Theorizing race and settler colonialism within U.S. sociology

Abstract

Settler colonialism expands race and racism beyond ideological perspectives and reveals the links between historical and contemporary racialized social relations and practices–the racial structure–of American society. In this article, we define settler colonialism, highlight sociological scholarship that uses settler colonial theoretical frameworks, and explore ways in which this work enriches, intersects with, complicates, and contradicts key assumptions within the sociology of race.

Race, Ethnicity, and Twenty‐First Century Rural Sociological Imaginings: A Special Issue Introduction*

“…While scholars have explored intersections between rural imaginaries and environmental injustices (Ashwood and MacTavish 2016), less is known about the coconstitutive relationships between race, rurality, and environment (for an exception, see Bailey, Barlow, and Dyer 2019). At the same time, scholars of settler colonialism argue that environmental domination cannot be understood apart from racialized control of populations (McKay et al 2020;Murphy 2020;In press). As Norgaard, Reed, and Bacon (2018) note, environmental manipulation is achieved through racial projects involving state-led processes of resource redistribution that undermine Native economic and cultural practices.…”

“…However, popular imaginings of racialized spaces, and in particular rural America as a primarily "white space" (Kimmel and Ferber 2000;Metzl 2019), have consistently ignored the dynamics of race, space and rurality, including the historical presence of non-white peoples and the complexities of settler colonial histories. Native American, Latinx, and African American communities have long maintained an active and vital presence in rural America, despite enduring patterns of exclusion, displacement, and disenfranchisement (Brown 2018;Chavez 2005;McKay, Vinyeta and Norgaard 2020;Smith 1991;Ward 1998). Similarly, popular debate over non-white immigrants obscures how race-making in the rural United States has been tied to global projects of expansion and state-led labor migration, in which U.S. national identity was defined in opposition to a foreign or non-white "other" (Geisler 2014;Mize 2006).…”

The racial and colonial dimensions of gentrification

“…Settler colonialism can be understood as a colonial social structure with the foundational project of building a “new world” through the elimination and dispossession of Indigenous people by invading populations (McKay et al, 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 2006). Paradoxically, these populations seek to build a settler state which simultaneously seeks Indigenous elimination and appropriates Indigenous culture in order to “indigenize” settlers and legitimize settler claims to the land (Tuck & Yang, 2012: Veracini, 2010, 2011).…”

“…These settler claims to the land and the dispossession of Indigenous land are carried out by physical violence and legitimized by an “ideology of improvement,” articulated through the construction of epistemological and legal frameworks which support settlers putting land to a “higher use” for commercial trade while denying Indigenous forms of sovereignty and relations to the land (Bhandar, 2018) through discursively fixing Indigenous people in place and relegating them to the past within the worldview of Eurocentric modernity (Byrd, 2011; Moreton‐Robinson, 2015). Thus, central to settler colonialism and decolonial politics against this structure is a struggle over the land (Coulthard, 2014; McKay et al, 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2012).…”

“…Thus, the specifically colonial and racial foundations of gentrifying working-class spaces are by and large not theorized in this literature. This is likely shaped in part by a specific theorization on the connection between colonialism and racism (with a specific focus on urban struggles), stemming from critical Black theorists, fading away in the US sociology in recent decades (Pinderhughes, 2010;Steinberg, 2007)-even while earlier work examined this connection (Blauner, 1969(Blauner, , 1972-and a general erasure from sociology of Indigenous peoples and epistemologies which have historically engaged with an analytics of colonialism, land, and place (see McKay, Vinyeta, & Norgaard, 2020). Meanwhile, a rich tradition of theorizing on colonialism has continued to flourish largely in the humanities (see Go, 2016) and also in anthropology (Asad, 1973;Escobar, 2008;Gupta & Ferguson, 1997b;Scott, 1995;Stoler, 2002;Trouillot, 2003), while remaining relatively separate from sociology.…”