reading indigenous literature reminded me of one thing:

[highimpactsex]

white people talking shit about white people don't usually hit as hard as pocs and indigenous people talking shit about about white people. sometimes, they do but that's because they heavily rely on these literatures. this affects white leftist thinking too.

several reasons as to why:

• white academics don't always articulate imperialism, (settler) colonialism, capitalism, and so on in their criticisms
• white academics love to cite themselves because they center themselves as the site of Knowledge
• white thinkers love to reinvent the wheel and say they've come across something epic when marginalized communities already living in shit moments already have figured something out
• white leftists hate questioning themselves, their assumptions, etc. so they tend to actually espouse a liberal multiculturalism (why don't we all criticize together and get along)
• white men are an institution
• white writers envision utopias that displace people (let's make a socialist/anarchist utopia on this empty land that definitely doesn't have native communities!) instead of doing politics and dialog
• white people will recognize Shit is bad and they'll just fall back to platitudes like "i'm just doing my best as an individual" without accepting responsibility

i suspect much of the white resistance against abolitionism as a movement (even from leftists!) come from their reluctance to imagine a world where their privileges (which is a kind of white communism for the rich white people) will be shared with everyone else (an actual communism).

there's definitely some great white scholars i've been reading. but they'll also be the ones to not go #NotAllWhiteScholars because tbqh everything is good scholarship when you cite diversely and think about how (academic) knowledge production is not at all value-neutral. these thinkers are not afraid to be intersectional in how they understand race, sex, gender, colonialism etc.

and i recognize i'm part of the issue since subconsciously, i valorize white academics. even though i am primarily inspired by black radicalism and other cool stuff, i find myself reading white scholars. i only realized how bizarre it is as i tried to search for indigenous literature on settler colonialism. there's so many white people talking about indigenous people, some of them are pretty good (thinking of Scott L. Morgensen's works here) and others are just hmm questionable. i was familiar with the "politics of citation" but having to actually deal with this in crafting my proposal to write about settler colonialism in popular culture made me seriously rethink how i do shit.

like i recognize that if i don't include indigenous voices on the phenomena they're experiencing (settler colonialism), i'm just reinforcing the marginalization of their voices. gotta do better if i wanna be an accomplice, not an ally!

but i also don't want to sound like i'm doing diversity for the sake of diversity. that'd be too condescending. besides my misgivings on what i've been reading, i thought that the indigenous literature i've been reading are More On Point because -- again -- they are writing about the phenomena they're experiencing. no need to entirely depend to epic theory, it's all critical consciousness synthesized from observation and a little theory to guide the way.

indeed, i find critical indigenous literature far more interesting and worth my time than a lot of settler colonial studies i previously engaged in lol... same applies for disability justice, black radicalism etc. -- works of theory that come from those who are marginalized and therefore the most perceptive of their conditions!

anyway, check out Lee Maracle's I Am Woman, Nick Estes's Our History is the Future, Taiaiake Alfred's Peace, Power, Righteousness, and Glen Sean Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks. they're some good and inspiring shit. i'm also enjoying Aileen Moreton-Robinson's The White Possessive, a text i wish i had read for my dissertation on australia's handling of international students.

i would also recommend Unsettling America's primer on settler colonialism if you're interested in reading more about this. and i would be remiss not to link "Decolonization is not a metaphor" by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. after writing this post, i went hunting for more reads and found "Everyone Calls Themselves An Ally Until It Is Time To Do Some Real Ally Shit"

for many people incl myself, these reads will probably suck -- but they're all meant to unsettle you. i am personally learning a lot from reading this stuff and i wish i read them when i was younger and actually in academia. these writings are able to untangle my confusion with such precision. they're some seriously good shit.

p.s. man, i fucking hate white academia. what the fuck is my goddamn MSc Degree for International Relations with Honours is for if i haven't read a single work by an indigenous person?! i at least have one professor to thank for recommending me Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza but she's an actual activist-scholar. that's something i wanna do proper if i ever go back to academia.