Settler colonialism rests on the elimination of indigenous population--genocide, forced removal, confinement to reservations, assimilation. It creates a structure that persists to shape relations between the colonists and the colonized—only an alternative that dismantles those structures solve

I now turn to an exposition of settler colonialism as an alternative starting point for a framework that can generate a more historically and structurally grounded analysis of racial inequality in the United States, one that pays attention to variation across time and place while also being attentive to structures that link these differing cases. It is a framework that is amenable to intersectional understanding because it is widely understood that colonial projects simultaneously structure race, gender, class, and sexual relations within and between colonists and the colonized. Moreover, since settler colonial projects are transnational in scope, a settler colonialism framework invites investigation of cross-national connections and comparisons.

The concept of settler colonialism has been most clearly elaborated by scholars of indigenous studies, especially in Australia, Canada, and the United States. It is a framework that highlights commonalities in the history and contemporary situation of indigenous peoples in many parts of the world. However, although it may seem to be best suited to explain the racialization and treatment of indigenous peoples, I agree with Patrick Wolfe (1999) that settler colonialism should be seen not as an event but as an ongoing structure. The logic, tenets, and identities engendered by settler colonialism persist and continue to shape race, gender, class, and sexual formations into the present.

Scholars of settler colonialism argue that it is a distinct form of colonialism that needs to be theorized separately from colonialism more generally. In contrast to classic colonialism whose aim is to take advantage of resources that will benefit the metropole, settler colonialism’s objective is to acquire land so that colonists can settle permanently and form new communities. Lorenzo Veracini (2011) compares the narrative arc of classic colonialism and settler colonialism to the difference between a circle and a line. In classic colonialism, the narrative, as in the Odyssey, takes a circular form, “consisting of an outward movement followed by interaction with exotic and colonized ‘others’ in foreign surroundings, and by a final return to an original location” (p. 205). In contrast, “the narrative generally associated with settler colonial enterprises rather resembles the Aeneid, where the traveler moves forward along a story line that can’t be turned back” (p. 206). Settler colonists do not envision a return home. Rather, they seek to transform the new colony into “home.”

The differing goals of classic colonialism and settler colonialism lead to a second major difference: their confrontation with indigenes. In classic colonialism, the object is to exploit not only natural resources but also human resources. Native inhabitants represent a cheap labor source that can be harnessed to produce goods and extract materials for export to the metropole. They also serve as consumers, expanding the market for goods produced by the metropole and its other colonies. Goods and raw materials, like colonists, follow a circular path in classic colonialism.

In settler colonialism, the object is to acquire land and to gain control of resources. To realize these ambitions, the first thing that must be done is to eliminate the indigenous occupants of the land. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways: genocide, forced removal from territories desired by white settlers, and confinement to reservations outside the boundaries of white settlement. It can also be accomplished through assimilation. Assimilation can be biological (e.g., through intermarriage to “dilute” indigenous blood) and/or cultural (e.g., by stripping indigenes of their culture and replacing it with settler culture).

The second thing that must be done is to secure the land for settlers. This can be accomplished by imposing a modernist property regime that transforms land and resources (sometimes including people) into “things” that can be owned. This regime consists of such elements as mapping and marking boundaries to delimit an object that is to be owned, a system for recording ownership, and legal rules for ownership and sale of objects defined as property. Indigenous people generally understand the land and their relationship to it very differently, viewing themselves as being provided for by the land and in turn as living in harmony with the land and having a sense of responsibility for its welfare. Settler society does not recognize indigenous conceptions and from their own perspective of land as property, views indigenes as failing to make productive use of it.