Their theorizing recreates the worst forms of orthodox Marxist reductionism – the complexities of racial capitalism can only be explained through a dialectical approach that maps intersections of power relations.

But perhaps my own defense of Indigenous decolonization movements for sovereignty begs a larger question about whether sovereignty in itself offers a radical politics that can encompass or mobilize a black radical tradition rooted in the project of abolition. And it is here that I agree with Sexton’s intervention to problematize the idea that antiracist agendas must emerge from the foundational priority of Indigenous sovereignty and restoration of land.54 But against the totalizing frame of Afro-pessimism, I want to stress instead the pitfalls of any antidialectical approach to the political economy of the settler colonial racial state from the position of either Indigenous or antiblack exceptionalism. Settler colonial racial capitalism is not a thing but a social relation. As such, it is not produced out of the causal relationships that Sexton puts forward here: “Slavery, as it were, precedes and prepares the way for colonialism, its forebear or fundament or support. Colonialism, as it were, the issue or heir of slavery, its outgrowth or edifice or monument.” 55 The nearly totalizing black existential frame is similarly based on a questionable construction of epistemic privilege:

[black existence] does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic system. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and queer.56

According to Sexton, no other oppression is reducible to antiblackness, but the relative totality of antiblackness is the privileged perspective from which to understand racial formation more broadly. But unlike the way feminist and queer critical theory interrogate heteropatriarchy from a subjectless standpoint, Sexton’s entire point seems to rest on the very specificity and singularity—rather than subjectlessness—of black critical theory’s capacity to understand race. The privilege of this embodied viewpoint similarly relies on rigidly binaristic conceptions of land and bodily integrity. He writes, “If the indigenous relation to land precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the slave’s inhabitation of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land—landlessness. And selflessness is the correlate. No ground for identity, no ground to stand (on).”57 In other words, the slave’s nonrelation to her body precedes and exceeds any other body’s relation to land. However, the settler colonial designation of the United States and Canada as terra nullius—as legally empty lands—denies the very corporeality of Indigenous populations to inhabit land, much less have any rights to it. Alongside genocidal elimination, the erasure of Indigenous corporeal existence is inseparable from the ground it doesn’t stand on, or is removed from.

For the same reason that the economic reductionism of orthodox Marxism has been discredited, such an argument that frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial superstructure similarly fails to take into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism. The political economy of settler colonial capitalism is more appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than a linear chain of events. Relinquishing any conceptual privilege that might be attributed to Indigeneity, alternatively, Coulthard offers a useful anti-exceptionalist stance: “the colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus of ‘base’ from which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and state relations converge.”58 From this view, race and colonialism form the matrix of the settler colonial racial state.