Every instance of refusal is key.
Vats, 20—Assistant Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies and Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College (Anjali, “Decolonizing Creatorship and Remaking Personhood,” The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans, Conclusion, pp. 204, dml)
That fundamental double bind of white supremacy is one that ties together (neo)colonialism and internal colonialism oppressions. As Quijano explains: “European or Western culture imposed its paradigmatic image and its principal cognitive elements as the norm of orientation on all cultural development, particularly the intellectual and the artistic. That relationship consequently became a constitutive part of the conditions of reproduction of those societies and cultures that were pushed into Europeanization of everything or in part.”40 The “Europeanization of everything” can be undone through decolonial refusals of white supremacy.
Here, I come full circle, back to Hasian’s notion of character within law. Rhetorical cultures, per his understanding of legal decision making, both enable and constrain legal and racial narratives. One important function that each moment of resistance performs is the creation of new character arcs for people of color in the overarching mythos of American creatorship. Characters build the rhetorical cultures and narrative roles that people of color can occupy, even with respect to knowledge production. While it is tempting to dismiss extralegal interventions as “mere rhetoric,” those rhetorical interventions make possible the policy ones through which people of color can become creators, citizens, and persons who can transform racial capitalism.