Anti-Blackness

In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engagements with curriculum and pedagogy; complicating understandings of emergent curriculum as simply following the lead of children. The particular interruptive orientations that the authors bring forward include: possibilities for responding to and cultivating the conditions for emergence in ways that disrupt the managerial concerns of everyday practice; troubling the co-optation of emergence by human-centred consumptive practice; and unsettling emergence in conversation with settler colonialism and antiblackness in the places and spaces of early childhood education.

Bringing together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic supremacy, this book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts. By highlighting the counterstories of Black students, Baker-Bell demonstrates how traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm, internalized linguistic racism, or consequences these approaches have on Black students' sense of self and identity. This book presents Anti-Black Linguistic Racism as a framework that explicitly names and richly captures the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization Black Language speakers endure when using their language in schools and in everyday life. To move toward Black linguistic liberation, Baker-Bell introduces a new way forward through Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy, a pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, intellectual, and self-confidence needs of Black students. This volume captures what Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy looks like in classrooms while simultaneously illustrating how theory, research, and practice can operate in tandem in pursuit of linguistic and racial justice.　

A crucial resource for educators, researchers, professors, and graduate students in language and literacy education, writing studies,　sociology of education, sociolinguistics, and critical pedagogy, this book features a range of multimodal examples and practices through instructional maps, charts, artwork, and stories that reflect the urgent need for antiracist language pedagogies in our current social and political climate.　

Purchase the Book Here: https://www.routledge.com/Linguistic-Justice-Black-Language-Literacy-Identity-and-Pedagogy/Baker-Bell/p/book/9781138551022

View the Book Trailer Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmbzPzip4Fs

Contemporary social scientists have detailed how the practice of systematically criminalizing black people has become administratively inseparable from the justification and management of the U.S. policing and penitentiary system. I argue that the ongoing practice of criminalizing intentional action of black agents raises important philosophical challenges for our understanding of how intentional action unfolds in the social sphere. Specifically, is the social uptake of black agents’ actions fundamentally and persistently vulnerable to being criminalized by others and, if so, what are the consequences for philosophical work on intentional action that is taken to be universally applicable to all agents? In this paper, I argue that we should analyze the problem of criminalization of black intentional action as a kind of "racial conflation," or an ongoing conflation of the concepts of “blackness” and “criminality" that transforms, drives, and textures the social meanings that drive intention and intentional action among agents. Unlike formulations of racial bias (such as prejudicial stereotyping and stigma), racial conflation illuminates how the criminalization of black action is not only a problem of how black subjects are treated or conceptualized, but also how criminal action itself is understood. I contend that racial conflation demands a more complex analysis of how “blackness” and “criminality” are woven into the broader social schematic of information, which presents challenges philosophical approaches to intentional action.

Studies indicate that African American men report more personal experiences with discrimination than do African American women. According to the subordinate male target hypothesis, this gender difference reflects an underlying reality in which African American men are the primary targets of anti-Black discrimination. From the perspective of intersectionality theory, African American women and men experience racial discrimination differently; and therefore greater reports of discrimination among African American men might be a result of measurement bias that favors the experiences of African American men vis-à-vis African American women. To assess these perspectives, the authors analyze data from the 1995 Detroit Area Study and the 2001–2003 National Survey of American Life. The authors use multiplegroup confirmatory factor analytic models with latent means and categorical outcomes to observe the degree to which gender bias in measurement accounts for disparities in perceived discrimination among African American women and men. The results show that gender bias in the measures most often used to assess unfair treatment in social surveys is responsible for the gender gap in certain kinds of perceived discrimination among African Americans. Measures of everyday discrimination are mostly gender balanced, but measurement bias is responsible for a large portion of the gap in perceptions of major life discrimination and the entire gap when major life discrimination is attributed to race. The results highlight the importance of intersectionality theory for assessing discrimination, and the authors argue that revisions in the measurement of perceived discrimination are required to better reflect the experiences of African American women.

This article uses a newly developed theoretical concept – the 'uncommodified blackness' image, to accentuate the discursive methods in which the humanness of Africans is denied in subtle and commonplace ways in Australia. In other words, the concept of uncommodified blackness is used in this study to theorise both the racist infrahumanisation and the blatant racist dehumanisation that Africans are subjected to in Australia. An analysis of semi-structured interviews with 11 research participants suggests that, through the image of uncommodified blackness, the participants are viewed by mainstream Australia as dysfunctional and dirty Others who ought to be avoided in public transport. Participants' lived experiences imply that mainstream Australia regards them as outsiders and perpetual refugees who are failing at 'integration'.

In this essay, Roderick L. Carey draws from social-psychological perspectives on mattering to argue that Black boys and young men have yet to achieve comprehensive mattering in social and educational contexts. Positing that Black boys and young men find their social and school lives framed by marginal mattering, which is realized through social and educational practices that criminalize, dismiss, and propel them into school failure, and partial mattering, where only some of their skills and abilities are cultivated and heralded, Carey contends that due to neoliberal reforms and stakeholders' structural incapacities to imagine and do otherwise, educators fail to construct contexts in which Black boys and young men can robustly infer their comprehensive mattering. Thus, educators and researchers miss relational opportunities to support Black boys and young men in imagining alternative lives that compel their fullness of interests, latent talents, and subsequent worth.

As an activist scholar, this themed edition of the Black History Bulletin focused on the " crisis in Black education " is deeply personal to me. My early and late childhood experiences in a home with a mother who was addicted to drugs and a father who was absent inform how I write and think about Black life and death. Therefore, this article will be an examination of schooling for Black youth from low-income families—an intersection between academic scholarship and an autobiographical account. Moreover, I highlight four critical aggressions that contribute to the crisis in Black education: (1) micro interactions between teacher and student within the broader context of macro relationships; (2) reproduction of oppressive systems resulting from anti-Black racist methodology; (3) extermination of the Black subject while maintaining the body for capitalistic exploitation; and (4) securitizing schools and criminalizing Black youth. I surmise that the dialectical nature of schooling exposes Black youth to life and death, and the current dialectical nature must be understood as one of the first steps to address the ongoing crisis.

This article examines visual and textual representation of blackness in contemporary black expressive culture. Its primary objective is to discern what blackness means and looks like when seen from the point of view of contemporary black expressive culture. To assess this, I first, briefly, analyze and interpret blackness. Second, I interrogate how contemporary black practitioners critique European ideas of blackness and mirror the complex multidimensionality of black subjecthood by conducting a formal analysis of two pieces of South African artist Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama – Hail the Dark Lioness series. Third, I explore the relationship between visual and textual imagery and their involvement in discourses on race. My intention is to reveal the role text and images play and have played in shaping the concept, perception, and representation of blackness; the visual effect they have had on the black imagination; and the heavy responsibility placed on black writers and artist...

Salvador is a Black city. Besides being a place mainly inhabited by a population which is racialised as Black, any urban phenomenon in Salvador is inseparable from the complexities and violence typical of the sites of racial encounter. In this article we explore two collaborative experiences that brought together the authors and different grassroots movements around two urban struggles in the city. The first experience unpacks the 30-year conflicts surrounding the Programme of Recuperation of the Historic Centre of Salvador, where thousands of people were evicted to turn a stigmatised Black neighbourhood into a scenario for cultural heritage enjoyment and tourism. The second experience uncovers plans underway to replace the Subúrbio railway with a monorail, a project which will negatively affect several Black neighbourhoods in Salvador and its metropolitan region and hundreds of thousands of Black daily life practices. These serve as just two examples of urban initiatives cyclically carried out by Salvador's elites and official spokespeople which, under the discourse of modernisation, always threaten the improvised ways of inhabiting the Black city. We argue that the urban struggles that we analyse in this article trace a continuity with the historical struggles for the affirmation of Black life within sites of racial violence. For this reason, this article establishes a dialogue between urban studies and Black theory, through ideas of Black city and Black fugitivity.

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

Environmental activist and ardent advocate for children’s rights and well-being, Jamaican laureate of the 2008 Jamaican National Literature awards, Diana McCaulay, published her critically acclaimed debut novel Dog-Heart in 2010. This paper will first focus on the legacy of colonial racism in Jamaica, before addressing the main characters’ quest for identity in a crime-ridden society.

We write to you from somewhere, though as we write we are geographically dispersed. We write as collaborators in the truest sense--committed to one another’s personal, political, poetical, and professional projects. But our collaboration is
contingent because of how we are differently implicated and invested, differently coded, by settler colonialism, Indigenous erasure, and antiblackness.

This article examines visual and textual representation of blackness in contemporary black expressive culture. Its primary objective is to discern what blackness means and looks like when seen from the point of view of contemporary black expressive culture. To assess this, I first, briefly, analyze and interpret blackness. Second, I interrogate how contemporary black practitioners critique European ideas of blackness and mirror the complex multidimensionality of black subjecthood by conducting a formal analysis of two pieces of South African artist Zanele Muholi's Somnyama Ngonyama-Hail the Dark Lioness series. Third, I explore the relationship between visual and textual imagery and their involvement in discourses on race. My intention is to reveal the role text and images play and have played in shaping the concept, perception, and representation of blackness; the visual effect they have had on the black imagination; and the heavy responsibility placed on black writers and arti...

Increasing commodification of progressive language in public discourse over the past four decades has resulted in users’ indexical alignment with anti-racist politics becoming unmoored from expectations of legitimate action toward dismantling white supremacy. In this essay, we describe how this process is enacted through virtue signaling—highlighting one’s morality through the use of language and other signs that invoke progressive sociopolitical values—and the ways it mobilizes the linguistic repertoire of anti-Blackness. Theorizing this behavior provides a framework to locate and confront the mechanisms that maintain white supremacy and the actors who align themselves with it.

This course examines Butler’s use of time travel as a rhetorical device for forcing an encounter between the present and the past. In particular, through analysis of secondary literature on Kindred, we will track the functions of race and gender in the novel and how these categories determine patterns of relation between characters, render logics of power and domination visible, and question the politics of memory. Throughout this course, you will be encouraged to use the novel as a way to critically reflect on and engage with contemporary racial and gender politics in the U.S., especially on the legacies of slavery and anti-blackness.

This article examines visual and textual representation of blackness in contemporary black expressive culture. Its primary objective is to discern what blackness means and looks like when seen from the point of view of contemporary black expressive culture. To assess this, I first, briefly, analyze and interpret blackness. Second, I interrogate how contemporary black practitioners critique European ideas of blackness and mirror the complex multidimensionality of black subjecthood by conducting a formal analysis of two pieces of South African artist Zanele Muholi's Somnyama Ngonyama-Hail the Dark Lioness series. Third, I explore the relationship between visual and textual imagery and their involvement in discourses on race. My intention is to reveal the role text and images play and have played in shaping the concept, perception, and representation of blackness; the visual effect they have had on the black imagination; and the heavy responsibility placed on black writers and artists not only to correct these images but to create images for the collective more often than for themselves.

This introductory essay considers the critical purchase of “relationality” in current scholarly debates in Comparative Ethnic Studies and Comparative Literature. It foregrounds Blackness and/as incommensurability as they are treated in these fields' distinct and overlapping institutional locations, historical developments, and epistemic investments.

A twelfth-century manuscript preserves an English homily known as the
History of the Holy Rood-Tree. In it, the three Rods of Moses perform a number of miracles, including turning the skin of several Ethiopian men and their sons white. The Ethiopian mothers, however, remain Black. The History is perhaps the earliest surviving English text to create a hierarchy of skin colour, and to explicitly state that white skin is more beautiful than black skin. This article frames the History as an early chapter in
the history of European depictions of Blackness. The Ethiopians know and respect God, and the History represents their Blackness as abject yet affording insight into God that white characters do not have. At the same time, they implicitly desire whiteness, in an uncanny precursor to the internalized feelings of inferiority that Frantz Fanon described for modern Black people. The History reminds us of the truth of Fanon’s claims that the European past holds modern Black people prisoner, and that it is important to write long histories of race and anti-Blackness.

A review of the literature on alternate pathways of certification and anti-racist curriculum revealed that the alternate pathways of certification requirements vary from the traditional pathways of certification that often require a course on multicultural education or diversity. In Arizona, there are 15 main alternate teacher preparation programs. Due to the federal policy of No Child Policy and teacher shortages (primarily in Arizona), there has been an increase in the number of teachers certified through an alternative method (Boe, Cook, & Suderland, 2008; McLeskey & Billingsly, 2008). The advantage for the school districts and the preservice teachers is that alternate pathways is a cheap and quick way into the classroom. But for students, especially Black students, these preservice teachers are not introduced to anti-racist curriculum and pedagogies that help address racism and combat anti-Blackness. These alternate pathways reflect neoliberal approaches to solving public problems by sidestepping racism and adopting market driven approaches to a solution.

This article introduces a new term, “anti‐blackness supremacy,” in order to supplement existing theological discourse about the ethical life of racism. To a much greater extent than the terms “racism, ” “white privilege” or even “white supremacy,” this term also better positions scholars to address what I identify as the two most pressing problems in anti‐racist discourse: first, the inability to diagnose the relation between classism and racism without reducing one into the other; and second, the tendency to treat racism as a monolithic evil that falls upon all people of color equally and in the same way. The former error has distorted political discourse for decades; the latter misconception intensifies as the United States undergoes demographic shifts in the wake of immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Both of these errors arise from a pervasive misunderstanding of the slave regime that has set our current racial system in motion. In truth, slavery primarily represents not a mechanism of profit extraction, but a relation of a unique type of power. The term “anti‐blackness supremacy,” I contend, corrects both of these misperceptions, affirming both the singularity of black oppression and its fundamental connection to enslaving power. In so doing, it enables ethicists to disarm an older racial foe while thwarting the ascension of a newer one.

A lethal infectious disease is among us. Alarmingly, the disease burden's distribution is strikingly unequal. White subjects have a far greater viral load, particularly because of noncompliance with public health guidelines. Yet the virus has a much more harmful impact on Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) populations, which are vulnerable due to structural inequities. The disease is commonly transmitted through talk: The more forcefully an infected individual speaks, the greater the viral shedding of virus-containing droplets or aerosolized particles; vitriolic political rallies and violent, seditious activities are especially dangerous. However, these widely publicized flare-ups often overshadow the everyday chronic form of infection, which is even more insidious because it is endemic to the white population and therefore less recognized. [viral infection, anti-Blackness]

Community policing is a varying operation. Recent scholarship has attempted to grapple with this variation by examining differences in the way community policing operates across space (e.g., from neighbourhood to neighbourhood), but has problematically overlooked the issue of variation over time. Aiming to analyze both geographical and historical variation, this article examines community policing in the city of Montreal between 1978 and 1994. In this period, I argue, community policing embodied at least three distinct logics, each of which were linked to variations in the racial politics of the city: (1) a logic of collaboration, (2) a logic of compromise, and (3) a logic of counter-insurgency. These three logics, emerging at specific points in time, were also specific in their geography. Documenting geographical and historical variations in community policing, I conclude, can help to link diverse forms of policing to the differentiated socio-spatial hierarchies that shape it and better contribute to the making of what Gilmore (2017) "abolition geographies."

Adopting a hemispheric perspective, this essay problematizes the construct of latinidad by foregrounding how it reproduces Black erasure. I argue that “Latin America,” rather than being a geographical designator, is an imagined community that is Eurocentric to the degree that its conceptual boundaries exclude African diaspora spaces. I then turn to understandings of whiteness across borders, contrasting perceptions of racial mixture in the United States and the Hispanophone Americas. Lastly, I examine works by (Afro-)Latinx artists whose nuanced views on race demonstrate the potential of visual representation to provide insight into this complex topic beyond the black-white binary.

In this article, I propose Critical Race English Education (CREE) as a theoretical and pedagogi-cal construct that tackles white supremacy and anti-black racism within English education and ELA classrooms. I employ autoethnography and counterstorytelling as methods that center my multiple identities and lived realities as I document my racialized and gendered experiences in relation to my journey to Ferguson, MO and my experiences as a secondary ELA teacher. The research questions guiding this study are the following: (1) As a Black male English educator and language and literacy scholar, how am I implicated in the struggle for racial justice and what does it mean for me to teach literacy in our present-day justice movement?; (2) How are Black lives mattering in ELA classrooms?; and, (3) How are we using Black youth life histories and experiences to inform our mindset, curriculum, and pedagogical practices in the classroom? This article explicates findings from three interconnected stories that work to show how CREE can be operationalized to better understand the #BlackLivesMatter movement in its historical and contemporary dimensions. The data analyzed stem from my autobiographical narratives, observations, social media artifacts, and images. I aim to expand English education to be more synergistically attuned to racial justice issues dealing with police brutality, the mass incarceration of Black people, and legacies of grassroots activism. This analysis suggests implications that aim to move the pedagogical practices around the intersections of anti-blackness and literacy from the margins to the center of discussion and praxis in ELA contexts.

Black women live at the intersection of two subjugated identities: their experiences reflect a socio-political history rooted in Eurocentric and Androcentric ideologies. Because an individual’s health is concomitant with her societal status, the ideologies that drive American social institutions amplify the physiological and psychological vulnerability of black women. Black women experience significant disparities in sexual health in comparison to black men and women of other racial/ethnic groups. Traditional theories attempting to explain these outcomes are persistently individualistic and rooted in neoliberal ideologies that emphasize the victim’s responsibility. In contrast, this study provides an intersectional analysis of these outcomes, reflective of the socio-political history. Many black women subscribe to the Strong Black Woman (SBW) Archetype, a cultural and survival script that emphasizes a consistent manifestation of strength while simultaneously suppressing emotions, masking difficulties and abiding by the cultural mandate of silence and racial responsibility. Sexual assertiveness (SA) is an indicator of sexual health outcomes, particularly as it relates to refusal skills, communication, condom negotiation and initiation. The purpose of this study was to examine the predictors of SBW adherence as well as the relationship between personal characteristics, SBW adherence, SA and sexual/experiences. Analysis conducted with a sample of 279 black women revealed that higher scores on the SBW Archetype scale were negatively correlated with self-esteem. Overall sexual assertiveness and communication assertiveness were positively correlated with self-esteem and women with higher levels of SBW adherence had lower levels of refusal assertiveness. Women with higher levels of SBW adherence were also more likely to have had at least one unplanned pregnancy, and participants with lower self-esteem were significantly more likely to have had an abortion than those with higher self-esteem. These findings suggest that cultural scripts may influence sexual assertiveness and sexual health. Considering these discoveries, practice and policy initiatives geared toward promoting sexual agency and health among black women should examine the role of the SBW archetype and its social, emotional and psychological impact on adherents. Research and education should also incorporate the use of an intersectional framework to capture the ways in which the interaction of race and gender influence the lived experiences of black women.

This thesis explores the problem of the anti-black violence as the liquidation of Black time, space, energy, patterns of movements and flesh. This exploration is a performative exfoliation of niggas and they things is an intra racial discussion of how niggas and other forms of Black flesh liquidate each other for the rewards of humanity in the context of academia, politics, and gender. This thesis ultimately goes “baby on baby” on how Black flesh and its desired performances are captured and returned as Black humans who know best. Thus, Niggatry then is how Black flesh moves around the reproduction of anti-black violent rituals by Black flesh.

It is now common to encounter appeals for movement beyond “the human” in diverse scholarly domains, yet the temporal and spatial connotations of this “beyond,” let alone destinations, are often underexamined. Contra the beguiling appeal of the “beyond,” I would ask: What and crucially whose conception of humanity are we moving beyond? Moreover, what is entailed in the very notion of a beyond? Calls to become “post” or move “beyond the human” too often presume that the originary locus of this call, its imprimatur, its appeal, requires no further examination or justification but mere execution of its rapidly routinizing imperative. In the brief space I have here, I want to caution that appeals to move “beyond the human” may actually reintroduce the Eurocentric transcendentalism this movement purports to disrupt, particularly with regard to the historical and ongoing distributive ordering of race —which I argue authorizes and conditions appeals to the “beyond,” maybe even overdetermining the “beyond’s” appeal.

This paper unearths the relation between French philosopher Michel Foucault and the US Black Panther Party (BPP). I argue that Foucault’s shift from archaeological inquiry to genealogical critique is fundamentally motivated by his encounter with American-style racism and class struggle, and by his engagement with the political philosophies and documented struggles of the BPP. The paper proceeds in four steps. First, I assess Foucault’s biographies and interviews from the transitional period of 1970–72 that indicate the fact and nature of this formative encounter. Second, I turn to some of the writings of BPP leaders and to the theme of politics and war as they articulated it. Third, I address this same theme of politics as war as it gets taken up and rearticulated by Foucault between 1971 and 1976, with an eye to the degree to which the philosophies and struggles of the Black Panthers silently, yet profoundly, inform Foucault’s genealogical work. I conclude by raising some ethical and political questions pertaining to the criteria of truthful speech in scholarly discourse.

This essay offers an introduction to 'dialect', 'variety', and 'language ideology' as used by linguists and linguistic anthropologists. Specifically, I interpret the significance and delivery of Alysia Harris's remarks during 2017's Disrespected Literatures Symposium, drawing upon notions of language ideology and linguistic inequality, as well as excerpts from a contemporaneous interview with Harris. The analysis is contextualized through review of key flashpoints in public debate the appropriateness of African American Language in the U.S., and the inclusion of American dialects within considerations of language and literature. I also incorporate insights from my experiences as an African American woman and reader of both Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Shakespeare's Hamlet, each of which Harris discusses. By using her performance as an opportunity to celebrate the language-affirming activism of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Harris sounds a powerful critique of the often narrow notion of literature, and visibilizes the racial, gendered, and literary contours of intersectional linguistic inequality.

This essay reexamines the life of the three enslaved Black "women" Anarcha, Lucy and Betsy at the hands of the acclaimed "Father of Modern Gynecology" J. Marion Sims through the lens of Afropessimism as a means of developing a new analytics of seeing modern scientific development. Through a critical Black studies engagement with the work of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, the paper sets out to explain and expand the concept of 'primitive accreditation' as it relates to the foundational narratives and performances of violence constitutive of the modern scientific conceptual economy. Through paradigmatic analysis, the essay aims to antagonize the ease in which anti-Blackness coheres bio-centric notions of gender, sexuality, and humanity as well as suggest that science studies as a field has not yet wrestled with the gender/genre question of Blackness as a problem for the axioms of thought and being.

This paper introduces the special issue of Gum Saan Journal on challenging ongoing racism and white supremacy in the US, which includes articles on both historical and current issues.  The articles' diverse authors include Asian American Movement veterans, teachers, grassroots organizers, non-profit administration, and others across generations.  This paper also briefly explores the diversity of Chinese diaspora in the US (e.g., Southeast Asia, mainland China), histories of Chinese American activism, and the need to challenge anti-Black racism and other forms of ahistorical and disinformed beliefs and practices within Chinese and Asian American communities.

This essay seeks to read Whiteness as Property onto contemporary Israel by demonstrating that the value ascribed to Jewish nationality is not simply a matter of Jew versus non-Jew. Instead, Whiteness reflects a European order that reproduces and embodies the exclusionary and orientalist tropes that produced anti-Semitism in Europe. The State continues to apply those tropes to Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern origin. Mizrahim are the objects of Zionism's modernization project, which necessitates a violent bifurcation of their Arab and Jewish identity on the one hand, and the imposition of a singular European history that effectively marginalizes them on the other. Once consolidated within an ethno-nationality mythology of a European Jewish national, the project of nation building completely excludes the Palestinian who, like the Eastern Jew, is uncivilized, but unlike her, is ineligible for rehabilitation. Instead, the Palestinian must be removed, diminished, and contained geographically, politically, and socially. Law facilitates this process as it dispossess and displaces the Palestinian and simultaneously imbues Jewish nationality with a coveted value, one that mirrors European Enlightenment ideals of civilization and the superiority of Whiteness. Settler-decolonization is necessary for Palestinian self-determination and has the potential to achieve Jewish emancipation beyond the state.

This article treats An Indian from India, a photographic series by Indian-American photographer, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, as an example of South Asian diasporic cultural production that rearticulates white settler colonial mythology of 'dead Indians' in order to raise questions about justice and place for non-Indigenous non-Black People of Color. Drawing upon some of Matthew's photographs that are reflective of my reading of the entire series, I argue that South Asians in America must pay attention to how our questions and critiques of racial injustice are often steeped in white-settler colonial, anti-Black and casteist logics.