Thread by @NicoJuarezMSW

I considered whether to add this because I know it's unpopular and I understand the intent of the Tweet and its follow-ups, but I think this framing is both untrue and politically dangerous and so I wanted to offer this good faith engagement: 🧵

https://twitter.com/MelaninMvskoke/status/1554611650572931072

First, it is untrue, I believe, to the extent that virtually every theorization of #LandBack includes the dismantling of capitalist economies, the ending of settler colonial forms of government, and the attendant ending of other forms of violence like patriarchy or antiblackness.

The ending of capitalist economies not only would entail the dismantling of industrial models of production, but its attendant agricultural approaches which would destitute most Western standards of living.

Settler sovereignty secures the vitality of Indigenous homelands and the ongoing dispossession and violation of Black livelihood in favor of White (and non-Black) accumulation of wealth and cultural status.

Women's unpaid labor supplements, by some estimates, 1/4th of global GDP, not to mention the perverse pleasures men extract from the violation of not-men.

Antiblackness, colonialism, and Orientalism not only open up vast markets for imperial citizens, but it also enables them to secure resources and engage in forms of eroticized fantasy either through the pornographication of those bodies or the eroticism of enacting violence.

#LandBack is not Settler salvation, but their condemnation, the end of the ontological privileges of the Settler which have, through a parasitism, enabled Settler livelihood to reach forms of living that make medieval kings look like peasants.

This is without addressing the numerous psychological benefits Settlers receive, either in their capacity to have a home, travel anywhere in the world, absorb other cultures, fetishize, inflict and watch violence, etc.

Second, I don't believe this approach is rhetorically very useful. As Assata Shakur reminds us, no one ever won their freedom by appealing to the morality of their oppressors, and certainly not through appealing to their self-interests.

At best, this functions as a form of liberal interests convergence which rhetorically positions Indigenous liberation as valuable to the extent Settler's can imagine extracting benefit from it, limiting the horizon of our politics.

The response might be that it's extinction or #LandBack, but that kind of assumes that the libidinal economy of settler colonialism (and antiblackness, for that matter) is based on a securing of the biological life of the Settler-Master.

And, historically, Settlers HAVE chosen the loss of their well-being over the survival of Native American and Black peoples. I think rather than read this as ignorance, it should strike us how survival is not the highest value in settler colonial society.

The Settler prides the continuation of their way of life, the securing of their futures far more than they care about their personal well-being. This is not ignorance, but observable phenomenon that for many, there are things more important than being alive.

And I don't say this to bash on anyone or to be rude or to incite any sort of hostility against this take, but I do want to question it's motivations and limitations in the broader struggle against settler colonial society.