IP is constantly framed through European colonial values– framing indigenous property as ‘traditional’ holds down indigenous groups and racial minorities – to break through and decolonize we must use decolonial theory at a large and small scale

. Critical Race IP as Decolonizing Praxis In the historic piece "Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation," Derrick Bell, Jr. observes that "Leroy Clark has written that the black community's belief in the efficacy of litigation inhibited the development of techniques involving popular participation and control, that might have advanced school desegregation in the South." 291 Bell, who echoes the criticism of Civil Rights Movement leaders such as Dr. King, goes on to observe that "the problem of unjust laws … is almost invariably a problem of distribution of political and economic power." 292 If we accept Bell's principle as true, then it is necessary to find productive  extra-legal as well as legal approaches to anti-racist and anti-colonial resistance within the context of intellectual properties, ones which are not invested in conservative law and economics models. Following Bell's lead and his conceptualization of racial realism, 293 we offer as one avenue for locating such radical approaches: decolonial theory. Addressing the structural sources of the unequal distribution of political and economic power that Bell raises as a primary cause of racial non-neutrality in law is a central goal of decolonial theory and practice, which have become increasingly central to anti-racist and anti-colonial strategy among academics and activists. While we do not mean to suggest that decolonial theory is the one right answer to reworking race and intellectual property, we maintain that its understanding of the nexus of (neo)coloniality, narratives of progress, power, and knowledge is a useful one to deploy to undo intellectual property's racial and (neo)colonial logics. Moreover, decolonial theory can be thought together with other types of critical theory, including CRT, feminism, and queer theory in order to imagine new ways of creating radical multiversalities. As such, it creates space for a complex and multifaceted engagement with race, (neo)coloniality and intellectual property that addresses the fundamental historical power dynamics that shaped laws of knowledge production. In short, it is only through the death of the (European/American) human 294 that Others can claim their place as radical equal partners in humanity. 295 Decoloniality, as Walter Mignolo describes it, addresses the "hidden agenda" of modernity, 296 namely an investment in coloniality. For him, coloniality "names the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today of which historical colonialisms have been a constitutive, though downplayed, dimension." 297 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano describes decoloniality's centrality in creating systems of power which embrace Otherness, writing "decoloniality is an alternative accent - one marked by pluriversal commitments, geohistorical attentiveness, and biographical configurations." 298 As such, the "coloniality" in decoloniality does not simply describe the process and reparation of  colonization, it describes the logics of progress, enlightenment, development, and democracy which made the domination of Other peoples, in its many racist and (neo)colonial manifestations, a thinkable option. Modernity and coloniality are, therefore, fundamentally intertwined, with the former often offering ideological and narrative justifications for the latter. Per Anibal Quijano, (neo)coloniality operates through a "matrix of power" 299 with four component parts: economic control, authority, patriarchal domination, and knowledge and subjectivity. 300 Quijano explains the scope of coloniality, as well as its tendency to permeate other forms of oppression: In the beginning colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination, while at the same time the colonizers were expropriating from the colonized their knowledge … as well as their products and work. The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivised [sic] expression, intellectual or visual. It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers' own patterns of expression, and of their beliefs and images with reference to the supernatural. These beliefs and images served not only to impede the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic. 301 For Quijano, the colonization of power was the underlying impetus for the creation of the category of race, the original move which made all other forms of domination possible. 302 Moreover, colonization's objectification of the colonized, i.e. rendering them the objects of study instead of producers of knowledge, conceptually voids the idea of Other knowledge. 303 The four categories of the colonial matrix that Quijano identifies articulate areas in which colonizers exercised their power to effect total control over the colonized and their knowledge. Decolonization, therefore, requires a "de-linking" from the colonial matrix of power and its ideological commitments to modernity,  with all its component parts. 304 Put differently, decolonial theory and praxis conceives of "epistemological reconstitution," 305 which makes space for "another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality." 306 Wanzer-Serrano defines decoloniality as: Any practice, discursive or otherwise, that facilitates a divestment from modernity/coloniality and invents openings through which decolonial epistemics can emerge… . Delinking requires changes in both content and form … . It requires being oriented toward shifts in our genealogies of thought, including drawing authority from colonized spaces/voices and resisting latent imperialisms - even when such resistance may not be exclusively oppositional. 307 Decoloniality is also distinct from dewesternization, a practice which attempts to create radical multiversality through the already existing frameworks of global governance and neoliberal capitalism. 308 We are skeptical that dewesternization, as Mignolo defines it, can play any role in undoing intellectual property's valorization of economic productivity, investment, and profit, or its deep and entrenched fidelity to racial capitalism. The post-Lochner and post-Fordist world imagines creatorship as labor performed in the service of national economic survival. Consequently, we imagine the decolonial as the radical departure from law and economics and racial capitalism as well as racism and (neo)colonialism. That is not to say that incrementalism is unimportant in moving toward a decolonized world; rather that the struggle for social justice in intellectual property law appears to necessitate undoing and remaking economic models that fuel racial capitalism. In this section, then, we situate decoloniality as a practice which can be used to unmake intellectual property's investments in whiteness and racial capitalism, particularly because of its overarching engagement with the underlying epistemologies of knowledge production and its transnational scope. We first define coloniality, a practice which is both historical and contemporary, with reference to decolonial understandings of the term and then examine how decoloniality might be used to think through intellectual property's "possessive investment in whiteness." 309 In doing so, we offer  decoloniality as an avenue for theoretical and practical exploration vis-a-vis intellectual properties. As we show, spaces of knowledge production that break with the demands of coloniality already exist, and we model what may come next. 310 Coloniality, as formulated by Mignolo and Quijano, implicitly includes intellectual property regimes, which incorporate core principles of modernity into their frameworks for governing property ownership. Whether understood through the history of devaluing the knowledge of racial Others, including slaves and indigenous peoples, the imposition of predominantly European intellectual property rights regimes on the developing world, the commodification of traditional knowledge, or the implicit imposition of development agendas on the regulation of knowledge production, intellectual property law reinforces the central premises of modernity and beliefs in the inequality of people of color that underlie them. Because intellectual property law is deeply embedded within and committed to reproducing modernity/coloniality, legal reform without undoing its fundamentally European values is unlikely to succeed in creating more racially just information paradigms. 311 Put differently, decolonizing intellectual property is a necessary prerequisite to undoing the racial hierarchies that are embedded within the law itself. While this does not mean that we should abandon attempts at legal reform, it does mean grappling with the underlying power dynamics through which intellectual property regimes were and continue to be produced. Read as such, decolonization is a complementary project to CRT, one that looks beyond even the ideologies which inform law's racial non-neutrality. Decolonial thinking might therefore be read as overlapping with CRT but with a broad commitment to undoing the damage of modernity/coloniality on the world, including its structures for information economies. Nelson Maldonado-Torres uses the framework of decoloniality to construct a framework for not simply anti-(neo)colonial resistance but  also anti-racist thinking. Following W.E.B. DuBois and Sylvia Wynter, he argues for the centrality of modernity/coloniality in the construction of racist regimes. For him, as with Fanon, "decolonization is about the creation of a new symbolic and material order that takes the full spectrum of human history, its achievements, and its failures, into view." 312 Yet the path of decolonization is not shaped around "overcoming" Empire or (neo)colonization as Fanon intimates. 313 It is constructed through radical departure from the logics of modernity. Maldonado-Torres continues: Taking Du Bois and Wynter's lead, I would like to suggest that from the perspectives of the repeatedly racialized groups of modernity, particularly indigenous people and people of African or Afro-mixed ex-slave descent, but also Jews and Muslims, a concept of Being premised on what is often referred to as the dialectics of modernity and the nation, and their supposed overcoming by the emergence of imperial sovereignty or Empire, miss the non-dialectical character of damnation. That is, in short, that what are changes for many, for those whom Frantz Fanon called the condemned of the earth seem rather to be perverse re-enactments of a logic that has for a long time militated against them. 314 Here, the decolonial is about creating something beyond the dialectic of modernity and coloniality, a framework that can radically embrace and center Otherness. His work is instructive here, as it offers us space for conceiving of how the decolonial accesses the problems of racism and (neo)coloniality in structures of knowledge production. In the remainder of the section, we unpack how delinking might look, as a set of scholarly and activist perspectives, guided by an ethic of decolonial love, that reorients us toward hearing the voices of the Global South so that we might begin disrupting what we know and how we come to know those things, but not necessarily in ways that are accountable or attempt to answer to the West. 315 Anderson, who spoke on this at Race + IP 2017, dreams of "de-colonial futures" in the context of intellectual property law. 316 While she predominantly focuses on indigenous knowledge, her work asks us to consider how and why decolonial theory might inform attempts to reimagine intellectual property law. For Anderson, decolonizing indigenous knowledge, at least in part, includes the creation of a new  system of labels and licenses whereby indigenous peoples have control over how information and objects are managed. 317 One functional outcome of such licensing projects - as well as the attendant pushes to leverage human rights as a means of protecting traditional knowledge 318  - is to revalue knowledge that has been consistently marginalized, in part by highlighting the right of its creators to dictate how and when it is used. Scholars such as Boateng and Basole also examine ways of addressing the devaluation of traditional knowledge. Both scholars suggest even the terms "traditional knowledge" and "indigenous knowledge" are problematic because they create categories of information within intellectual property regimes. 319 Identifying traditional knowledge or indigenous knowledge frequently involves differentiating it from information produced in Western contexts in ways which are legible to international intellectually property regimes. However, as Okediji and Coombe point out, such intellectual property regimes were built on a foundation of coloniality which refused to categorize information produced by the colonized as knowledge. 320 These critiques operate as delinking moves, which question the narratives that modernity has laid out for non-European knowledge. They also exemplify the type of critical practice that might aid in reimagining intellectual property law,. Delinking decoloniality in the context of intellectual property requires the rejection of narratives which categorize Other knowledge as secondary or inferior to that of Westerners, whether implicitly or explicitly. Terms such as "traditional knowledge," "indigenous knowledge," and "folklore" are dangerous precisely because they create a bifurcation between that knowledge produced informally, often by non-Westerners, and "real" knowledge. Resisting such narratives, for instance by advancing narratives of bio-piratical theft from the non-Western world and reclaiming memories that might otherwise be erased from the canon, are important first steps in remaking the laws of information. The step, which follows pulling back the curtain on the implications of the modernity/coloniality binary for intellectual property  law, however, is a more complicated one. Decolonization requires reconstituting universality in a manner, which, instead of substituting the European for the totality, creates space for the embrace of multiple perspectives, in a manner, which is both democratic and cosmopolitan. While we do not offer a model to supplant that of modernity/coloniality, we note that several nations, such as India, 321 Ghana, 322 and South Africa, 323 are remaking intellectual properties through the embrace of digital databases, local models of intellectual property protection, and rejection of international intellectual property regimes. Moreover, decolonizing practices can unfold at the individual level as well, through resistive performative practices, such as discursive interventions and arts. Our goal in highlighting both the undoing of narratives of modernity/coloniality in intellectual property and practices which supplant Western intellectual property law is to point to further avenues of research for Critical Race IP scholars. Existing scholarship in these areas suggests that attending to decoloniality as a means of interrogating the intersections of race and intellectual property is likely to be a fruitful avenue for further research.