terms involves know it's shorthand for one of the most atrocious human rights abuses in human history - the exact opposite of a pleasant euphemism). They're necessary to capture the exact nature of what took place and why it differs from a standard 'Germany invades France to retake the Rhineland' scenario - tools of more honesty, rather than less. Settler-colonial dispossessions simply cannot be understood in the ordinary context of conquest or even non-settler colonialism because they have fundamentally different basic justifications, assumptions, and outcomes. This requires us to acknowledge both the inherent violence of the frontier wars and genocide involved in the process while also drawing a line between said violence and ordinary warfare, and to examine those different justifications and motives more closely rather than less.

Australia is, once again, a particularly special example of that, as by the time our frontier wars were raging in full force the British Government had changed gears a little and it was no longer considered acceptable by London society to murder everyone and take their shit (unless they're Irish, I suppose.) I'm fairly sure this is part of why we're where the field of settler-colonial studies really came into its own - our frontier wars and settlement period (settlement being both an event and a structure in settler-colonial theory - an event and the structures of oppression and dispossession necessary to perpetuate that settlement's 'legitimacy' and stability over time) are only just out of living memory now, were at the highest ebb of refinement of the settler-colonial model (thus drawing on vast amounts of experience accumulated worldwide in how to best 'manage' Indigenous peoples who inconveniently hold the land you want to farm on), and left vast swathes of poorly concealed evidence because Australia was a surprisingly literate place for a prison colony. Because of the change in gears in London we wound up with this situation where the colonial government is actively involved in deceiving the mother colony about conditions on the ground and euphemistically referring to a genocide as mere 'disruptions' and 'driving them away from farms', because the nature of the settler-colonial project as a settler-colonial project requires the genocide and displacement of the Indigenous inhabitants of the land whether the mother colony approves or not, so we have a historical record rife with doubletalk and bullshitting that actively tried to hide the facts of the ongoing genocide.

The alternative to settler-colonialism in colonization (and which Australia may have wound up with, had the repeated orders of various governors and bigwigs in England not been ignored by the local forces and governors) gives you a more conventional colonial setup, which doesn't require this same genocide and displacement, merely subjugation and exploitation - still bad, but at least it has explicit room for the continuation of the colonized as subaltern peoples, permitted to keep their lives, cultures, families, and languages all more or less intact. This is why a line must be drawn between settler-colonialism and regular colonialism - only the former necessarily requires the death, dispossession, and destruction of the colonized peoples in their totality. Other colonialism requires it in part (deaths to keep the order and acquire the territory, dispossession of wealth through exploitation and the seizure of prime land sporadically for the construction of infrastructure, rewards for civil servants, etc) but prefers to keep the colonized peoples alive as labour and human capital, and indeed, often directly cultivates a fascination with the cultures, languages, and religions of the colonized peoples - just consider the way the British Empire took to elements of Indian cultures with great delight.

[MarxII]

A quick reading list:

Thanks. I'll keep these in mind when next I'm out harvesting books.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by 'buy-in' in reference to the Wilderson books?

No technical phrase is ever completely innocuous. They will always have at least some baggage from both the people who framed them and the intellectual millieu from which they emerge. They all have clear indisputable meaning and are designed for ease of use in discussion though.

You don't think these terms have any ambiguity within the academic community, or any legitimate capacity to be misunderstood without it?

Is it important to signify the intellectual framework you use to describe the world? Yes. It vastly improves reading, it's academically honest, and it improves the writing process. The intellectual dishonesty would come from trying to reframe the works of people like Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard, Heidegger, etc. in your own words without giving them the intellectual credit for the work they did. And if you're going to give them that credit why not use their terminology for both purposes of precision and easy recognition for readers who either come from that background or who may only be reading sections of your work?

That sounds fair, but I have to question whether this scrupulous fidelity to previous terminology necessarily improves reading or precision. As a sort of philosophical etymology I can certainly see the merits, but there does seem to be a potential for misunderstanding as well.

So, to use Baudrillard's book as an example, there are three reasons why he uses the title the way he does:

First, it's an allusion to a French play. I've never seen the play, or read it, but it was apparently quite popular. Other authors will do similar things to draw connections between their own work and famous works which they want readers to think about when engaging (e.g. Peter Sloterdijk, a favorite philosopher of mine, wrote a book called Critique of Cynical Reason which is a straight up Kant allusion, and a book Rage and Time which in the German is clearly a reference to Heidegger's Being and Time.)

Second, one of the arguments Baudrillard makes is that there was no 'war', per se. It was a massacre of a weaker power by a far far stronger power.

Third, Baudrillard's main thrust is that in the information age the ideas we interact with are no longer necessarily connected to what we think they represent. (Take everything that comes after this with the knowledge that while I think Baudrillard is a very smart philosopher I also think he's a troll and fundamentally wrong about a lot of his premises. That may show through in some of the things I say about him here.) In the context of the Gulf War there was, for the first time, so much information to be had about everything that was happening both in the media and in the context of the military commanders that no one could reasonably claim to understand it all. Nor could someone claim to have understood and synthesized all the information available about the event. Ergo, Baudrillard continues, everyone was interacting with a concept that represented a simulacra of the conflict, a stand-in. (He explores these concepts further in Simulacra and Simulation, another famous book by him that makes a cameo in the Matrix.) As such there was no singular 'Gulf War' but many many 'Gulf Wars', and he warned that the future would represent a continued fracturing of knowledge in ways that would shape conflict and society. Given the result of the 'War on Terror' and the media landscape in the United States, I don't think he was wrong in some of what he had to say.

And, yes, that one-star review isn't an answer, but it remains fucking hilarious.

Well, I do thank you for laying that out. I must admit in spite of myself that if I ran across this text at a reasonable price I'd be tempted to follow the rabbit and see if the text in detail puts a more convincing spin on his choice of title (and overall thesis; I'm assuming this too is a choice of words we are taking literally, as with the larger terminology we've been discussing(?)). But with that said, I'll have to admit as well that I'm not seeing much to convince me that the argument Baudrillard makes is pretty damned unconvincing, and the choice of words with which he describes or at least headlines it does little to clarify meaning and comes off like an obnoxious form of (proto-?) clickbait.

Reason 1 is a literary reference, which is not offensive or anything, but I don't think helps the argument for clear terminology and arguments in the field. Reason 2 is to my mind fairly weak. I can see where he's coming from, but it doesn't justify staking the claim (or claiming the attention) it purports to, and I think does the armed forces of a Iraq a certain disservice. Reason 3 has some more meat on it, and I hope it's the one he spends the most ink on. But again, it doesn't rise to the level he's advertising and would frankly benefit from decoupling itself from the eye-grabber on the cover.

So, this is one of those instances where understanding the background makes a difference. Wilderson absolutely means for people to take the concept of libidinal desire literally. But, he means it in a Lacanian sense of how desire functions and is shaped. I don't want to go to deep down that rabbit hole for a bunch of reasons, partly being that I think Lacan is a jackass and the less time I spend thinking about him the better. (Lacanians, though, are fucking great fun to hang around with.) But Lacan thinks that desire shapes how we want to imagine the world. A summary of Wilderson's argument can be made like this: "The Structure of Whiteness creates a world wherein people who are invested in it imagine an unruly Black mass that must be suppressed to maintain order. Ergo, White folk who are part of this order find the suppression of Black folk to be cathartic."

If you want to see this in action, look at the number of times White folk call the police on black kids in public spaces, or the defenses offered in the killing of Tamir Rice.

Okay. Now, we can discuss the merits of Wilderson's argument all day long, but I understand it as you've summarized just fine. Only I don't see the libidinal aspect, which we are meant to take literally, but also in the style of Lacan. Notwithstanding the good company on offer from his disciples, how does the catharsis certain white people feel in suppressing black people rise to the level of literally libidinal?

So, let's start as a sort of baseline question: If Critical Race Theory is the intellectual examination of how race plays a role in society and structures our government, thoughts, and actions, how are we to pass meaningful judgment on Racism, remedies for racism, and the continuation of racist traditions without at least a grounding in Critical Race Theory?

Let me bat one back: are we using Critical Race Theory as a term and field synonymous with race studies overall? When I hear the term Critical Race Theory I tend to think of something somewhat narrower than what you've described, but I could be off.

I don't think anyone is expecting people to defer to theorists. I think people are expecting that if you're going to come into a thread guns blazing and declare that the United States isn't fundamentally racist and that its treating of natives isn't genocidal that you have done at least some background reading on racism, native folk, and genocide. The people who have most strongly staked out those claims have also made very clear that they have done little to no reading on these subjects and have even refused to read posts in this thread because they think their assertions trump (hah) that sort of intellectual rigeur. I think that's intellectual laziness, hubris, and profoundly problematic politics and I think it's good to call it out.

I'll refrain from weighing in on the other strands of conversation, but what you outline here seems fair enough to me. Although we might spin out some more discussion on what exactly counts as background reading on the topic.

[Straha]

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by 'buy-in' in reference to the Wilderson books?

I mean it's not the easiest read and some of it is esoteric and/or based in film criticism, so you have to be willing to get through that stuff to get to the main theses of the book.

You don't think these terms have any ambiguity within the academic community, or any legitimate capacity to be misunderstood without it?

Not really, and there's capacity to be misunderstood but more by poor readers.

Again, to flip this, are there examples you're thinking of?

That sounds fair, but I have to question whether this scrupulous fidelity to previous terminology necessarily improves reading or precision. As a sort of philosophical etymology I can certainly see the merits, but there does seem to be a potential for misunderstanding as well.

There are potential misunderstandings from readers who don't have a background in the material, but those aren't the intended readers of the texts.

Well, I do thank you for laying that out. I must admit in spite of myself that if I ran across this text at a reasonable price I'd be tempted to follow the rabbit and see if the text in detail puts a more convincing spin on his choice of title (and overall thesis; I'm assuming this too is a choice of words we are taking literally, as with the larger terminology we've been discussing(?)). But with that said, I'll have to admit as well that I'm not seeing much to convince me that the argument Baudrillard makes is pretty damned unconvincing, and the choice of words with which he describes or at least headlines it does little to clarify meaning and comes off like an obnoxious form of (proto-?) clickbait.

Reason 1 is a literary reference, which is not offensive or anything, but I don't think helps the argument for clear terminology and arguments in the field. Reason 2 is to my mind fairly weak. I can see where he's coming from, but it doesn't justify staking the claim (or claiming the attention) it purports to, and I think does the armed forces of a Iraq a certain disservice. Reason 3 has some more meat on it, and I hope it's the one he spends the most ink on. But again, it doesn't rise to the level he's advertising and would frankly benefit from decoupling itself from the eye-grabber on the cover.

It takes a very particular kind of person, who has very much drunk the kool-aid, to say that Baudrillard isn't something of an academic troll, and that was a role I feel Baudrillard reveled in. But, at the same time, his terminology is purposeful and his analysis is well worth engaging with and thought-provoking. If you're interested in the book I'll gladly send you a digital copy, but otherwise, don't bother.

I'll add my favorite rebuttal to Baudrillard, fittingly in meme form:

Okay. Now, we can discuss the merits of Wilderson's argument all day long, but I understand it as you've summarized just fine. Only I don't see the libidinal aspect, which we are meant to take literally, but also in the style of Lacan. Notwithstanding the good company on offer from his disciples, how does the catharsis certain white people feel in suppressing black people rise to the level of literally libidinal?

Because 'libidinal' in the Lacanian/Freudian sense doesn't mean libido as simply sexual desire a la popular usage of the term. This is, to go back a few steps, why it's important to use the terminology and cite the intellectual history of the phrases being used. Because, in this context it's used to discuss the unconscious structure that creates all desires and shapes the human interaction with the world around it, and comes from a rich intellectual history that goes very deep on how that operates.

I'll be honest with you, I don't want to write an intro to Lacan because that's not worth my time, and the less Lacan I teach the happier I feel. (Or is it merely how I think I'll feel? asks the Lacanians.) This is a decent introduction to Lacan's imagining of desire if you're so inclined to read.

Let me bat one back: are we using Critical Race Theory as a term and field synonymous with race studies overall? When I hear the term Critical Race Theory I tend to think of something somewhat narrower than what you've described, but I could be off.

I kind of am. Which, perhaps, flashes my intellectual inclination on these questions. But, the field has grown and been accepted to the point where just about any serious academic author on race studies these days is going to imagine themselves as operating at least partially in that realm. And CRT has been so successful since the 80s that even those who imagine themselves as operating in very different fields are still going to have an intellectual debt to authors inside the field, for instance even though the American legal system and its lawyers are often very hostile to the questions that CRT raises, nobody can deny that Derrick Bell is one of the most serious influences on how American jurisprudence has advanced on questions of race.

I'd also add that anyone who would imagine themselves to be knowledgeable on the question of racism in the modern era (by which I mean has engaged in a serious programmatic study of the issue) is going to have to recognize the concepts and have thoughts on them to share. To not would be like having someone who claims to be interested in particle physics but has no thoughts on quantum mechanics.