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Theorizing Modernities article

Living on Indigenous Lands: (Re)Considering Relations with Occupied Lands


View of the Golden Gate Bridge from Marshall Beach on a cloudy afternoon. Via Wikimedia Commons.

What does it mean to be a non-Indigenous person living on Indigenous land? With the increasing conversations about racial justice in the US, many institutions and organizations have adopted the practice of land acknowledgements. These statements often speak of the Indigenous peoples of a given territory and may recount the history of dispossession. Native and non-Native scholars and community members have sometimes critiqued these as shallow performances of allyship. Yet, when taken seriously, they offer an invitation to think more deeply about the relationships that we collectively have to the lands on which we reside—whether Indigenous, Black, migrant, and/or  settler peoples. Considering these relationships to land and to Indigenous peoples opens up possibilities for what it might mean to move beyond performative allyship towards learning how to be a guest in Indigenous homelands.

For instance, a section from the land acknowledgment from my own university, Texas Christian University, invites us to reflect on relationship. Alongside the creation of an Indigenous monument, the land acknowledgement reads:

As a university, we acknowledge the many benefits we have of being in this place. It is a space we share with all living beings, human and non-human.…The monument created jointly by TCU and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes reminds us of our benefits, responsibilities, and relationships. We pause to reflect on its words:  This ancient land, for all our relations… TCU especially acknowledges and pays respect to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, upon whose historical homeland our university is located.

Among the many elements of this statement, written by members of the TCU Native American Advisory Circle, is relationship. As many Indigenous scholars have noted, Indigenous thought often situates land as a site of relationships between humans, plants, animals, and sacred beings. Yet too few non-Indigenous peoples consider our own relationships to land. Red River Métis/Michif scholar Max Liboiron reminds us that “assumed access to land is fundamental to so many settler relations. Land relations are central not only to Indigenous worlds, but also to settler worlds” (68).

Image of Land Acknowledgement monument at Texas Christian University. Image Credit: Abel R. Gomez.

The structures of settler colonialism impact all of us, as Indigenous feminist scholars Malie Arvin (Kānaka Maoli), Eve Tuck (Unangax̂), and Angie Morill (Klamath Tribes) argue. Liboiron writes, however, about how our distinct relations to land and colonialism often remain invisible. In academic literature, for example, Native scholars are often marked as such with their particular affiliation to their Native Nation or community. The same is not always true of non-Native scholars who typically remain “unmarked,” as if neutral or disconnected from land or colonial occupation. Liboiron notes, “This unmarking is one act among many that re-centers settlers and whiteness as unexceptional norm, while deviations have to be marked and named.” It assumes “settler presence on Land, especially Indigenous Land, is the stable and unremarkable norm” (3, footnote 10). Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous scholars such as Tiffany Lethabo King, Alaina E. Roberts, and Kyle T. Mays (Saginaw Chippewa) describe the more complex ways that Black peoples relate(d) to Indigenous lands than either settlers or migrants.

Taking Liboiron seriously means marking my own position as a non-Native person from an immigrant Central American and Mexican family born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. The San Francisco Bay Area is the land of the multiple Ohlone tribes and family lineages and home to diverse relocated and diasporic Indigenous peoples today. My journey to understand the San Francisco Bay Area and its history led me to engage in fieldwork among diverse Ohlone communities and to participate in various protests, cultural events, and ceremonies. I love this land and also recognize that my sense of belonging to this place has been shaped by Spanish, Mexican, and American colonization. I also recognize that these colonial legacies mean that Indigenous peoples remain largely dispossessed along the California coast.

Ohlone Indians in a Tule Boat in the San Francisco Bay (1822), by Louis Choris. Via Wikimedia Commons.

My work in the academy and in community has been shaped by the question of what it might mean to live as a respectful guest on Indigenous land. Many non-Native people take for granted our relationships to land or relate to land largely as property. Non-Native scholar Robert Nichols theorizes the ways that settler colonialism transforms non-proprietary forms of relationships to land into commodities. Through this transformation, the original “owners” (Indigenous peoples) are only owners retroactively, a process he calls “retroactive dispossession.” The colonial process of dispossession occurs alongside other forms of violence such as racial supremacy, gendered and sexual violence, enslavement, exploitation, and attacks on Indigenous governance. All of this remains largely invisible, which is likely why many non-Native people have the luxury of not considering our relationship to land or the ways it has been conditioned by settler colonialism.

In the wake of ongoing histories of colonial violence, Native and non-Native scholars and community members have considered what respectful relations might look like. Writing in the context of Hawai’i, Japanese American scholar Candace Fujikane considers a “settler-aloha ʻāina.” This refers to the ways that non-Native people may develop a sense of aloha (love) for āina (land) and work towards Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) sovereignty and independence. “Settler-aloha ʻāina” moves beyond the settler-Native binary to consider the potential of good relations to land. Importantly, Fujikane argues that settler-aloha ʻāina does not erase the distinct ways that settler colonialism impacts Black, Indigenous, settler, and people of color differently. At the same time, it opens the possibility of respectful relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples.

‘Settler-aloha ʻāina’ moves beyond the settler-Native binary to consider the potential of good relations to land.

Considering relationship to land can open to responsibility. Fujikane writes, “As settler aloha ʻāina we can wehe [open to Kānaka Maoli knowledges] ourselves to love the land, even as we are learning the way to best enact practices that are reciprocal. While part of our kuleana [responsibility] is to play a supportive role, that should not prevent us from actively challenging the occupying state or standing against law enforcement” (16). Non-Native people not only have a relationship to land, but also have the potential of being in respectful relations, relations that grow out of respect, humility, and care. Such perspective moves beyond a shallow performance of allyship that writers like queer Black essayist Mia McKenzie critique. Instead, it allows for the potential for robust forms of solidarity in the future and a responsibility towards making amends for past harms.

Part of a robust solidarity is accepting feedback. Fujikane no longer uses the term “settler aloha ʻāina.” In a Twitter post, she writes, “I having [sic] been using the term ‘settler aloha ‘āina’ that Noe Goodyear Ka’ōpua posed as a possibility in 2014. But there have been Kānaka Maoli who don’t like that term because they define it as being genealogically descended from lands. I am reverting back to using ‘settler ally.’”

Non-Native people not only have a relationship to land, but also have the potential of being in respectful relations, relations that grow out of respect, humility, and care.

Tongva and Acjachemen scholar Charles Sepulveda similarly considers respectful relations, through the Tongva concept of kuuyam, “guest.” Sepulveda argues that situating oneself as kuuyam “can disrupt setter colonialism” by restoring landscapes, eradicating hierarchies, and building relationships based in “responsibility and protocol.” He writes, “Kuuyam allows for a re-centering of place, and instead of dividing people into categories (and binaries) it allows for people to understand themselves as guests of the land—either they behave appropriately, or they do not” (57).

Members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe at Máyyan Šaatošikma, aka Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont, CA. November 2022. Photo credit: Abel R. Gomez.

Anishinaabe and Ukrainian writer Patty Krawec notes that there are no easy solutions. Instead, she writes, “We have to build relationships.…Living as if the land belonged to the people we acknowledge means forming and working through relationships” (146). This includes learning about and having discussions in community about the land where one lives—the Indigenous peoples, treaties, place names, histories, and current struggles connected to that place. It means organizing the people where you live to support Indigenous-led movements, especially movements connected to the return of land to Indigenous peoples. It also means understanding that relationship to land is conditioned by one’s relationship to legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and displacement.

In the helpful guide “How to Come Correct” created by members of the Indigenous-run organization Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, they include “Be a good guest!” This line appears at the end of their list but in some ways may be the most profound suggestion. A guest is welcomed, but also must ask permission. Guests do not overstay or act entitled. To be a guest is also to recognize oneself as in relationship. The work of understanding one’s relation to land, to legacies of colonialism and resistance, and the ways that one might act in good relations is a life-long process. Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang (diasporic settler of color) write that, “Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict” (3).

At the same time, the violence of colonialism was never inevitable. As I tell my students often, the settlers that came here made choices. Considering our relations and responsibilities to land invites us to make other choices, ones that might guide us, perhaps, towards being in good relations with the land and the Indigenous peoples of that place. This also comes with invitations to reckon with the past and do the work of repair for the colonial legacies we have inherited. Krawec reminds us, “Being a settler or a colonizer is not something you are it is something you do. It describes your relationship to this land and the people in it.…If you are going to stop being a settler and start being kin, that’s where we start. With what you do” (178–79).

 

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Abel R. Gomez
Abel R. Gomez is Assistant Professor of in the Religion Department and affiliated faculty of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. His research and teaching examine the relationships between sacred sites, ceremony, gender and sexuality, Indigenous cosmologies, and (de)colonization. In particular, Abel conducts ethnographic research among Ohlone tribal communities in the San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay regions to theorize Indigenous resurgence and movements to protect sacred sites. He is a first generation queer Latinx scholar descending from Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Mexican lineages that migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, the homeland of Ohlone peoples.
Theorizing Modernities article

What Kind of Tradition is Black and Radical?


Labor organizer from the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union rallying at a strike on Black Friday to unionize Walmart, November 23, 2012. The Walmart Black Friday strike was part of the starting wave of the Fight for $15 movement. Via Wikimedia Commons.

I only attended one meeting of my college’s Black Student Union. It was a spirited gathering, filled with energy and familiarity. In the large classroom where the few dozen students met, I could feel the ease that comes with stepping off stage, out of the spotlight of hypervisibility shined by an elite, predominantly White institution. At that point, around the turn of the millennium, a Black Student Union functioned as essentially a social club, affirming Black identity by creating Black spaces on campus. I was looking for something else, so I did not return.

I found my people in political organizing work. Classmates and I built friendships with the predominantly Black, poorly paid janitors, dining hall workers, and maintenance crews. We heard the challenges they and their families were facing just to get by. We imagined, with them, what a university community might look like that valued each of its members, whether they were students, alumni, faculty, or staff. And we strategized together, formulated demands, targeted administrators, and generated media attention. We reached out to alumni who had been involved in a previous generation of campus activism, demanding divestment from apartheid South Africa, and we staged dialogues with them about the connections between our struggles.

In short, I found fulfillment and joy in struggle. It was struggle largely, but not exclusively, with Black folks, and it was struggle against the powers that asserted their arbitrary rule over my community members and friends. It was struggle that grew out of a tradition of contesting domination, a tradition that cultivated the agility needed to locate domination in new forms, whether it was university investments in apartheid South Africa, sweatshops manufacturing university-branded merchandise, labor conditions on campus, or—in the campaign to which we would turn after the success of our labor organizing—divestment from Israel.

This contrast between Blackness as a social fact, defined in relation to the blinding light of Whiteness, and a tradition of Black struggle is at the heart of my project in Black Dignity. I argue that much goes wrong when it seems sufficient to wallow in shared identity. Shifting away from that framework, toward a tradition of struggle requires fundamentally rethinking moral categories (including love, hope, excellence, and dignity) and political strategies (abandoning the false security offered by respectability). Unlike when I came of age, in the heyday of multiculturalism, Black justice movements rooted in traditions of struggle have much more visibility today, and Black Dignity seeks to make their intellectual and political shape explicit. The book also develops resources to help us remain vigilant against the tendencies within these movements and the pressures from reactionary forces without that flatten Blackness into an essentially apolitical social club (even if that club mouths radical slogans).

I am grateful to the participants in this symposium—each a scholar whose work I greatly admire—for probing, extending, and questioning my project in Black Dignity. While they raise many important issues, I will briefly respond to the pressure they put on the concept of tradition that is at the heart of my book.

Unlike when I came of age, in the heyday of multiculturalism, Black justice movements rooted in traditions of struggle have much more visibility today, and Black Dignity seeks to make their intellectual and political shape explicit.

While the “Black radical tradition” has become a fashionable phrase in leftist political circles, secular activists and intellectuals rarely take the concept of tradition as seriously as scholars of religion take it. From a secular perspective, a tradition is often a historical curiosity, a resource to draw on, or a chain of influence. Scholars of religion ranging from Alasdair MacIntyre to Jeffrey Stout to Saba Mahmood, in contrast, understand tradition as setting a horizon of possibility and as shaping reason, feeling, and imagination. Most importantly, scholars of religion attend to the normative force of tradition: participants in a tradition ought to act in accordance with a tradition, even if what that means is always contested.

Black Dignity argues that Black justice movements constitute a tradition in a rich, deep sense, shaping and obligating their participants. But this tradition has some peculiar features: it is unified not by empirical facts about people or histories but by a shared commitment to struggle against the paradigm of domination (slavery and its afterlives). The horizon of possibility set by this tradition involves rejecting horizons of possibility, imagining the impossible. With the world infected by domination, that is the only way of orienting ourselves to a world free of domination.

With reference to Palestine/Israel, Shaul Magid worries that a tradition once focused on struggling against domination can transform into an ideology of mastery. This strikes me as a hugely important point across contexts and scales, including when Black elites embrace the language of justice struggles. Turning a tradition inside out in this way requires, first, secularizing it, tethering it to a specific set of worldly, empirical people, events, and demands. But the grandeur of tradition, and particularly the Black tradition I describe in my book, is a product of its ontological rather than merely ontic nature: it is about more than the eye can see, about more fundamental questions than those we encounter in everyday life. Maintaining this position requires humility and a tragic sensibility, but it is an essential prophylactic against cooptation by politicians, CEOs, cable news commentators, and, yes, professors.

Rosetta Ross’s reflections implicitly raise the question of orthodoxy within the Black tradition. If the tradition is pragmatic, proceeding via bricolage to address the problems of the day, how can we tell what counts and what doesn’t count as part of the tradition? If scholars of religion can restore vitality to the dusty-sounding category of tradition, might they also save the category of orthodoxy from being identified with dogmatism? To acknowledge the normativity of the Black tradition requires some sense of orthodoxy, but the process of discerning that orthodoxy strikes me as, again, requiring a light touch and an awareness of our fallibility.

The grandeur of tradition, and particularly the Black tradition I describe in my book, is a product of its ontological rather than merely ontic nature: it is about more than the eye can see, about more fundamental questions than those we encounter in everyday life.

To what extent is the Black tradition—in this book I center the African American tradition— commensurable with other traditions? Siphiwe Dube productively explores the ways in which Black African traditions can be read as part of the Black tradition I describe, but could this equally be the case with, say, Adivasi traditions in India, Aboriginal traditions in Australia, and Indigenous traditions in South America? Was it the case for the colonial American tradition, struggling against the domination of the British crown? Ukrainians fighting today? In Black Dignity, I leave these questions open, but I do point to procedures for addressing them. In short, we must move back and forth between paradigm cases of domination and the complexities of actual domination in the world. Blackness occupies a privileged position because the Atlantic slave trade is as close as we get to a paradigm case of domination, providing an example of mastery in laboratory conditions, as it were, with the enslaved stripped of land, language, family, and culture so as to be entirely subject to the arbitrary rule of their masters.

Closely related to the question of commensurability is the question of traditions that nest, one inside the other. Nadia Fadil points out that, in the Belgian context, the shape, perception, and politics of Afrodiasporic communities is quite different from those of Muslim communities. Belgian culture uses various techniques to manage (or destroy) the communities within it – making it impossible to talk about fully autonomous Afrodiasporic or Muslim communities within Belgium. Fadil describes this process as disciplining wills within Muslim communities, and she suggests that cultivating respectability and solidarity may be necessary for survival amidst these pressures. I agree that the European cases Fadil describes are at quite a distance from the paradigm case of domination, in the Middle Passage, but so are the North American cases. I worry that the urgency of political rhetoric about anti-Blackness in North American at times obscures that distance, and the complexities of culture and context that follow from it. In Black Dignity I urge that we toggle between that distant paradigm case and the urgent, complex problems of the present, in a process that acknowledges the need to be strategic about struggle, generates solidarity, and appreciates that dignity, understood as struggle against domination, is wildly contagious.

Finally, Traci West asks when the story of a tradition needs to be reworked to exclude someone whose contributions we discover to be severely compromised—in a sense, this is the question of excommunication. The issues around misogyny she raises are urgent, not only in the well-known case of Cleaver but also in the case that I discuss in the book and elsewhere of CLR James (who confessed to rape in his unpublished autobiography) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (whose notorious misogyny cannot be relegated to a footnote). Once again, I do not think there are easy answers about what to do with such figures. In Black Dignity I suggest there are instances where excommunication is appropriate, even if making such decisions are risky. Once again, it strikes me as essential to tread lightly, aware of the likelihood of error in our discernment.

We live in exciting times: the Black radical tradition is increasingly visible in our public conversations about racial justice, and it is guiding how young people are growing into their Blackness. We also live in precarious times, when overt and subtle attacks on Black justice movements threaten to silence or deform those movements. Maintaining a rich sense of the tradition part of the Black radical tradition—through debating its meaning—promises to gird resurgent justice movements against their detractors.

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Vincent Lloyd
Vincent Lloyd is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. His recent books include Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination, Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons (with Joshua Dubler), and Black Natural Law; he co-edits the journal Political Theology. He has held visiting positions at Notre Dame, Emory, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Durham. Lloyd is currently writing a book about abuse.
Theorizing Modernities article

Black Women and the Political Performance for Environmental, Territorial, and Human Rights on the Pacific Coast of Colombia


The Vice President of Colombia, Francia Márquez, during her speech for the closing of the second cycle of talks with the ELN in Mexico City. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In this post, I spotlight how Black women advocate for human, territorial, and environmental protection through political performances. Moreover, I explore how the legacies of capitalism and colonialism have not only accelerated environmental degradation, but also disproportionately impacted Black populations and continued to shape the Black experience in contemporary Colombia. Lastly, I underscore how dispossession is not merely a matter of losing land and territory but is also a violation of the individual body and collective body.

Although Black Colombians were declared the legal proprietors of ancestral lands, territories, and natural resources according to Law 70 of 1993, private companies, guerrilla groups, and paramilitary groups (amongst others) have continued to dispossess land, displace Blacks, as well as practice illegal mining and dump mercury into rivers. While many have been displaced, others have been forced to endure the poisoned waters. In effect, inhabitants of the Pacific coast have ingested lethal amounts of mercury, and it has even been found in mothers’ breast milk. This led Goldman Prize winner Francia Marquez, who would become Colombian Vice President in 2022, to declare this a “generational genocide.”  The Pacific Coast is the region where the majority of rivers in the country begin. As a result of the informal mining, more than eighty rivers are contaminated in Colombia. Thus, sectors participating in illegal mining are not only violating environmental and territorial rights, but also the human and civil rights of Black Colombians. Despite legal rights, sociologist Tiana Paschel highlights that in Colombia “there is a notorious gap between laws on paper and actual state practices” (189). Consequently, in 2019, according to the United Nations, two-thirds of the gold produced in Colombia was illegally extracted. Much of this gold was extracted from Black and Indigenous communities like the Pacific Coast, which is meant to be protected under Law 70.

These injustices do not go unchallenged. Black women are at the forefront of resistance to these practices and in pushing for human, territorial, and environmental protection. Black women in the Pacific Coast are defending not only water (be it freshwater or saltwater), but also land and territories. The protection of water sources like rivers is particularly important as they sustain life, provide routes for transportation, and contribute to the landscape and waterscape of ancestral and spiritual territories. Moreover, the protection of land and territories allows people to perform cultural practices, produce life, affirm identity, and much more.

Black women have been at the forefront of authoring pathways to futurity through their care work, spiritual customs, performance cultures, aesthetic practices, philosophies, and activist movements.

Thinking alongside Axelle Karera’s “Blackness and the Pitfalls of the Anthropocene,” I illuminate how various “regimes of Anthropocenean consciousness” tend to mobilize apocalyptic events to promote ahistoric unities that elide the daily and historic catastrophes of Black life (32).[1] If the institution of slavery is to be used as a temporal anchor for examining Black life in the Americas, then we see that Black women have been at the forefront of authoring pathways to futurity through their care work, spiritual customs, performance cultures, aesthetic practices, philosophies, and activist movements. The Black women of Colombia are no exception to this.

The March of Turbans

In 2014, La Marcha de los Turbantes, or the March of Turbans, as mass media termed it, was led by Francia Marquez. During this march, more than eighty Black women marched on foot from the Pacific coast of Colombia to the capital city of Bogotá in demand for land and water rights. And as the name infers, they all adorned their heads with headwraps or turbans. Black women, throughout history, have not only been integral components and leaders of social movements, but also, as historian and cultural theorist Tanisha Ford emphasizes, “have incorporated beauty and fashion into their activism” (3). Black women’s activism is unique and particular because undoing, challenging, and re-aestheticizing Black women through activism is something that only Black women have the positionality to fulfill. Black women have long included performances of aesthetic practices, including how they dress and style their hair, as a component of activism to not only contribute to the social movement at hand, but to also resist societal norms that have historically been structured to oppress Black women; for instance, the archetype of mammy, their representation as laborers, and/or as people who belong in positions of servitude, amongst others. Historically, in Colombia, as well as many parts of Latin America, headwraps were required for Black women during and following the years of enslavement. Throughout history, and even today, turbans are a component of some uniforms for positions of servitude. However, with the natural hair movement, Black women often wear headwraps as crown of pride and a symbol of identity. Furthermore, to wear headwraps during the march was a decision that reflected a desire to demonstrate pride in their African ancestry and to resist the norm of being a mammy, caregiver, and laborer. This simultaneously allowed them to take up the ever-present, yet often unrecognized normative position of being political thinkers and agents of change.

Illegal mining taking place in Colombia. Image Credit: Flickr User Lady Castro. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The march lasted ten days as they journeyed 350 miles to the capital to demand the total elimination of all illegal miners and equipment from their coastal community, which were present without communal consent. Their demands were two-tiered: First, they wanted to denounce illegal mining; and second, they wanted to advocate for policies and laws that protect the environment and the people impacted by illegal mining. Once in Bogotá, the women stated that “we will not move from here until the government removes the last dozer from our lands.” Many of the women during the March of Turbans explained that illegal mining, which compromises water sources, is not only an instance of historical and ancestral devastation, but also a threat to the future. Countless Blacks on the Pacific coast still heavily rely on access to land, natural water, and the independent collection of gold for social security. Contaminated water sources and the hyper extraction of gold are not only a direct threat to the current residents, but also alter the possibility of future generations to live and thrive in ancestral territories.

The Loss of Land and the Loss of Self

Another reality challenging Blacks from living and thriving in ancestral territories is dispossession. Blacks have been forcibly displaced from (and dispossessed of) their ancestral lands and territories through decades of internal conflicts and illegal mining. Nonetheless, dispossession is not only a matter of losing land and/or territory, but it is also a violation of the individual body and collective body. Political theorist Robert Nichols explains that with dispossession, “the primary locus of concern is not land but the body, self, or person.” He goes on to clarify that “the term dispossession is used to describe a particular violation of personal autonomy and/or bodily integrity” (118). Moreover, given that Blacks in the Pacific Coast of Colombia have ancestral, spiritual, economic, and other connections to the land and territory, they are part of the environmental ecology. The African philosophy Ubuntu, which means “soy porque somos” or “I am because we are,” has helped inform how Black identity is formed not only in relation to the land and water, but also as part of the wider ecology. “Being part of” then implies a recognition of the “interdependence” that shapes the Black experience and makes life possible (85). Francia Marquez has rooted her activism in this philosophy in her fight for human and environmental rights. In doing so, she highlights how Blacks have a collective and individual identity that is embedded in the earth, territory, and environment. Max Liboiron explains this interdependence with the earth, or what they consider Land (capitalized). “Land is a spiritually infused place grounded in interconnected and interdependent relationships, cultural positioning, and is highly contextualized … when I capitalize Land I am referring to the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, animals, air, water, humans, histories, and events” (7). The Anishinaabe poet and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson further explains the relation between identity, body, and ecology when she argues, “our bodies are embedded in the ecologies and in our intimate relationships with the land” (as cited in King at 114). Tiffany Lethabo King builds upon Simpson:

Indigenous insight into the land-body connection, or the land possessing the body, offers a different way to think about and regard the Black hands that are entangled with or stained by indigo. Far from being rendered objectified bodies, they are visual reminders of the ways that the human body is always embedded in the ecologies that surround us. In fact, all bodies are part of the ecology (114).

Thinking alongside Nichols, Simpson, King, as well as Latin American feminist Verónica Gago, I consider now the theorization of body-territory. The union of the words “body” and “territory” with a hyphen stresses the impossibility of delinking and isolating the individual body from the collective body, and the human body from the territory or landscape. The compacted single word “body-territory” unravels the notion of the body as an individual property and reconstitutes the body as territory. There are many definitions of territory. Here, however, I lean into the understanding of territory as a space for the cultivation of human and nonhuman (other-than-human) identity, meaning-making, the production of culture and life, and more.

Gago goes on to define body-territory as “a practical concept that demonstrates how the exploitation of common, community territories involves the violation of the body of each person, as well as the collective body, through dispossession” (86). The history of dispossessions, displacements, and even deaths in Colombia not only violate Law 70, but also threaten the lives of these communities. Moreover, this history suggests that the Black body-territory—carrying physical and geographical connotations—is viewed as open and for the taking. Thus, as Daniel Ruiz-Serna explains, “in such context, the defense of territory overlaps with the defense of basic human rights” (14). Or in other words, territory defense and human rights cannot be delinked. When one is defending the territory, they are is also defending life—be it human, geographical, or environmental.

The African philosophy Ubuntu, which means “soy porque somos” or “I am because we are,” has helped inform how Black identity is formed not only in relation to the land and water, but also as part of the wider ecology.

This defense of life is particularly important as those who structured colonialism assigned Black bodies, gendered bodies, and the environment as predetermined for death. Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics helps us understand this predetermination for death. The concept of necropolitics is nested in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, which suggests that the ultimate expression of authority is in the power to decide who lives and who dies. Mbembe maps the central link between violence and colonialism to this management of life and death through power structures like racism. Systems like slavery, the plantation, and modern terror(s) embody the political exercise of the authority of death. For that, Mbembe maintains that slave life is a form of “death-in-life,” or the living dead, meaning that certain subjects have been predetermined as disposable and meant for death. With this concept in mind, we can say that since the inception of colonialism and slavery, Black bodies, land, and the environment have been meant for death. This explains how the environment is being killed in the name of development, modernization, and economic gain. Furthermore, this hints at how Blacks (and extensions of Blackness like land, territories, etc.) are amongst the populations most vulnerable for displacement, dispossession, and even death.

Concluding Thoughts

As the legacy of colonialism and capitalism continues to unfold, as well as their link to violence against humans and nonhuman (other-than-human) entities, water and territory emerge at the nexus of racialized and environmental violence. Nonetheless, the intersecting racialized, gendered, and environmental violence does not go without challenge as Black women organize political performances in the fight against human and nonhuman (other-than-human) injustices. At the time of the march, almost forty percent of the nation’s territory was under concession as the Colombian government considered mining one of its main economic activities. Much of which was land that is supposed to be protected under Law 70. Thus, throughout the march, the women took to social media, documenting their journey and gathering widespread attention by using hashtags like #MarchaDeLosTurbantes (March of Turbans), #EscuchenNuestrosPasos (listen to our steps), and #BateasSíRetroNo (Yes to [ancestral] pans, no to extracting equipment)—amongst others. They sang songs of protest and spirituals as they shared about their experiences with (un)natural catastrophe on the Pacific Coast. Illegal mining has threatened social security, polluted water sources, caused a generational genocide, and compromised the possibility of future generations to live in ancestral lands and territories, just to mention few consequences. All in all, illegal mining is a violation of the law, a violation of human rights, and a violation of the environment.

[1] Two terms commonly used when discussing environmental studies are Anthropocene and Capitalocene. The term Anthropocene references the geological era that focuses on human (anthros) effect on climate change. Not everyone is equally responsible for environmental degradation. To say that the issue is a result of (all) human impact would negate the history and legacy of colonialism and capitalism. Thus, many use the term Capitalocene, which refers to the environmental effects caused by capitalism and the legacy of colonialism. However, I think alongside Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing to employ the term Plantationocene, which puts colonialism, capitalism, racial hierarches, and practices of labor at the center of dialogue when considering environmental depletion.

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Kaché H. Claytor
Kaché H. Claytor (she/ella) is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in Hispanic Studies with a certificate in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research centers Black and Indigenous women and their political performances, spiritual practices, and environmental ecologies amid displacement, extractivism, and environmental catastrophe in Peru and Colombia. Claytor is a co-founder and the former president of Black Graduate Student Association and works closely with undergraduate students as a graduate mentor. She has served as a committee member of the inaugural Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee for the Romance Languages and Literatures department and has been awarded the Helen Fe Jones Award for Teaching Spanish as well as the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. As a Fulbright Colombia grantee, she mentored for the Martin Luther King Scholars Program—an initiative geared towards increasing bilingualism within the Black and Indigenous communities throughout Colombia.
Theorizing Modernities article

More Than a Land of Open Graves: How the Sonoran Desert Refuses Capture


Crosses by Álvaro Enciso memorializing Justina Juarez Velazco and Domitila Juarez Velazco, who died attempting to cross Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. June 2022. Photo credit: Alex Morelli. Used with permission.

A USA Today interactive report on President Trump’s border wall—proposed during his 2016 presidential run—opens with the lines: “On a map, the southwestern Arizona desert is an empty stretch, the size of Connecticut, a sea of nothing. On a map of deaths, it is a sea of red.” The land, according to the author, is “harsh.” Migrants who travel across land known as the Devil’s Highway are dying in large numbers—unidentified remains are stored in coolers in government buildings, buried in mass, anonymous graves. The vocabulary of death is pervasive in discussions of the southern borderlands and transnational migration. Indeed, Border Patrol reports that more than 8,000 migrants have been killed attempting the crossing since 1994, when the United States implemented a policy known as Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD). However, according to No More Deaths, the agency notoriously underestimates this number. And it cannot account for the bodies that are never found.

Almost overnight, PTD increased the number of Border Patrol agents and the use of militarized technologies at urban ports of entry, rerouting migration to the Sonoran Desert. This policy has led to an unimaginable loss of life. In the desert, migrants succumb to dehydration, heat stroke, and hypothermia. They slip and fall attempting to climb a gravelly hill; they are bitten by a venomous snake, or they become so physically exhausted that they are unable to continue on their journeys. When this happens, their coyotes (or smugglers) often forge ahead without them. PTD also led to militarized checkpoints at every exit from the Tohono O’odham reservation. These checkpoints were outfitted with high-definition cameras, motion sensor systems, and 360-degree ground-penetrating radars. Todd Miller calls this a “high-tech occupation.” Through PTD, the United States seeks to conscript land to police migration. And, though scholars largely argue that the Sonoran Desert cooperates and collaborates with state agents, my fieldwork has taught me that the opposite is true. Land is sacred—positive and negative, nurturing and overpowering—and, as such, it poses a problem for enforcement and militarization.

Close up of jumping cholla, also known as hanging chain cholla. June 2022. Photo credit: Alex Morelli. Used with permission.

Notably, Jason De León has identified the Sonoran Desert as a “killing field, a massive open grave” (8). De León argues that, as a result of PTD, nonhuman actants—objects, minerals, environmental conditions, animals—play a crucial role in border control. In The Land of Open Graves, he writes that a “hybrid collectif”—mountain lions, rattlesnakes, scorpions, hot sand, monsoons, flash floods, deep canyons, and the broiling sun—has been recruited by lawmakers to control and limit human mobility (39). While he concedes that the desert does not act alone, De León nevertheless describes land as a weapon or a death-dealing ecosystem. In short, he argues that the United States government has outsourced border enforcement to the desert itself. But, the desert—a sacred landscape, alive and active in webs of relation—never works in one singular or fixed way. As scholars like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson richly propose, land is active and mobile, though “conquistador-settlers” (to borrow the language of Tiffany Lethabo King) have long imagined land as inert matter, as a set of resources able and willing to be tamed and operationalized. According to Marisol de la Cadena, these are competing ontologies, “more than one and less than many worlds” (108).

Where I disagree with De León, then, is in the way he aligns the desert with the profane, the way he grants victory to the settler state, presuming that land only acts by disappearing and decomposing migrant bodies. The Sonoran Desert is the lushest and most biologically diverse in North America, home of the O’odham—including four federally recognized tribes: The Tohono O’odham Nation, the Gila River Indian Community, the Ak-Chin Indian Community, and the Salt River (Pima Maricopa) Indian Community. It is sacred land, mobile and facilitating mobilities, including pilgrimages, migrations, and rituals. It is unpredictable, uncontrollable, negative and positive—harming and healing, inspiring dread and astonishment. The sacred does not travel in uniform ways, but rather takes contradictory and volatile routes. And while land can prove deadly for migrants who are unaware and unfamiliar with its rhythms, it can also enable fugitive crossings. Border walls, militarized checkpoints, and surveillance technologies do not necessarily collaborate with land against migrants. Rather, they seek to tame the land and its sacred energies. The settler state is not allying itself with the desert. It is actively working to destroy the desert, or—as I argue in my forthcoming book, Sanctuaries Everywhere —to render it spiritless, disenchanted, and profane.

The sacred does not travel in uniform ways, but rather takes contradictory and volatile routes. And while land can prove deadly for migrants who are unaware and unfamiliar with its rhythms, it can also enable fugitive crossings.

The Sonoran Desert has long been cast as negative sacred—a “sea of red,” to return to the USA Today report, an arid land that disappeared settlers, harbored fugitives, and facilitated the unauthorized crossings of Chinese migrants and enslaved people. Negative sacred energies are deadly, unstable, volatile, and easily angered. Joseph Nevins insists that the nation-state has strategically narrated the borderlands as wild and unruly. In Operation Gatekeeper, he writes about Prohibition-era depictions of border districts as sites of sin and promiscuity and about the declaration of the War on Drugs, when border crossings became framed as a national security issue. He shows how the southern border has long been imagined as “out of control” in order to facilitate more surveillance and policing (175). Lisa Marie Cacho further explains that “ideas about spatial violence naturalized colonialism, enslavement, and genocide because it explained why in some regions of the world people were masters of their own (and others’) environments and others were subjugated by other human beings” (73). The Sonoran Desert and its O’odham, or people, have been framed as negative sacred, violent and barbaric, underscoring the need for militarized intervention.

Humanitarian volunteers hike past an organ pipe cactus on their way to plant crosses for migrants who were killed by Prevention Through Deterrence. June 2022. Photo credit: Barbara Sostaita.

While conducting fieldwork for Sanctuaries Everywhere, I met Dora Rodriguez, who migrated across the Sonoran Desert in the summer of 1980 with a group of twenty-six Salvadorans fleeing a US-backed genocidal government. Thirteen migrants survived and thirteen died during the crossing. She detailed how saguaros resemble humans in the dark—looming, ghostly figures. She explained how dehydration made her dizzy, how some fellow travelers became deranged and homicidal, how others doused their lips in toothpaste to avoid sunburns. Dora called the desert deceptive, a maze that refuses to spit you out. Dora was locked out of good relations with the land, unprepared for what it meant to enter the desert. In fact, the coyote told her group the crossing would take less than a day. Some women even walked across Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in their stilettos.

Both state agents and coyotes seek to master land—to know the desert, tame it, and make it useful to their designs. Land, though, is variable and unpredictable, excessive and abundant. Surveillance infrastructure and militarized enforcement seek to discipline these negative and positive energies, to regulate mobility—the mobility of unauthorized migrants, of other-than-human animals like bobcats and ocelots whose mating patterns are being disrupted by walls and fences, and of the O’odham, whose rituals and kinships traverse the transnational border. Land is too much to be controlled or managed. As Max Liboirion argues, “land is a verb.” They differentiate lowercase land as resource or tool and uppercase Land as a set of relations “between the material aspects some people might think of as landscapes — water, soil, air, plants, stars — and histories, spirits, events, kinships, accountabilities, and other people that aren’t human” (43). This includes rituals like the Tohono O’odham salt pilgrimage that transgress borders, land defenders including Nellie Jo David and Amber Ortega who disrupt enforcement efforts by sheltering sacred land, and migrants and their coyotes who hide in arroyos, rest under mesquite trees, and blend into the night carrying water bottles coated in black nail polish. For the Border Patrol, the desert is not so much an accomplice as it is an obstacle to catching and detaining migrants. Saguaros stand in the way of walls, and so they are cut down. Ancestral burial grounds are desecrated. Mountains harbor fugitives, and so they are blasted to make way for switchback roads. O’odham, too, are an obstacle. They present alternatives to militarization and enforcement.

Both state agents and coyotes seek to master land—to know the desert, tame it, and make it useful to their designs. Land, though, is variable and unpredictable, excessive and abundant.

I close this essay with a scene from my book: While on a humanitarian water drop organized by the Tucson Samaritans, during which volunteers leave food and water along migrant trails, a travel companion shows me an article posted by CNN: “Hundreds of vultures have made a perch out of a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) radio tower, and the government has had enough.” For weeks, the flock of birds coated the structure with feces and vomit, making it nearly impossible for CBP to patrol the border. The two of us burst out in laughter, amazed by how the vultures mock enforcement efforts, how they so effortlessly outwit billions of dollars worth of technology. As we continue along the dirt and gravel road that runs parallel to the wall, I spot a section where the free-flowing Santa Cruz River meets the 30-foot-high steel panels. Undeterred by the towering fence, the water continues to run its course—its constant rush a protest against wall construction. Suddenly, another volunteer draws my attention to a decomposing coyote caught between the steel bars. Unable to fit through the four-inch-wide gaps, the animal likely starved to death. Animals, land, threaten enforcement efforts. They refuse militarization. And so the profane world works to render land lifeless, installing walls and barriers that murder coyotes and deplete natural springs. For the state, the Sonoran Desert is a problem, not a partner.

A Tucson Samaritans vehicle carrying water, food, and medical supplies for migrants makes its way along Ironwood Forest National Monument. July 2022. Photo credit: Alex Morelli. Used with permission.

To return to Liboiron, PTD sees land as a resource, as a weapon to be used against migrants and Indigenous people, as a tool to ensure “settler futures” (17). While it is undeniable that PTD is designed to deter migrants, the Sonoran Desert does not only act as a “killing machine” or a landscape that facilitates death, disappearance, and destruction. It is not only, as Gilberto Rosas writes, a “treacherous geography.” The desert’s sacred energies are an unruly affront to enforcement agents who seek possession or mastery. Land is dizzying, dangerous, excessive, awe-inspiring, and life-threatening all at once. It is sacred and so it is mobile, shapeshifting and refusing to stay in place. This restlessness poses a threat to border enforcement. Land rebels, endlessly.

 

Suggested reading:

Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).

Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the Illegal Alien and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge: 2002).

Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

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Barbara Sostaita
Barbara Sostaita (she/ella) is a scholar of religion and global migration, and an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her forthcoming book, Sanctuaries Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert, colludes with migrants melting the border’s steel bars through excess touch, artists summoning the migrant dead, and activists leaving water in the Sonoran Desert—in defiance of prevention through deterrence, in celebration of life that transgresses walls and bans.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Theories of Land


“Dead End” trail sign in Fossil Springs, Arizona. Image credit: Flickr User Al_HikesAZ. CC BY-NC 2.0.

What does it mean to treat a piece of land as someone’s home? Can home be reduced to property? Can the sacred be owned? Do conceptualizations of land as wilderness exclude human inhabitants? Does the value of land vary according to whom it “belongs”? Should land be “productive” for human beings, and if so, how should the productive value of land be determined? How should the goods of the land—minerals, foodstuffs, natural materials—be valued, obtained, or preserved? The answers to these questions depend on how we understand land in general, as well as how we understand certain places in particular.

Texts from different disciplines—legal, religious, literary, ethnographic—offer competing theories of land. Land is often rendered as property and commodity, but it can also be protected or preserved as having cultural significance or as wilderness. The term “Mother Earth” suggests a kinship relationship between us humans and the land, and Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ refers to the land as our shared home. Can such divergent theories of land coexist or are they mutually exclusive? If these theories of land are competing and mutually exclusive—some argue the sacred cannot and should not be owned by humans; land that is cultivated as home is not wild anymore—which are most suited to address the ethical and political questions that present environmental crises pose to our collective well-being?

These questions touch on intimately cultural matters, evoking how different communities conceptualize themselves and how such conceptualizations relate to land. These questions are not new. Ancient Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle asked about the essence of the earth, and early modern political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau grounded their social contract theories in the valorization of agricultural cultivation and its relation to private property. The new politics imagined by Enlightenment thinkers paved the way for European projects of colonialism and capitalism, bringing all land everywhere under the power of possession. Alternatives to and critiques of colonial theories of land abound: from the kinship models of humans in relation to land found among many Indigenous peoples, to the agricultural commune movements of the nineteenth century; from the anti-imperial communisms of the twentieth century to the radical environmentalists of the twenty-first century.

Many contemporary philosophers, scholars, and authors share these concerns and propose scientific, political, and social critiques and solutions to our environmental crisis. These critical discourses and proposed solutions have at their basis a theory of land.

This symposium emerged from a working group funded by the Social Science Research Council. An interdisciplinary group of ten scholars—all interested in religion but also in geography, Indigenous studies, Black studies, Latin American studies, law, and anthropology—got together to discuss theories of land over the course of one year. We read texts of legal theory, environmental humanities, environmental science, political theory, and ethnography, and we discussed the question of what academics who care about land, the natural environment, and ultimately, about environmental justice, can bring to the table when what we do is theorize but what we need, what the land needs, is very practical.

The interdisciplinary collection of authors we have read together each offers a different theory of land. While author Amitav Ghosh argues that our environmental crisis is the result of our colonial view of the land as resource, Red River Métis environmental scientist Max Liboiron reminds us that we treat the land as resource, and that we assume access to Native land, not only when we pollute, but also when we recycle. While ethnographer Keisha-Khan Perry reminds us that it is often Black women who are at the forefront of land rights and racial justice struggles (in Brazil and elsewhere), and that we tend to invisiblize them, political theorist Robert Nichols argues that the notion of land rights is based on a settler colonial understanding of land as property. Geographer Nicolas Howe tells us that if we focus on our relationship with land as landscape, as something that we look at, we can learn as much about ourselves as we will about the land. What we learn will have both legal and religious implications. Ethnographer Marisol de la Cadena pushes us to consider the ethical and political implications of our interdependence with the land. Finally, Indigenous studies scholar Candace Fujikane offers a Kanaka Maoli idea of abundance, a radical approach to land in the face of capitalist notions of scarcity.

Though we came together to discuss theory, our conversations often revolved around method as well. What can religious studies scholars who care about land learn from other disciplines? And how can we learn from other disciplines without being extractive? It turns out that what is true about being in good relations with the land (you should not be extractive, which means that you shouldn’t treat the land as commodity) is also true about knowledge (you shouldn’t read texts only as sources to cite). So, can we learn things from other scholars, especially Indigenous scholars, without extracting knowledge from them? One thing some of us kept insisting on is that it is not theorists who can help make our land relations better; rather, it is communities on the ground who can help us theorize better: Black women fighting for land rights in Colombia, Ohlone peoples fighting for #LandBack in California, first-generation college students. We need to take these communities’ lived experiences into account when we work to decolonize the Catholic Church or the land-grab university. Indeed, we need to listen to the land itself—the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the Sonoran Desert—in order to theorize better, in order to live better.

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Dana Lloyd
Dana Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and affiliated faculty at the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University. Her first book, Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites, is forthcoming this fall from University Press of Kansas. 
Theorizing Modernities article

The Personal and Political Gendering of Black Love


Front page of May 4, 1968 edition of The Black Panther Party community news service. Image Credit: Flickr User Thomas Hawk. CC BY-NC 2.0.

When I teach classes on ethics to my graduate and seminary students, I routinely explain that I want them to include a respectful affirmation of human worth and dignity as a core dimension of the vision for ethical human communities that they espouse. I insistently tell them that such an affirmation should be explicit in the ethical leadership they offer in their professional and ministry settings. Then I usually punctuate my insistence with a slightly overdramatic warning that in actuality I will expect them to develop a much more substantive moral vision for human social relationships and ethical leadership practices than the minimal baseline requirement of a respectful affirmation of human worth and dignity. After reading Vincent W. Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination I have come to realize the wrongheadedness in this warning to my students. Lloyd’s meticulous, in-depth exploration of the ideas and lived politics required for an authentic definition of dignity proves me shamefully mistaken in so dismissively and unilaterally claiming the insufficiency of an ethic that solely attends to human dignity. I am particularly drawn to Lloyd’s analysis of Black love as a crucial contributor to that definition of dignity and how it incorporates the politics of gender and sexuality, although I differ on his deployment of the ideas of Black nationalist Eldridge Cleaver as a useful resource for envisioning Black dignity.

I first want to note how this text startles me over and over again with its skillful art of interpretation of fundamental moral notions that range from benchmark concepts in social and philosophical ethics such as hope, family, and freedom, to its excavation of recent cultural theories of multiculturalism, Afropessimism, and rage. Always in service of illumining the meanings of Black dignity, these concepts are analytically contextualized within Black thought and activism. The conversation between theory and activist practice flows in a synergistic relatedness that demonstrates their complete interdependence and, at times, renders them indistinguishable from each other. A steady unraveling of the meaning of human dignity does not occur in this contextualized Black theory-practice treatment of constituent elements of human dignity. Lloyd veers away from a standard academic mode of engagement to which one might be accustomed. This form of engagement is usually composed of a series of intellectually dismembering critiques that are placed on display. It can leave the reader with the task of trying to knit all of the unraveled concepts back together in order to glimpse the whole of Black dignity as a static social good. Instead, Lloyd creatively reveals Black dignity as social movement work, more precisely, as Black freedom movement work.

The notion of love serves as one example of a core conceptualization that reveals Black dignity. Black love provides evidence of Black dignity, Lloyd argues. I have chosen the example of love because of its ubiquity both in my field of Christian ethics and in the language of activist leaders of several of the contemporary social justice movements I frequent. Declarations about the need for love are often asserted by those leaders as they try to respond to the dire consequences for so many in our communities of proliferating, hate-filled right-wing Christian political agendas. It is difficult to overstate my concern about the ways in which claims of love can function in U.S. public life to diminish attention to abuses of power and sustain a diversity of dangerous Christian hypocrisies, such as in situations of domestic violence, clergy sexual abuse, or idolatrous love of nation used as an excuse to legislatively terrorize transgender children.

In its dynamic reveals of Black dignity, Black love emerges as a struggle for freedom that Lloyd grounds in the message of Martin Luther King, Jr., “a prophet of love” (58), together with ideas from Black power advocates Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson. Although it primarily focuses on these figures, the chapter on love also analyzes other approaches, such as those from Black feminists Audre Lorde and Alice Walker and Black nationalist activist Assata Shakur, as well as Black feminist bell hooks in other sections of the book. The text presents a range of examples from King accompanied by correctives of simplistic readings of him. The discussion of King enables us to focus on the ways in which Black love requires both the necessary constraints of justice and the primacy of struggling for freedom in order to further the process of Black dignity. I experience relief and deep gratitude for Lloyd’s emphasis on how love talk—especially when King is invoked—can drain away any authentic moral meaning and exasperatingly implant a false sense that political injustices are easily resolved if we just love one another. For King, as Lloyd stresses, justice functions as a necessary corrective dimension of love. The contrast between King’s Christian views and the Black power positions of Cleaver and Jackson are narrated as part of a particular historical context rather than represented as a destructive rivalry. For Cleaver and Jackson, “Black love requires a hard break from wrongly ordered loves” (66) that are rooted in anti-Black racist and capitalist domination.

I experience relief and deep gratitude for Lloyd’s emphasis on how love talk—especially when King is invoked—can drain away any authentic moral meaning and exasperatingly implant a false sense that political injustices are easily resolved if we just love one another.

It is the sexual politics of the “wrongly ordered loves” of Cleaver and others in that 1960s Black nationalist movement that I find extremely troubling. Lloyd bravely engages their sexual politics but may underestimate the misogyny there and how it undermines Black dignity. He points out Cleaver’s focus on White women and his love for his White woman attorney that are articulated in Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and written from his prison cell. As Lloyd explains, Cleaver’s confrontation with how his own loves were disordered involved shifting away from advocating the rape of White women as an important political tool against the White man. For me, Lloyd’s understanding of Cleaver’s assaults as disorder or wrongly ordered love is not a fitting description. I am mindful of how at the beginning of Soul on Ice Cleaver admits to perfecting his technique as a rapist by attacking Black women before he moved on to White women. There is also a long allegorical section at the conclusion of the book with admissions of brutality against Black women by an “Accused” Black man. Simultaneously, in this concluding allegorical section, Black women are depicted as culpable in the abuse they receive because of the multiple ways they supposedly provoke it, such as their alleged love of White men and concerted betrayals of Black men.

Although these examples are not included in Lloyd’s account of the ideas about Black love that Cleaver’s Soul on Ice contributes to Black dignity, they are relevant to the issues of gender, sexual politics, and freedom that he invites us to engage. I am deeply appreciative of the subtle yet profound repudiation of the dignity-denying racism of mass incarceration in how Lloyd compels us to think about freedom through the lenses of someone who is in prison. Cleaver’s perspective may exemplify the struggle for freedom from anti-Black racist and capitalist domination. But it also stresses a certain kind of domination of Black women by maintaining a Black androcentric worldview as freeing. While I must reiterate that Cleaver does eventually disavow rape, I find that I cannot stop thinking about the Black women on whom Cleaver practiced his tactics of rape. I am also stuck on my disdain for the idea that a love letter to a White woman lawyer addresses the impact of the rapes he carried out against White women after practicing on Black women. The significance of the misogyny in Soul on Ice lies not merely in what Cleaver fails to express about his impact on the lives of the women he sexually assaulted, or includes in his portrayal of women as blameworthy for intimate abuse. The consequences stretch beyond the words uttered in Cleaver’s gendered, homophobic rantings about “the Black homosexual” in his critiques of Black novelist and activist James Baldwin. The reinforcement of this misogyny must be interrupted because of the wide influence of this Black manifesto within Black political culture, history, and studies. Lloyd’s discussion of it as a resource for understanding how Black love informs Black dignity motivates me even as I strongly differ on this point. It reminds me of the urgency to interrupt the misogyny in certain iconic Black power paradigms that prove how the personal is so very political when the history of Black thought and activism are constructively engaged.

Cleaver’s perspective may exemplify the struggle for freedom from anti-Black racist and capitalist domination. But it also stresses a certain kind of domination of Black women by maintaining a black androcentric worldview as freeing.

Lloyd’s intellectually provocative and complex social analysis of love will not allow me to stop probing and revisiting an understanding of how freedom practices inform Black dignity movement work. How do we count the gender justice costs in the struggles of that movement work? More importantly, when do we identify some of those costs as too high to be included in the process of how Black love constitutes Black human dignity? These questions represent the kinds of opportunities to wrestle with deep and contextualized meanings of human dignity that I am now excited to centralize in my teaching of ethics. Indeed, I look forward to addressing their wide-ranging gender and sexuality implications in my classes, particularly with my Black and Brown students in a state prison for men where I routinely teach. We often discuss moral conceptualizations in Black thought and activism. Undoubtedly, as we do so, there are opportunities to experiment with how freedom from domination might be embodied in our classroom interactions. Honestly, however, I must admit that I am not sure of the precise steps to take to authentically claim Black human dignity as Black freedom movement work at the center of our theory-practice learning in that male prison space. But I know that the students and I are committed to figuring it out, and I am methodologically inspired by Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination in such a pursuit.

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Traci C. West
Traci C. West is a scholar-activist serving as James W. Pearsall Professor of Christian Social Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School (NJ). Her teaching, research, and activism focus on gender, racial, and sexuality justice, particularly related to gender violence. In addition to many articles and book chapters, she is the author of Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence (2019) and Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women's Lives Matter (2006). She has also been appointed to the Professor Extraordinarius program of the Institute for Gender Studies in the College of Human Sciences, University of South Africa.
Theorizing Modernities article

Struggling Against Domination: The Ontology of Black Life Everywhere


Signs from the Apartheid era indicating separate entrances for “Whites” and “Non-Whites” in Johannesburg, South Africa. Via Flickr User DJM photos. CC BY 2.0.

As a scholar of religion and politics interested in issues of race, religion, and gender, I found a compelling conceptual distinction in Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination that I believe can be useful beyond the United States (US) context from which Lloyd writes. This is the distinction between oppression and domination. In a subtle swipe (intentional or not) at Iris Marion Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression” Lloyd notes that “domination points to an ontological condition, rooted in its primal scene, whereas concepts like oppression, suffering, exploitation, injustice, and marginalization point to ontic conditions, specific harms in the world” (13). This is not to say that the ontic is therefore immaterial, but that we can’t rely only on it to point to the complex ways in which Black people continue to suffer under the regime of anti-Blackness. Consequently, Lloyd’s reading of the Black Lives Matter movement through a concern with the ontological dimension of domination as “an expansive apparatus” serves to demonstrate that anti-Blackness persists in the “ideas, habits, feelings, institutions, and laws” of American society (12). However, I would add that this is not only the case in the US, but everywhere, including places where the majority of the population is Black. That is, anti-Blackness is a borderless ontological condition that is bound by the geography of Whiteness to which even people of Color (including Black people) sometimes subscribe. Thus, in supporting the book’s big claim that the struggle for Black Dignity is the pursuit of a denied status that can only be realized through the struggle to achieve it (5), Lloyd critiques not only White multiculturalism but also the politics of Black respectability. In Lloyd’s view, the struggle to achieve Black Dignity cannot be fulfilled through the individualistic and myopic politics of multiculturalism and respectability. That is, the antidote to this form of politics is collective action.

In South Africa, where I work as an academic and which is also one of the two places I call home (the other being Canada), there is a common refrain from the White enclave (both liberal and conservative) that Black South Africans should stop blaming apartheid for their current condition since we have had freedom for over twenty-six years. From Lloyd’s perspective, the conditions of anti-Blackness continue beyond the overt system of apartheid in South Africa precisely because the ontological conditions that perpetuate anti-Black racism have continued unabated. Bouts of overt racism in the country, according to the logic of domination, are only more visible manifestations of the deeper reality of marginalization. According to Lloyd, these examples of overt racism illustrate is the fact that “anti-Black racism is not just about bad choices, or about people who failed their diversity exam. It is at the center of everything, for everyone” (xi). This means that Black people everywhere, everyday are being disappeared from spaces where their dignity is not recognized, even when they try to play by the books and be “respectable.” Whether it is at a school, university sports field, corporate office, public park, restaurant, farm, or private home, to name just a few, to be Black is to be denied dignity, full stop. Moreover, anti-Black racism is not just about Black people, but about everyone because we all participate in domination.

Anti-Blackness is a borderless ontological condition that is bound by the geography of Whiteness to which even people of Color (including Black people) sometimes subscribe.

As such, in the context of the US, according to Lloyd, what the Black Lives Matter movement has chosen to do in response to this denial of dignity is to channel Black Rage and Black Love, redefine Black Family, and use Black Magic, all in the pursuit of Black Futures. Lloyd organizes the chapters of his book around these topics. Of particular interest is the observation that, instead of hope, “those who struggle for Black justice today talk about Black Futures, a label that joins a sense of the anti-Black world’s demise and the imperative to imagine radically new ways of living together” (96). While Black Futures might sound utopian, their orientation is anything but; fueled, as it is, by the rage of ending domination and instituting the end of the world. In the South African context, one is reminded of Steve Biko’s critique of liberal assimilation, especially the assumption that nothing is really wrong with South Africa except for the lack of integration of everyone into the same system. That is, colonialism and apartheid were merely the bad fruits of what should have been Black people’s good encounter with White European civilization. From the perspective of the liberal enclave, apartheid, in particular, hindered the supposed Edenic system of governance that should have been the result of European modernity brought to Africa. Western modernity was a good thing, but it was the Afrikaans White nationalists who spoiled everything. Therefore, all that needed to happen, instead, was to remove the bad ailments of White nationalism. Of course, this view failed to account for how the whole civilizational mission of Europe had obliterated Black South Africans out of humanity—out of dignity.

Therefore, for Biko, Black Consciousness was the answer to the domination assailing Black people from the sides of both the conservative and liberal enclaves, which treated Black people paternalistically and without dignity. Hence, when Chumani Maxwele threw human feces at the statue of Cecil Rhodes on March 9, 2015, it clearly demonstrated the indignity that Black people of South Africa feel they are being subjected to each and every day; White arrogance everywhere. While Maxwele might be singled out for his act that spawned a whole set of events, now labelled Fallism, he did not act alone. He was supported by a whole community of Black students, scholars, activists, and White allies who, although out of view, were very much central to the enactment of the shared desire to be free from the monumental White arrogance represented by the statue of Rhodes, among many others, thus pointing us back to Lloyd’s argument concerning the importance of collective action in the pursuit of dignity.

For Lloyd, “if hope cannot be shared, it is mere desire, what one individual covets” (103). Thus, the only way for Black people to achieve freedom and, consequently, dignity, is by acting collectively. The Fallist movements in South Africa (#RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall) were an example of such collective action, including what it can achieve now and in the future. This collective action is also what Biko called for when he and his colleagues challenged White liberalism in all its forms and showed how it was beholden to the same anti-Black domination model as its conservative counterpart. In calling for self-reflection on the part of Black people regarding their own condition of consciousness about being dominated, Biko demonstrated the kind of dignity that Lloyd points out in relation to some key figures of the Black American Tradition, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglas, whom he wrestles from the grip of Black respectability and White multiculturalism.

A protester wearing a Black Lives Matter mask outside the Hennepin County Courthouse in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota as the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin begins. Image courtesey of Flickr User Lorie Shaull. CC BY 2.0

As is evident from this reflection on Black Dignity thus far, there are several intersecting themes and concerns that the book covers. At times, it feels like the connections between chapters are neither strong nor well clarified (the logic of beginning with rage and ending with magic is never clarified); and that even some of the differences in ideological orientation are too stark and binary in their articulation (that between philosophers and social movement organizers, for example). However, in reading the book with patience, what appear as weaknesses actually reflect very principled methodological choices that remain true to the complex reality of pursuing Black dignity on the ground, and in a way that speaks to Lloyd’s engagement with the activists of the Black Lives Matter movement. That is, the struggle against domination and the pursuit of Black dignity are multiple in nature, and sometimes these struggles coalesce with other struggles, and sometimes these struggles bump heads. Lloyd makes this point evident in the ways in which he draws on contrapuntal examples of key Black leaders in the American context who might not seem to fit together (Martin Luther King, Jr. and Samuel R. Delany, for example), but when read together can be shown to be struggling against domination and concerned with the pursuit of Black dignity. For the reader, this means that in making sense of these struggles, including how they speak to domination, one has to make connections in a way that resonates with one’s reality. In other words, one has to engage in a process of discernment—i.e., struggle with oneself and others in line with the book’s argument that Black dignity arises out of struggle. In the case of King, Jr. versus Delany, for example, this means one has to appreciate their differences and understand their struggles contextually while embracing their thought collectively as part of the greater movement towards Black dignity. Moreover, if one is really committed to freedom and not domination, some stark binaries are necessary in order to name that which kills Black Dignity and affirm that which builds such dignity.

The only way for Black people to achieve freedom and, consequently, dignity, is by acting collectively.

In the end, Lloyd leaves us with a morsel of truth in classical philosophical style, but without the pretense of having given the Truth. And this is the observation that the pursuit of Black dignity may appear inchoate, confusing, tragic, and seemingly only reiterating that our struggle is in vain. But, as Lloyd writes: “Black people struggle, and this struggle is our dignity” (xiii). This statement is not to be taken lightly, because in its embracing of a negative, it affirms a key aspect of what the book highlights: “Black humanity and dignity requires Black political will and power” (21), a “new moral and political stance” (22). Such a stance is about foregrounding the precision of domination that has been perfected in anti-Blackness, even while we hold true the argument of interlocking systems of oppression. We do this because we have the most clarity about anti-Blackness the world over (14). Anti-Blackness informs not only the logic of racism globally (finding expression in places as varied as Brazil, India, South Africa, Tunisia, and Ukraine, to name just a few where expressions of anti-Black racism have recently surged), but also domination broadly.

However, this argument raises an important question for solidarity and collective action: Does this mean that for any other oppressed group, anti-Blackness is still the normative primal scene of domination? Here one can raise the issue of class, gender, and sex difference (amongst many others) as one of many primal scenes of domination for a specific set of people. However, I think that this would be to misunderstand Lloyd’s argument in the same way as those who misunderstand the Black Lives Matter movement as problematic because, in their view, all lives matter. Despite claims of equality and the dignity of all people, Black people continually find themselves in indignity, even where they constitute the majority. This can’t be mere coincidence, but an ontologically driven reality that requires that we rethink the dismissal of race politics as foundational to modern politics. That is, and this is a provocative claim: for Black people, collective action for dignity starts from our racialization. As those who are dominated, we are best positioned to articulate strategies and radical imaginations of anti-domination; collective anti-Black resistance against domination doesn’t have to be the terminal point, but it has to be a point of departure.

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Siphiwe Dube
Siphiwe Dube is a Senior Lecturer and former HoD in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is an author of numerous interdisciplinary articles and book chapters (and also supervises) on a range of topics covering African politics and religion, decoloniality, feminisms, post-colonial literature, race, religion and masculinities, religion and identity politics, religion and popular culture, and transitional justice. His current projects focus on African political theology, the religious New Right in post-apartheid South Africa, and a multi-institutional collaboration on rethinking liberation theologies. He is a United World College (Atlantic College) alumnus; a former NRF-DST Scarce Skills Development Postdoctoral Research Fellow; a former Africa Fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh; former Senior Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana, and currently a Pan-African Scientific Research Council Fellow and South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF) rated scholar.
Theorizing Modernities article

On the Kind of Life One Lives: Another Offering to All from #BlackLivesMatter


Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 1, 2015. Minneapolis students walked out of school and met at Martin Luther King Jr. park for a protest against police killings of black people. Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue. Via Flickr. CC BY-2.0.

Vincent W. Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination theorizes Black Lives Matter intellectual thought as activists’ pursuit of Black dignity and the ending of domination through a commitment to “dignity as struggle.” In this post, I present four observations about the work: (1) my reading of Black Dignity, (2) reflection on some insights and tensions of the book, (3) discussion of struggle as dignity in relation to Black religious consciousness, and (4) a view of the book’s challenge to readers.

I. One Reading of Black Dignity

Lloyd asserts that “struggle against racial domination is the paradigm of struggle—and Black dignity is the paradigm of dignity” (14). He contends that Black struggle is the preeminent form of struggle against domination. The will of Black people to struggle against the persistence of crushing anti-Blackness expresses dignity; and hence Black struggle is Black dignity. The emergence of this view in #BlackLivesMatter brought a new Black politics and a new political vocabulary. The vocabulary—particularly Black Rage, Black Love, Black Family, Black Futures, and Black Magic—reflects contemporary Black passion for freedom and overcomes the neutralizing, distracting language and busy work of “diversity, multiculturalism, racism, and nonviolence” (viii).

Black Dignity analyzes continuities and discontinuities of pre-#BlackLivesMatter activism with the current movement to identify the usefulness of ancestors’ practices. Selectivity in determining what is useful indicates a connection between intellectual thought and activism, revealing a BLM spirituality of reciprocating critical reflection and practice. The spirituality of Black dignity is a way of living; it seeks congruity of the world with BLM’s continually developing inner visions. Selecting the useful also is a signal of BLM activists’ engagement with diverse spiritual and religious traditions, which continues the legacy bricolage work in Afro-Atlantic ancestors’ religiosity.

II. Some Reflections

The approach of analyzing activists’ words and practices to discern their intellectual contributions is an important methodological practice. In addition to presenting a philosophical reading of BLM intellectual perspectives, Black Dignity offers a survey of the variety of ways BLM participants practice dignity as struggle. Accompanying the new intensity are new practices that centralize aesthetics, imagination, and more as activism. Lloyd is weary of identifying specific goals because ontic goals distract from ontological practice, tend toward reform, and may close or distort visions of the final, not yet imagined, although impossible to achieve, future end to all domination.

The spirituality of Black dignity is a way of living; it seeks congruity of the world with BLM’s continually developing inner visions.

Black Dignity notes women’s prominent BLM leadership and parallels that recognition by including Black women scholars to theorize BLM commitments and practice. In addition to others, Black Dignity draws deeply on Audre Lorde to explicate Black rage and to affirm Black family structures that break apart the nuclear family as the norm for familial intimacy and to release legitimate Black family from patriarchy and respectability’s debilitating restrictions. Some themes of Black Dignity—the quasi-eschatological emphasis on ontological struggle toward an impossibility; the comparability of domination throughout the world from the beginning of time with the traditional western conception of sin; the privileging of “creeds” for establishing Black religious norms—may cause some readers to liken Black Dignity’s theoretical constructions to Christian doctrine. In the latter case, Black Dignity’s argument that Black struggle against domination (actions based on political orientation) contradicts its presentation of Black liberation theology: “This tendency to focus on actions and political orientations rather than creeds left Black liberation theology vulnerable to co-optation during the era of multiculturalism.” (125)

III. Struggle as Dignity and Black Religious Consciousness

There is a similarity in the specific spirituality animating BLM struggle and Black religious consciousness. I understand the origin of Black spirituality to be the legacy of enslaved Africans’ identities as persons in communities that made personhood possible, ubuntu. During the Middle Passage, Africans remembered themselves as persons in communities and encountered that memory as a sense of the sacred during unimaginable horrors. In Ellipsis…The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long, Long suggests, in their imaginations, Africans turned toward the sacred as a defining reality other than the total domination of being chained as not-humans at the bottoms of commercial ships.[1] The intellectual labor of remembering and maintaining conceptions of themselves as persons is central to Black religious consciousness, a disposition sustained and enacted in every objection, every form of resistance, every melody, thought, or gesture that expresses Black personality. Religious consciousness is a sense of the self as inviolable and an arbiter of values in the world, including awareness of one’s deep concerns and ultimate affections. Black religious consciousness includes an oppositional disposition and actions related to anti-Black discourses and practices that inhibit being Black persons in the world. Without and within Black religions—in blues lyrics and performances, in Civil Rights Movement organizing, in objection to the back of the bus, in marching through vicious crowds to integrate schools, in the communal rescue of persons needing support, in refusals to be blamed, in wearing braids and beads—Black people enact the personal and communal virtue of Black religious consciousness every day.

Black Lives Matter mural in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Black Dignity’s presentation of enacting dignity now by relying on “divine power…manifesting inside” resonates with the sense of the sacred in everyday Black religious consciousness. Black Dignity’s use of Lorde to emphasize the foretaste of freedom and power experienced during struggle with others in love also resonates with William R. Jones’s humanistic theology that affirms the energy generated through intense collaborative action and with the esprit de corps of the Black religious consciousness that many Black women drew on and cultivated during the Civil Rights Movement. Some womanist theologians and Black feminist scholars theorize this often-overlooked relational work of Black women as invisible dignity and unshouted courage (Katie Cannon), an ethic of intragroup social responsibility (Marcia Riggs), and enslaved Black women’s labor of care (Angela Davis). Some Black women religious scholars draw on Alice Walker’s term womanist (identifying courageous, willful, responsible, in charge, serious behaviors) to name their work. Like Black theologies, womanist and other liberation theologies emerged amidst and after mid-20th century resistance movements across the globe to analyze that resistance work. Similar to Lloyd theorizing BLM intellectual thought, much liberationist scholarship is drawn from activism and offers theoretical insights for living faithfully against the grain of domination.

Black religious consciousness includes an oppositional disposition and actions related to anti-Black discourses and practices that inhibit being Black persons in the world. Without and within Black religions Black people enact the personal and communal virtue of Black religious consciousness every day.

Although sometimes over-determined by Christian traditions, liberation thought of the late mid-20th century also pushed down walls of the dominating Christian orthodoxies that purportedly secularized the world, weaponized syncretism to forbid engaging Indigenous traditions, forbade full human communion with Muslims and persons in other traditions, and required respectability practices. Black women excelled in challenging these orthodoxies. Their religious consciousness in historic and contemporary activism and literature often enacts Black women’s religious consciousness as the living-against-the-grain required to pursue free, full, flourishing human life. Related to the dis-ease of Black religious consciousness with dividing life into sacred and secular realms, some contemporary womanist scholarship rejects separation of flourishing human life from living against the grain of domination. This is Tricia Hersey’s assertion in Rest Is Resistance. There is resonance, again, in Black Dignity’s description of flourishing in struggle.

IV. The Kind of Life One Lives

Black Dignity’s assertion that anti-Black racism “is at the center of everything, for everyone” offers an opening to reflect on the kind of life one lives. At a time when grab-all-you-can by any means available is stridently normalized as exemplary, Black Dignity provides a different view of the exemplary: Dignity is the use of intellectual and physical capacities for an ontological purpose. In a world structured by domination, living purposefully requires intense, conscious action with others fueled by rage, love, and family to imagine the end of domination. Although there is no road map—”the deepest kind of flourishing we can experience … cannot be achieved by following certain moral rules or copying certain moral habits” (159)—Black Dignity’s logical reasoning invites us to adopt its view of living. Identifying struggle as accompanying “the deepest kind of flourishing” possible centralizes a type of human thriving that is purposeful, encourages creativity, affirms being in touch with one’s passions (rage and love), takes account of human embodiment as both frail and a host of divine power, and as something that exists in community. If the proposition is accepted that domination has so colored visions of the world that most human time is spent accommodating domination, a central task of the commitment to being free humans is to change that worldview. Domination’s overwhelming hold means, as Lloyd writes, “To see and act rightly, to realize our humanity, we must believe we will be free and struggle to achieve our freedom” (104). The emphasis on “struggle” clarifies the idea of belief as something other than hope (for pie in the sky), because living a life of struggle is directed by the belief that there can be freedom and the sense of the future as intertwined with passionate pursuit of that to which one is ultimately committed.

[1] See Charles H. Long, Ellipsis…The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long, 280. Long writes: “The Middle Passage—chained enslaved Africans in the holds of several ships of every Atlantic maritime nation—is never forgotten by the Africans, neither during slavery nor in freedom. The watery passage of the Atlantic, that fearsome journey, that cataclysm of modernity, has served as a mnemonic structure, evoking a memory that forms the disjunctive and involuntary presence of these Africans in the Atlantic world. From this perspective, religion is not a cultural system, much less rituals or performance, nor a theological language, but an orientation, a basic turning of the soul toward another defining reality.”

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Rosetta Ross
Rosetta E. Ross is a professor of religious studies at Spelman College. She pioneered scholarship on religion and U.S. Black women’s activism and was an early proponent of womanist theology. At Spelman, Ross transformed the study of religion from exclusive focus on Christian theology to a diverse religious studies curriculum. Her research explores religious consciousness in Black women’s social action, and Africana women and religions. Author of Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights, co-author of The Status of Racial and Ethnic Clergywomen in the United Methodist Church (with Jung Ha Kim), co-editor of Unraveling and Reweaving Sacred Canon in Africana Womanhood (with Rose Mary Amenga-Etego), Ross is co-PI (with Monique Moultrie) on the Henry Luce Foundation funded Garden Initiative for Black Women’s Religious Activism. Her current research project is Black Religious Consciousness and Women in the NAACP, 1927 to 1979. Ross is founding editor of the peer-reviewed e-journal Black Women and Religious Cultures.
Theorizing Modernities article

Zionism and the Politics of Domination: On Protest, Liberty, and the Status Quo


A young man is taking into police custody following during a protest against a parade in Jerusalem on “the Day of Unification” during which anti-Arab slogans were chanted by marchers. Via Flickr User Tal King. CC BY-NC 2.0.

The history of human civilization is a history of domination. Perhaps it began with Cain and Abel, or maybe the serpent and Eve, but in any case, it has continued ever since. Human conflict is almost always rooted in the struggle of those who are dominated against their domination, and then against those who are against domination. To be dominated is not only to be without rights, or to be denied goods and services; it is to live under domination and to be robbed of dignity. It is an erasure of selfhood and self-worth. This underlies the argument in Vincent Lloyd’s excellent new book Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Lloyd lays out the way Blackness and anti-Blackness in America, from Civil Rights to Black Nationalism, from Afropessimism to Black Optimism, all constitute a struggle to achieve dignity where dignity is denied—and for Black people in America dignity is always denied, even when a Black man becomes president.

Dignity and Respectability

At the outset, Lloyd draws an important distinction between dignity and respectability. “Respectability,” he argues, “is the illusion of dignity.” “Ordinary language often treats ‘dignity’ and ‘respectability’ as interchangeable, yet from the movement perspective, dignity is laudable, respectability indictable. The latter connotes an attempt to perform for a white audience, fulfilling white fantasies of how ‘good’ Black people look and act” (5). Lloyd brings an example of the unconscious way that Joe Biden, as a vice presidential candidate, defined his soon-to-be boss, a Black man, as “clean and articulate” (5). That is, respectable (from the White man’s gaze). That is not dignity. Liberalism, Lloyd argues, and I agree, does not really grant Black people dignity, even as it may aspire to grant them respectability, and even equality. This is why Martin Luther King Jr. was so suspicious of White liberals whose “love of Blacks” may have been, even inadvertently, a “false love.” Lloyd writes, “The love that some of those subject to domination purport to have for the things most associated with their own domination may also prove a false love” (64). One can love those one dominates, but such love does not grant dignity, it rather controls access to society. This is because dignity is a revolutionary struggle against domination, and thus against society, which is why Lloyd provocatively claims that Black Lives Matter (or BLM) does not emerge from multiculturalism but is a rejection of it. As Lloyd sees it, “multiculturalism arose out of a desire to institutionalize—and, consciously or not, contain and control—struggles for racial justice…it is about managing diversity by reducing political claims about domination to claims about the need to recognize and celebrate diverse cultures” (18). It can be likened to the term “civilized,” which Jewish Studies scholar Harry Wolfson noted is not to be legitimized as much as to be “Christianized.”

Black Dignity, Domination, and Zionism

Reading Black Dignity I kept coming back to the question of Zionism and Israel/Palestine, which is a very different conflict. It is one that also revolves around, as most conflicts do, domination. Zionism arguably began as a movement against domination: the domination of Jews in Europe who no longer wanted to live under the aegis of a White Christian society that dominated them, often brutally. Zionism was one answer to the “Jewish Question,”—as Theodore Herzl famously wrote in his 1897 essay “The Jewish Question”—which on one reading is a question of perennial domination, the plight of the unassimilable other. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Immanuel Kant referred to the unassimilable Jews as “the Palestinians among us” (100). So, Zionism was, on this reading, a revolt against European Christian domination. And by escaping the “Jewish Question” they created the “Arab Question,” and many early Zionists knew that when they coined the term “the Arab Question.” That is, by becoming liberated from domination, they became dominators. Was this inevitable? My answer is an equivocal yes, except among very few such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, as well as others such as Hayyim ben Kiki (1889-1936), who understood the dangers of domination, and warned Zionist leaders against it, to no avail.

Having said that, the early Zionists in Palestine were the distinct minority, and domination is often, but not always, the privilege of the majority (the classic counter example being South Africa and colonialism more generally). And yes, as Jonathan Graubart notes in his new book Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism, “long before the Biltmore declaration (1942) or even the Peel Commission (1936), the Zionist movement had declared and implemented a set of policies aimed to bring Jewish predominance and diminish the status of the majority indigenous population…. The leaders’ primary concern was Jewish predominance, not a shared space with Palestinians” (21). Domination which required a demographic project of becoming a majority through settler colonial mechanisms, and not equal co-existence, may not have been operational in pre-state Mandate Palestine but it was arguably aspirational, as Alon Confino recently argued in his essay “The Nakba and the Zionist Dream of an Ethnonational State.” Dominance needn’t be violent, in many cases it is institutional and structural, it is the way a population with power treats a population under its power. And yet, as Lloyd riffs on Lauryn Hill’s 2012 song “Black Rage,” “at its heart [domination] is about violence to souls, about making a human believe she is actually less than human, about making domination seem right and natural” (40). In the language of Afropessimism, borrowing a term from sociologist Orlando Peterson, it is about “social death.”

Naturalizing Domination

Domination often hides behind the veil of “security,” making it “unfortunate” but “necessary.”  This is true of American anti-Blackness. Here we can think of Black men being seen as threatening to White women (or their White husbands) in the Jim Crow south, the urban ghetto as a hotbed of crime—potential and actual—that required increased measures of policing and security. In Israel/Palestine domination is programmatically justified by security. But of course, there is both a real concern and a circularity to the argument. Security is a subjective category, it depends upon who is defining an imminent threat and who is able to question it. And domination itself procures the rage that makes the dominated more threatening. One need only view the film The Battle of Algiers to see how this plays out in horrific ways under a regime of domination. And as James Baldwin said in a 1961 interview, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time—and part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance.” Insubordination doesn’t exist before subordination, it is produced by it. The real question about the Intifada that broke out in Israel in 1989, after twenty years of occupation, and forty years since the Nakba, is not why it happened, but why it took so long to happen.

Security is a subjective category, it depends upon who is defining an imminent threat and who is able to question it. And domination itself procures the rage that makes the dominated more threatening.

Lloyd tells us, “Domination tells a false story, and it contaminates our perception to make that story seem true” (159). As I see it, Zionism as it is being lived today in Israel and promoted in the diasporas, largely tells a false story. Or, perhaps, it is a distortion of a true story. Zionism may have been a necessary solution to an intractable problem of European Jewry. But a solution to domination is not domination. Many early Zionists understood the precarity of the “Arab Question,” or perhaps today we might call it the “Palestinian Question,” even claiming that the success or failure of Zionism depended on how it was addressed. But the “Arab Question” is hardly talked about these days. Domination has become so institutionalized and structurally embedded in Israeli society that the question itself has all but disappeared. There still may be a question about how to deal with, manage, or resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict, but the “Arab Question” within Zionism has largely become moot. Zionism as lived in the state of Israel is a form of Jewish domination, even in benevolent terms. Among many Israeli Jews, there is no “Arab Question” anymore.

Reframing the Question of Zionism

In the early days of Zionism there was a category called “the good Arab.” The good Arab, not unlike America’s Uncle Tom, was not “good” because they were unthreatening but good because they succumbed to domination. As Hillel Cohen writes in his 2010 book Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967, “The aspiration was to reshape Arab consciousness and identity in accordance with the hegemonic Israeli worldview by controlling society’s political discourse. Through its [Arab] loyalists, the state sought to indoctrinate Arab schoolchildren with the Zionist narrative…to promote obedience to the authorities, and to challenge non-Israeli national identities” (3). The “good Arab” is one who accepts Jewish domination and even protects it through collaboration.

Critics of Zionism often use negative terms to describe the relationship between the Jew and the Palestinian in Israel: Jewish superiority, Jewish supremacy, Jewish chauvinism, ethnonationalism, etc. Defenders of Zionism often cry foul, claiming that these terms are derogatory, overly polemical, and misleading. I too have occasionally used such terms and I think they apply to some extent, knowing their complexity but also frustrated with how to describe a reality of systemic injustice. This is one reason I found Lloyd’s book so helpful. Lloyd seeks to re-frame the question of anti-Blackness in America outside the common descriptors such as White supremacy, systemic racism, etc. He does not deny that they point toward something real, but also acknowledges that they do little to move the majority toward a real confrontation with the injustices the US perpetuates. Choosing the language of domination and dignity, less volatile but no less cutting, offers a different way to assess the reality in which we live.

Zionism as lived in the state of Israel is a form of Jewish domination, even in benevolent terms. Among many Israeli Jews, there is no ‘Arab Question’ anymore.

I think that domination and dignity are also useful terms to describe the situation of Palestinians in Israel. To illustrate the nature of domination of the Arab minoritized in Israel, Asa’d Ghanem in his 2010 essay “State and Minority in Israel: The Case of Ethnic State and the Predicament of its Minority,” offers a helpful distinction. The more common approach to the minoritized Arab in Israel, certainly among many Jewish Israelis and many scholars, is what Ghanem calls the “normal development approach.” As he writes, “this approach describes the development of the Palestinians in Israel as resembling that of other minorities in the Western democracies” (438). That is, since 1948 Palestinian Israelis have developed along two lines: Palestinization through an increasing identification with their belonging to the Palestinian people; and Israelization through their experience as Israeli citizens. In short, he states that many scholars suggest that Arabs in Israel are going through a process of normal development, including ethnic identity formation and integration into a wider society.

Ghanem contests this claim to suggest another approach, what he calls the “predicament development approach.” On this approach, Palestinian Israelis are not faced with a normal case of minority integration but are faced with “state policy that is rooted in the ‘settler society’ behavior, which characterizes the Jewish majority views and the state policy toward the Arab citizens” (444). In short, Palestinian Israelis confront state policies of domination that actually prevent, or at least dissuade, Israelization (unless they are willing to succumb to such domination). This pushes them further toward Palestinization, which can sometimes lead to radicalization and, even if it doesn’t, does lead to a sense of permanent marginalization, which is different than simply minority status. To those who would note that Palestinian Israelis enjoy increasing success in Israeli society, I would counter that may be so, but that is about respectability, and not dignity. It may be true that many Palestinian Israelis enjoy better lives than their Arab counterparts in other Arab countries. But that again is about respectability and not dignity. There is no dignity granted to a population living under domination; and domination remains the state policy in Israel, even codified into law in the 2018 Nation State Law that claimed that Israel is the state of the “Jewish people.” That is, Palestinian Israelis can live in Israel, they can be citizens of Israel, but Israel is not their country, it is the country of the Jewish people.

The Limits of Protest

This brings us to the Spring 2023 protests in Israel. The impending judicial “reforms” in Israel have ignited massive protests. This is because these reforms would erode the autonomy of the judiciary and thus the very existence of democracy. All of this is true and laudable and I support the protests. What the protests are not about though, or certainly not primarily about, is systemic Jewish domination. There may be many good reasons why the protest organizers chose to sideline the occupation; for example, their desire to create the broadest coalition possible. But in doing so they have chosen to leave the status quo of domination in place. Hopefully, these protests will pivot from the erosion of democracy for Jewish Israelis, to the limited democracy of Palestinian Israelis, and then to the lack of democracy for Palestinians living in the West Bank and those under blockade in Gaza. The hazard of such a pivot is that the protests may get much smaller because a true protest against the erosion of democracy will be a protest against a society of domination, what some Israelis might simply call “majoritarianism,” but what are more accurately described in my view as state polices of Jewish domination, even if enacted benevolently.

There is no dignity granted to a population living under domination; and domination remains the state policy in Israel, even codified into law in the 2018 Nation State Law that claimed that Israel is the state of the ‘Jewish people.’

Confronting domination, Lloyd argues, echoing Critical Race Theorists and many in the BLM movement, calls for societal revolution. Domination is not incrementally erased, in fact, incrementalism is often the enemy of the battle against domination. This is clear in Lloyd’s criticism of multiculturalism as a tool for muting calls for justice by regulating diversity. In this way, the protests, as constructive as they are, have exposed a deeper fissure in Israeli society, namely that Israel is a society where the Jewish majority structurally dominates the Arab minority in ways it is not willing to abandon. It is willing to grant respectability to the Arab, but not dignity. Of course, Jewish “majority” is itself a complicated term since it all depends on how one counts and how one relegates territory. If one includes the occupied territories and includes all its residents, most of whom are under Israeli sovereignty (perhaps excluding Gaza which is more complicated) then the Jewish majority largely collapses or is certainly greatly diminished. However, majoritarianism has been from the early days of Zionism the sine qua non of Zionism’s success and Israel functions politically and militarily as a majority even as its claim of majoritarianism is itself a product of domination.

What the protests show is that the “Arab Question” and the “good Arab” are largely things of the past. In fact, the protests are not really about the Palestinian at all even as we do see anti-occupation signs scattered throughout the crowd. They are largely about democracy for the Jew, which of course will impact the Arab. The settler state that has cultivated and continues to cultivate brutal domination over the Palestinian Israeli sector is now turning against the liberals, as should have been predicted. One should also mention the Mizrahi Left who have their own claims against the domination of the Ashkenazi-dominated government which, while not as extreme as it was during the Wali Salib protests in 1959 or the founding of the Israeli Black Panthers in the early 1970s, still remains a fissure in the Israeli social fabric.

The liberals are those who do not quite contest domination—they do not contest Zionism as an ideology of domination, which I believe it is—but seek respectability (yet not dignity) for their Palestinean neighbor. In this way, they have become the enemy of the brutality of domination exercised by the present far-right government, but also to some extent the enablers, and certainly the beneficiaries, of the structures of domination.

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Shaul Magid
Shaul Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and the Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His latest books are Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021), and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press). He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Black Dignity


Confronting the push and pull between theory and practice has long challenged scholars in the field of religion and humanities more broadly. Should we take what our interlocutors say at face value without critically questioning their claims? Or should we apply a scholarly apparatus that ignores the content of their claims and instead prioritizes our theoretical concepts, whether it be the idea of the social (Durkheim), power (Foucault), or linguistics (Derrida or Butler). These questions, for much of the past century, even when they are attempting to take interlocutors “on the ground” seriously, have been asked behind the walls of academic institutions. Here, in spaces saturated with the norms of Whiteness the privileged could debate epistemology while ignoring (or instrumentalizing) those who suffered. The scholarly gaze is almost always directed from on high down to the people below, marking empathy and critique equally as practices of the dominant.

In Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination, Vincent Lloyd reverses the scholarly gaze and attempts, as he puts it, “to sketch out the vision of today’s racial justice movement.” In doing so, he goes on to note, “I also think with that vision, probe it, and give it shape and coherence that I did not find in the words of movement participants even as I take those words as starting points” (viii). Here Lloyd attempts, from within the academy, to outline an approach to “the object of one’s study” that refuses abstraction and empty displays of empathy.

Lloyd’s book begins in the midst of struggle, not at its end or beginning. In the preface he describes his own path to engaging Black thought by reflecting on the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and his attempts to reckon with the movement that arose in that event’s wake. Through chapters conceptualizing Black rage, Black love, Back family, and Black magic, Lloyd thinks with the Movement for Black Lives, not as a singular moment in history, but as part of a tradition of engagement among Black thinkers and activists. The central feature of these chapters is the concept of Black dignity, which Lloyd defines as “the struggle against domination” (2). Dignity, for Lloyd, is a praxis rather than an essential aspect of identity; it is not fixed, it is found through struggle rather than preceding it or following it. Dignity is accompanied by a “moral vocabulary” that has been constructed over years of building movements in the struggle against domination. In Black rage, for example, we find anger multiplied because of the all-invasive nature of racist domination in our society. “Once we collectively attend to the uncomfortable truths [Black rage] reveals, we are moved to act together against those parts of the world that are built on lies” (54).

In the essays collected here, scholars reflect on the impact of Lloyd’s argument for those invested in struggles against domination in the communities in which they find themselves. Shaul Magid, for example, draws on Lloyd’s work to think through Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel. For Magid, Zionism mirrors anti-Blackness in the US by telling a false story to justify its dominance. It does so, further, in ways that continue to hide the deep and pervasive asymmetry in power that exists in Israel/Palestine today. Siphiwe Dube, meanwhile, takes Lloyd’s argument to his own South African context. Dube contends that the domination that Lloyd describes as present in the US is also present in South Africa and indeed many other countries with majority and minority Black populations. The antidote to this continued domination is collective action and active discernment by those involved in the struggle to meet the demands of the moment.

Rosetta Ross reflects on Lloyd’s emphasis on the voices of Black feminist and womanist scholars in his book and the way they help flesh out the parallels between his conceptualization of dignity and the concept of Black consciousness. Ross ends her piece by noting the impact of Lloyd’s work for imagining an everyday way of living that is responsive to the reality of domination. Traci C. West, finally, delves more deeply into Lloyd’s consideration of Black love, noting that the balancing of love with justice that Lloyd argues is required in the struggle against domination is one that corrects simplistic readings of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. She pushes Lloyd to further consider the misogyny of a figure like Eldridge Cleaver, who exercises an important influence in Black political movement spaces. She does so in the spirit of discernment that is characteristic of the way Lloyd approaches other figures in the book.

Weaving these various responses together is an abiding concern with rooting out domination where we find it and remaining relentless in our criticism of those people, institutions, and discourses, that would preserve it. As Lloyd remarks towards the end of the book, doing so requires not merely virtue, but a willingness to continually confront domination in our communities and in ourselves. We are called to an asceticism that refuses the comforts of domination. Here the rigors of the life of the cloistered monk who denies the pleasures of this world for the sanctity of another are reimagined towards a world without domination.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.