I disagree with Sandy's comment here. I've encountered the language of decoloniality in organizing spaces and the academy as a means to throw any class analysis to the wayside and foreground hyper-individualistic interpretations of reality that only pay lip service to "structures" as long as they don't have to locate them concretely and confront them collectively. There's a narrative that ES changes lives, and it may do so individually, but in my experience at the university level as a teaching assistant, it demobilizes people from engaging with reality as is in favor of virtue signaling and representational politics. I think this is just another way of forming a consensus about "acceptable" minoritized identities that then ask for a racialized student-center, or something similar. Under this kind of organizing people love to talk about white supremacy and coloniality but the moment you want to act collectively people then use their racialized, minoritized identity to talk themselves out of doing anything. I don't think this convo is out of touch-- it tackles the problems with ES head-on and honestly. Yes, of course we have to fight for liberation but this kind of framing remains abstract and when we pinpoint where power actually lies the more people just don't wanna do anything about it because cynicism gets in the way, etc.. or they're surprised that confronting power is not a pleasant activity you get awards and recognition for.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but coloniality studies and decolonial theory grew out of the work of scholars like Anibal Quijano, Immanuel Wallerstein, Walter Mignolo, and Sylvia Wynter (among many others), PRECISELY to address how settler colonialism and capitalism developed together and in mutually constitutive ways that have affected every aspect of existence. Class analysis and a critique of racial capitalism is integral to a decolonial approach. As is a critique of the carceral and white supremacist state. It has to be. All of the orgs and projects I’ve named are doing this work, from the point of education for social awareness, to shifting culture, to fighting for policy change, to organizing protests, etc.
Also, do you know what you get when you want a revolution without also educating people on their histories and how they are connected the histories of global oppression created by empire and capital? What you get when you try to change centuries old systems of power without changing minds and hearts on a collective level? Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Fred Hampton have pointed out in different ways that this is a recipe for more of the same— you end up reproducing the same oppressive structures with different outward trappings, and the oppressed become the oppressors. Education of course can get coopted too- but to blame ES instead of blaming the cooptors is misplaced. My own experience in teaching race and ethnic studies at Cal State LA is that it has activated students to engage more meaningfully in politics and community aid, in addition to empowering their own senses of self as BIPOC. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the latter, btw. How can one move into engagement on the social and political levels without first feel empowered at the level of one’s own self?
I was disappointed to hear how out of touch this conversation was with what is happening on the ground among Asian American activists and organizers. Check out orgs like Ktown For All, Freedom Inc, Hana Center Chicago, NAKASEC, 18 Million Rising, People’s Collective for Justice and Liberation, Vigilant Love, Asian American Feminist Collective, Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab (my org), and probably a bunch of other ones I’m forgetting right now. Coalitional, cross-racial organizing is happening on all fronts- not just on the labor and immigrant rights front, but also on the cultural, digital, healing, educational fronts (and more). We have to fight for liberation on all these scales because the reach of systemic white supremacy is deep, from coloniality on the level of the global military industrial complex to coloniality on the level of the mind and body. We have to decolonize our very senses of being and knowing in order to be truly coalitional. The conversation about ethnic studies was also so limited to elite institutions- as an adjunct professor at Cal State LA, I can tell you that race and ethnic studies and Pan-African studies literally change the lives and help empower our BIPOC students. One of the co-founders of BLM LA, Dr. Melina Abdullah, is a long time professor in (and former chair) of PAS at Cal State LA. There’s a huge people’s struggle right now to get the white supremacist administration to appoint her as the inaugural Dean of the new College of Ethnic Studies, second in the nation after the historic founding of SFSU’s CoES. They recently decided to appoint an Asian man without training in ethnic studies to be the interim dean, instead of appointing the people’s choice— the tired white supremacist tactic of using Asians as a racial wedge. There is so much more I could say, but I’ll stop there.
I disagree with Sandy's comment here. I've encountered the language of decoloniality in organizing spaces and the academy as a means to throw any class analysis to the wayside and foreground hyper-individualistic interpretations of reality that only pay lip service to "structures" as long as they don't have to locate them concretely and confront them collectively. There's a narrative that ES changes lives, and it may do so individually, but in my experience at the university level as a teaching assistant, it demobilizes people from engaging with reality as is in favor of virtue signaling and representational politics. I think this is just another way of forming a consensus about "acceptable" minoritized identities that then ask for a racialized student-center, or something similar. Under this kind of organizing people love to talk about white supremacy and coloniality but the moment you want to act collectively people then use their racialized, minoritized identity to talk themselves out of doing anything. I don't think this convo is out of touch-- it tackles the problems with ES head-on and honestly. Yes, of course we have to fight for liberation but this kind of framing remains abstract and when we pinpoint where power actually lies the more people just don't wanna do anything about it because cynicism gets in the way, etc.. or they're surprised that confronting power is not a pleasant activity you get awards and recognition for.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but coloniality studies and decolonial theory grew out of the work of scholars like Anibal Quijano, Immanuel Wallerstein, Walter Mignolo, and Sylvia Wynter (among many others), PRECISELY to address how settler colonialism and capitalism developed together and in mutually constitutive ways that have affected every aspect of existence. Class analysis and a critique of racial capitalism is integral to a decolonial approach. As is a critique of the carceral and white supremacist state. It has to be. All of the orgs and projects I’ve named are doing this work, from the point of education for social awareness, to shifting culture, to fighting for policy change, to organizing protests, etc.
Also, do you know what you get when you want a revolution without also educating people on their histories and how they are connected the histories of global oppression created by empire and capital? What you get when you try to change centuries old systems of power without changing minds and hearts on a collective level? Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Fred Hampton have pointed out in different ways that this is a recipe for more of the same— you end up reproducing the same oppressive structures with different outward trappings, and the oppressed become the oppressors. Education of course can get coopted too- but to blame ES instead of blaming the cooptors is misplaced. My own experience in teaching race and ethnic studies at Cal State LA is that it has activated students to engage more meaningfully in politics and community aid, in addition to empowering their own senses of self as BIPOC. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the latter, btw. How can one move into engagement on the social and political levels without first feel empowered at the level of one’s own self?
I was disappointed to hear how out of touch this conversation was with what is happening on the ground among Asian American activists and organizers. Check out orgs like Ktown For All, Freedom Inc, Hana Center Chicago, NAKASEC, 18 Million Rising, People’s Collective for Justice and Liberation, Vigilant Love, Asian American Feminist Collective, Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab (my org), and probably a bunch of other ones I’m forgetting right now. Coalitional, cross-racial organizing is happening on all fronts- not just on the labor and immigrant rights front, but also on the cultural, digital, healing, educational fronts (and more). We have to fight for liberation on all these scales because the reach of systemic white supremacy is deep, from coloniality on the level of the global military industrial complex to coloniality on the level of the mind and body. We have to decolonize our very senses of being and knowing in order to be truly coalitional. The conversation about ethnic studies was also so limited to elite institutions- as an adjunct professor at Cal State LA, I can tell you that race and ethnic studies and Pan-African studies literally change the lives and help empower our BIPOC students. One of the co-founders of BLM LA, Dr. Melina Abdullah, is a long time professor in (and former chair) of PAS at Cal State LA. There’s a huge people’s struggle right now to get the white supremacist administration to appoint her as the inaugural Dean of the new College of Ethnic Studies, second in the nation after the historic founding of SFSU’s CoES. They recently decided to appoint an Asian man without training in ethnic studies to be the interim dean, instead of appointing the people’s choice— the tired white supremacist tactic of using Asians as a racial wedge. There is so much more I could say, but I’ll stop there.