Citizenship has nearly always protected white Americans, served their needs, and promoted their priorities. Of course they’re afraid of losing their safety net.

Unsplash/Steve Harvey

Update: On June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the Trump Administration’s Muslim ban.

I think most people who pay regular attention to U.S. current events knew the travel ban was coming eventually. Some predicted the impending ban during Trump’s campaign trail, understanding his various brazen promises as actionable statements, and his supporters as a litmus for the country’s future. Still others recognized the possibility more than a decade ago, realizing that the shockwaves of 9/11 would resonate for generations to come.

Still, when nearly one year ago today, Trump signed his first executive order essentially blocking an entire religion, it shook the nation. Had it not been challenged by multiple judges, the order would’ve banned entry from seven majority-Muslim countries across the Arab region for 90 days, in addition to suspending the entire U.S. refugee admissions system for 120 days.

Since then, the Trump administration has soldiered on in hate, signing a second executive order last March, also challenged in the courts and eventually kicked up to the Supreme Court, which opted to temporarily revive part of Trump’s original order; and then signing a third executive order — because why not? — this time declaring permanent travel restrictions on eight countries, which was temporarily halted by a federal judge in Hawaii.

I’m A Refugee From A Banned Country— This Is My American Story

Never one to pass up the opportunity to be as xenophobic as possible, the president then used the October attack in New York’s lower Manhattan neighborhood to call not for more extensive travel bans, but for tighter immigration restrictions, saying that he wanted to “step up our already Extreme Vetting Program,” and push for “Merit Based immigration.”

There’s already an extensive entry process for refugees and immigrants in place in the U.S., and the national security rationale for increasing travel restrictions has been excellently debunked by the Washington Post.

So why the extreme (and targeted) urgency in regulating our borders? Why the aggressive panic and guardianship over citizenship? The answer, one year ago as today, is rooted in a troubling history and racist brand of nationalist identity too few of us are willing to face.

White America, regardless of class or geography, has always been primarily comprised of enthusiastic flag-waving patriots, inciting a kind of nationalism that appears harmless and uncomplicated. American citizenship was first built to acknowledge and prioritize white bodies as legitimate, as protectable, as worthy of state recognition — so for White Americans, citizenship appears uncontentious. Their sense of belonging and livelihood are not at odds with the American state.

Americans have long been taught to follow a self-consolidating model of understanding their own identity: We know best what American-ness is, only after defining what American-ness is not.

Citizenship — the sister-sentiment to American-ness — acts as the legal marker of belonging that supposedly precedes the American Dream. In a nation that totes its “land of immigrants” moniker so proudly, citizenship is the first, tangible piece of legal recognition the government can give to a person. We’re taught to be grateful for it, and for the shape of American belonging with all its flimsy, valuable luxuries — safety, protection, visibility, access to the economy, to democracy, and more.

We’re also taught to be intensely defensive of it, willing to kill others and be killed over it. This, we learn to understand, is the definition of patriotism and honorable sacrifice.

Although this violent shade of patriotic pride has been simmering for some time, our current U.S. President and his associates are actively fueling a newer kind of nation-based extremism that requires attention. With an administration so openly aggressive and, at times, willfully antagonistic, the United States’ traditional cupcakes-and-barbecue July 4th patriotism has since been warped into a forceful nationalism. And like American-ness, nationalism and citizenship go hand-in-hand. If citizenship is the legal identifier, then American-ness is the spectrum by which it’s measured, and nationalism provides the geographic and cultural boundaries by which it is confined.

We know the United States, built on stolen land and with stolen labor, was the hardened dream of (lost) empire-minded, “god-fearing,” white supremacists, who constructed their governments and institutions according to that same archetype. In order for us to gain citizenship today, to legally belong to a nation-state established by men such as those, we’re compared to the American archetype relentlessly. If we don’t match up, as black folks, brown folks (immigrant or otherwise), and Muslim people of color do not, then access to the benefits of citizenship are limited. Traditional staples of democracy like voting, public education, and equal access to the economy are all restricted.

Americans have long been taught to follow a self-consolidating model of understanding their own identity.

Even the right to protest, a supposed bedrock of this country’s history, is inaccessible for people of color. The countless NFL players who took a knee in protest back in mid-September (following Colin Kaepernick’s public protest, and a string of protests by WNBA players before that) were criticized by the usual #BlackLivesMatter trolls and naysayers, alongside claims of being unpatriotic. People across the country, President Trump included, fervently argued that kneeling during the national anthem was un-American. On the flip side, some #TakeAKnee supporters argued the exact opposite: that acts of protests were not only fundamentally American, but evidence that people loved their country enough to fight for a better version. But you know the drill — protesting taxes (by wasting copious amounts of tea) is admirable; protesting systemic violence against black people? Less so.

Loving your country is one thing; being recognized as a full citizen by your country is another.

In the midst of Trump’s presidency, citizenship is especially contentious. We’ve watched the legal moniker rapidly develop into a weaponized ideal eagerly leveraged against people who don’t fit the American archetype. The anti-Muslim fear that ballooned after 9/11, continued throughout our wars in the Middle East, and became bloated during Trump’s presidential campaign fed an intense need in white America. Trump’s sizeable base is anxious and desperate, overwhelmed by the coming dissolution of American-ness, of nationalism, of citizenship — as they understand it. Their readiness to justify racist aggression is palpable. Their willingness to elect a presidential candidate who regards Nazis as “very fine people” is telling. Even aside from Trump’s base, there are millions of white Americans unwilling to look critically at what the American flag represents to other people domestic and abroad. To consider and speak out against what American citizenship has cost entire countries. To openly condemn and call for the end of the violence it has justified.

More Than Just Sanctuary, Migrants Need Social Citizenship

But citizenship has nearly always protected white Americans, served their needs, and promoted their priorities. Of course they’re afraid of losing their safety net. Of course they’ll go to great lengths to protect it. And so, defending the borders of American citizenship comes in the shape of violent rhetoric, aggressive wars and occupations, deportations, violent border patrol police, travel bans, and more. Foreign populations are subjected to violence and harassment under the guise of national security, patriotism, freedom, or whatever else. This is the cost of American safety, the price of promoting nationalism based on a white supremacist view of both the United States and the world at large. This is what happens when you wield American citizenship like a weapon against people that white supremacy identifies as a threat to its own power.

But for those of us who are permanent U.S. citizens, American “citizenship” poses new questions: Are we willing to dismantle a fundamental part of our identity to protect those it would be wielded against? Are we willing to challenge a thing that feels safe if it means protecting others?

As a person committed to uprooting the white supremacist, militaristic, capitalist violence leveled against my people and those I’m in solidarity with, I’ve found that parasitic ideals like American-ness, nationalism, and citizenship are no longer things I’m deeply invested in. I’ve spent the last three July 4th holidays warding off firework-induced panic attacks, still triggered by memories of tear gas cannons exploding across the St. Louis sky. I’ve watched American-ness become the banner for both treasonous white supremacists, and well-meaning but revisionist liberals managing to find freedom and democracy where I only see a young nation-state already falling apart at the seams. I am, as Danez Smith writes, “sick of calling your recklessness the law,” and distrustful of any “peace” or “order” that displaces accountability.

Are we willing to dismantle a fundamental part of our identity to protect those it would be wielded against?

I am troubled by a citizenship that renders the indigenous people of this land invisible. A citizenship that only has the capacity to humanize those who fit squarely within its boundaries. I am physically, cognitively, and politically at odds with a kind of citizenship that requires the destruction of other people of color in other plundered, destabilized corners of the world in order to keep me…“safe.”

If we know that citizenship and American-ness, as it currently exists and functions, requires the disenfranchisement of certain people in order for the construct to remain in tact, then what worth is it to us, really?

Building a new world calls on those of us intent on bringing it forth, to take more critical risks. To take the time and care to sharpen our own perspectives, imagine more broadly, and redefine the traditional details of our world in a less violent, less exploitative, more liberatory way. Part of that radical intellectual work involves pushing ourselves to reconsider things many of us have taken for granted, or previously assumed were unshakeable — things like safety, citizenship, statehood, and freedom. The Muslim Ban is political fallout from a kind of American nationalism that depends on rigid, white supremacist notions of each of these details in order to exist. It’s time to shake the bricks loose, destabilize our assumptions, and usher in something new.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/we-cant-talk-about-standing-rock-without-talking-about-cultural-appropriation-5c5a8c92bc7d/ Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:19:35 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=5453 Read more]]>

We Can’t Talk About Standing Rock Without Talking About Cultural Appropriation

The Standing Rock fight isn’t just about the Dakota Access Pipeline. It’s also about cultural theft, colonialism, and white supremacy.

WikiCommons/Rob87438

Despite the bitter cold, thousands of First Nations people, environmentalists and others gathered in D.C. on Friday, March 10, to fight for native sovereignty, and protect the rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe who own the land the Dakota Access Pipeline would cut across. The #NativeNationsRise march and rally come roughly a month after the Standing Rock camp in North Dakota was forcibly removed, and they prove that although the protest stronghold is not longer there, the resistance is far from over. Four days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he signed executive orders that nullified Obama’s temporary construction halt last fall. Now, indigenous Water Protectors and their accomplices have brought the fight to him.

The environmental concerns regarding the pipeline are obvious: Part of the Dakota Access Pipeline would be built beneath the Missouri River reservoir, threatening the drinking water supply of the entire Standing Rock Indian Reservation. In the last year alone, there have been reports of multiple oil leaks from pipelines located in cities across the country. One leak, spilling more than 176,000 gallons of crude oil into a hillside and a river tributary, happened a mere 150 miles away from the Standing Rock protests. But taking an environmentalist approach to the conflict is a cop-out, and considering the urgency of this moment, we cannot afford to settle for a surface-level analysis of the powers at play. The water protectors and allied protesters at Standing Rock aren’t just fighting against the DAPL. They’re fighting against white supremacy, resisting its centuries-old colonialist and capitalist impulses.

The water protectors and allied protesters at Standing Rock aren’t just fighting against the DAPL. They’re fighting against white supremacy.

At the core of the injustice is the same white supremacist nationalist arrogance that prompted early American colonialists to rationalize the displacement and genocide of millions of indigenous people. To be clear, as Kelly Hayes perfectly laid out in an essay re-printed by Truth-Out.org, “This moment is, first and foremost, about Native liberation, Native self-determination and Native survival.”

In order to develop stronger, more effective tactics to combat state-sanctioned white supremacist violence, we have to be willing to deconstruct the sources of its power, beginning with even the seemingly mundane. In the case of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and indigenous liberation more broadly, the question I wrestle with is this: How does cultural appropriation empower white supremacy?

It may seem off-topic, or even superfluous, to discuss cultural appropriation in this politically violent moment. I wince to even mention it; the media space has definitely been saturated with the topic in the past. But cultural appropriation — which I prefer to call cultural theft — is the exact kind of drawn-out cultural violence that makes room for the literal violence we’ve witnessed against the indigenous people at Standing Rock.

Midwives At Standing Rock Aren’t Going Anywhere

Using the more accurate word “theft” helps to highlight the way that cultural colonialism enables physical harm. In the mainstream American imagination, the term “appropriation” has been dulled, often placed alongside less threatening words like “borrowing” or “adopting” or “appreciating.” Cultural theft, however, is a more active term. More importantly, it also implies that the act involves a renegotiation of power, visibility, and more, which is why cultural theft is so harmful to marginalized communities of color in the first place.

If we don’t understand cultural theft as a derivative of white supremacy, then calling out some carefree, trendy lifestyle brand for selling dreamcatchers and Native-inspired accessories on its website quickly becomes an oversimplified argument about cultural ownership. Without a proper analysis, challenging a “bohemian” white girl for wearing a misappropriated native headdress at a music festival will always turn into a reductive, patronizing playground back-and-forth about sharing. But cultural theft is an extension of white supremacist power specifically, not just power in general. It is, at a base level, a white supremacist project.

Cultural theft is an extension of white supremacist power specifically, not just power in general.

Over the last few years, the constant gaslighting by opponents has somehow managed to turn the mainstream narrative about “cultural appropriation” into its own isolated battleground. For those invested in maintaining the status quo, having drawn-out arguments about whether or not something counts as cultural theft is much less threatening than talking about how their team mascot or Halloween costume relates to the genocide of an entire population. People who deliberately debate the significance of cultural theft effectively minimize the issue, forcing the rest of us to expend a ridiculous amount of time and energy on each instance.

Understandably, the whole thing can be emotionally and mentally draining, but the debate about cultural theft takes up more space than it should. In reality, white supremacy is the battleground; cultural theft is the fallout. It’s one very visible and particularly painful symptom of a power imbalance that is both systematic and directional. The minute a people’s attributes are reduced to fodder, substance, material to be culled and used at the whim of a dominant group, power shifts. When we normalize the cultural theft of indigenous traditions, decorations, images, histories, language — the very details that facilitate identity — indigenous people are reinforced as the playthings of white supremacy.

For the Lakota Water Protectors at the Oceti Sakowin resistance camp at Standing Rock, the threat of theft was real and imminent, just as it had been countless other times before across history. After holding the camp for more than 9 months, the Governor of North Dakota and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued an evacuation order, stating that the camp would be forcible removed, and any remaining protesters arrested. But the land that the resistance camps stood on belongs to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, according to the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868. It is literally, legally, their property — making the evacuation order in violation of the treaty rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation.

When we normalize the cultural theft of indigenous traditions, decorations, images, histories, and language , indigenous people are reinforced as the playthings of white supremacy.

The Dakota Access Pipeline, whose construction has continued steadily since Donald Trump’s January order, will travel beneath Lake Oahe, putting the entire Tribe’s water supply at risk. And according to a U.S. Internal Department memo written by Hilary C. Tompkins, the Interior Department’s top lawyer, the pipeline’s route also infringes on the Sioux Tribe’s federally protected hunting and fishing rights. “The Corps’ reasons for rejecting the Bismarck route also largely apply to concerns regarding tribal treaty rights associated with the Lake Oahe route. As such, if the Bismarck route is impermissible, the Lake Oahe route should be equally impermissible,” Tomkins writes.

The actual land that the pipeline would cut across belonged to the Sioux Tribe as of the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, but was supposedly ceded in the 1868 Treaty. The legitimacy of that Treaty, though, should be called into question, considering several Sioux chiefs didn’t sign the document, and at least one chief who did sign claimed he was misled, according to the Huffington Post. Since the United States has a long history of misleading, manipulating, and deceiving indigenous leadership into signing Treaties and documents, this should come to no surprise.

We’re witnessing the contemporary iteration of American colonialism — now armed with rubber bullets and tear gas, but perpetuating the same anti-indigenous aggression as before. The forced removal and displacement of indigenous peoples is both a historical and contemporary violence. The violation of the Treaty rights of indigenous people is an occurrence of both the past and the present. The restriction of resources and the violent theft of land first belonging to the First Nations people is a horror that has continued for centuries. If cultural theft is a child, then domestic colonization — this country’s history of indigenous erasure and genocide — is its proud mother.

If cultural theft is a child, then domestic colonization — this country’s history of indigenous erasure and genocide — is its proud mother.

White supremacy is not a simple thing. Its multiple branches and varied faces all serve to bolster its power, strengthen its reach, and ensure its survival. Cultural theft is a deceptively normalized, sinister part of that. If we develop the narrative that cultural theft is a symptom of white supremacy, then perhaps a sense of urgency will alter the mainstream conversation around “cultural appropriation,” revealing just how far-reaching and many-sided white supremacy actually is. And of course, the better we can understand white supremacy — its shape, its habits, its strategies and derivatives — the more effectively we can challenge it and threaten its stability.

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