All content tagged with: Colonization

Filter

  • Toward Self-Determination in the U.S. Territories: The Restorative Justice Implications of Rejecting the Insular Cases

    Conservatives and liberals alike are increasingly calling for condemnation of the Insular Cases—a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases from the early 1900s, in which the Court developed the doctrine of territorial incorporation to license the United States’ indefinite holding of overseas colonial possessions. In March 2021, members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced House Resolution 279, which declares that the Insular Cases should be rejected as having no place in U.S. constitutional law. Moreover, in 2022, Justice Gorsuch called for the Supreme Court to squarely overrule the cases. For many, rejecting the Insular Cases is a long-overdue reckoning for U.S. colonialism. Nonetheless, some representatives and scholars from the U.S. territories have raised concerns about potential implications for existing local laws in the territories. Many of these local laws protect Indigenous territorial peoples from further colonial harms. If the proposed bill or Supreme Court’s overruling of the cases functioned to extend the U.S. Constitution in full to the territories, these laws may be found invalid under current constitutional jurisprudence. This Article employs a contextual framework for Indigenous peoples to explore the nuanced restorative-justice implications of rejecting the Insular Cases. It emphasizes the varying perspectives of Indigenous peoples of the present-day U.S. territories, who would be most impacted by the measure. Finally, flowing from this restorative justice framework, this Article demands that any resolution to the Insular Cases forward the human rights principle of self-determination for Indigenous peoples—not mere equality.

  • Unraveling the International Law of Colonialism: Lessons From Australia and the United States

    In the 1823 decision of Johnson v. M’Intosh, Chief Justice John Marshall formulated the international law of colonialism. Known as the Doctrine of Discovery, Marshall’s opinion drew on the practices of European nations during the Age of Exploration to legitimize European acquisition of territory owned and occupied by Indigenous peoples. Two centuries later, Johnson—and the international law of colonialism—remains good law throughout the world. In this Article we examine how the Doctrine of Discovery was adapted and applied in Australia and the United States. As Indigenous peoples continue to press for a re-examination of their relationships with governments, we also consider whether and how the international law of colonialism has been mitigated or unraveled in these two countries. While we find that the Doctrine lingers, close examination provides several important lessons for all Indigenous nations and governments burdened by colonization.

  • Africana Legal Studies: A New Theoretical Approach to Law & Protocol

    “African people have produced the same general types of institutions for understanding and ordering their worlds as every other group of human beings. Though this should be obvious, the fact that we must go to great lengths to recognize and then demonstrate it speaks to the potent and invisible effect of the enslavement and colonization of African people over the last 500 years.” – Greg Carr

  • No Voice, No Exit, But Loyalty? Puerto Rico and Constitutional Obligation

    The Michigan Law Review is honored to have supported Professors Charles and Fuentes-Rohwer's Essay on the subjugated status of Puerto Rico as an "unincorporated territory." This Essay contextualizes Puerto Rico not as an anomalous colonial vestige but as fundamentally a part of the United States' ongoing commitment to racial economic domination. We are thrilled to highlight this work, which indicts our constitutional complacence with the second-class status of Puerto Rican citizens and demands a national commitment to self-determination for Puerto Rico.

  • Digital Colonialism: The 21st Century Scramble for Africa through the Extraction and Control of User Data and the Limitations of Data Protection Laws

    As Western technology companies increasingly rely on user data globally, extensive data protection laws and regulations emerged to ensure ethical use of that data. These same protections, however, do not exist uniformly in the resource-rich, infrastructure-poor African countries, where Western tech seeks to establish its presence. These conditions provide an ideal landscape for digital colonialism. Digital colonialism refers to a modern-day “Scramble for Africa” where largescale tech companies extract, analyze, and own user data for profit and market influence with nominal benefit to the data source. Under the guise of altruism, large scale tech companies can use their power and resources to access untapped data on the continent. Scant data protection laws and infrastructure ownership by western tech companies open the door for exploitation of data as a resource for-profit and a myriad of uses including predictive analytics. One may believe that strengthening data protection laws will be a barrier to digital colonialism. However, regardless of their relative strength or weakness, data protection laws have limits. An analysis of Kenya's 2018 data protection bill, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and documented actions of largescale tech companies exemplifies how those limits create several loopholes for continued digital colonialism including, historical violations of data privacy laws; limitations of sanctions; unchecked mass concentration of data, lack of competition enforcement, uninformed consent, and limits to defined nation-state privacy laws.

  • Urban Decolonization

    National fair housing legislation opened up higher opportunity neighborhoods to multitudes of middle-class African Americans. In actuality, the FHA offered much less to the millions of poor, Black residents in inner cities than it did to the Black middle class. Partly in response to the FHA’s inability to provide quality housing for low-income blacks, Congress has pursued various mobility strategies designed to facilitate the integration of low-income Blacks into high-opportunity neighborhoods as a resolution to the persistent dilemma of the ghetto. These efforts, too, have had limited success. Now, just over fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act and the Housing Choice Voucher Program (commonly known as Section 8), large numbers of African Americans throughout the country remain geographically isolated in urban ghettos. America’s neighborhoods are deeply segregated and Blacks have been relegated to the worst of them. This isolation has been likened to colonialism of an urban kind. To combat the housing conditions experienced by low-income Blacks, in recent years, housing advocates have reignited a campaign to add “source of income” protection to the federal Fair Housing Act as a means to open up high-opportunity neighborhoods to low-income people of color. This Article offers a critique of overreliance on integration and mobility programs to remedy urban colonialism. Integration’s ineffectiveness as a tool to achieve quality housing for masses of economically-subordinated Blacks has been revealed both in the historically White suburbs and the recently gentrified inner city. Low-income Blacks are welcome in neither place. Thus, this Article argues that focusing modern fair housing policy on the relatively small number of Black people for whom mobility is an option (either through high incomes or federal programs) is shortsighted, given the breadth of need for quality housing in economically-subordinated inner-city communities. As an alternative, this Article proposes, especially in the newly wealthy gentrified cities, that fair housing advocates, led by Black tenants, insist that state and local governments direct significant resources to economically depressed majority-minority neighborhoods and house residents equitably. This process of equitable distribution of local government resources across an entire jurisdiction, including in majority-minority neighborhoods, may be a critical step towards urban decolonization.

  • Puerto Rico: Cultural Nation, American Colony

    This Article articulates a theory of Puerto Rican cultural nationhood that is largely based on ethnicity. In linking ethnicity and citizenship, it is imperative, however, to avoid the evils of ethnic strife and balkanization, while celebrating rather than imposing difference; community consciousness cannot degenerate into fascism.

  • Expert Report of Eric Foner

    Race has been a crucial line of division in American society since the settlement of the American colonies in the beginning of the 17th century. It remains so today. While the American understanding of the concept of "race" has changed over time, the history of African-Americans provides a useful template for understanding the history of race relations. The black experience has affected how other racial minorities have been treated in our history, and illuminates the ways in which America's white majority has viewed racial difference.

  • Can Money Whiten? Exploring Race Practice in Colonial Venezuela and Its Implications for Contemporary Race Discourse

    The Gracias al Sacar, a fascinating and seemingly inconceivable practice in eighteenth century colonial Venezuela, allowed certain individuals of mixed Black and White ancestry to purchase "Whiteness" from their King. The author exposes the irony of this system, developed in a society obsessed with "natural" ordering that labeled individuals according to their precise racial ancestry. While recognizing that the Gracias al Sacar provided opportunities for advancement and an avenue for material and social struggle, the author argues that it also justified the persistence of racial hierarchy. The Article concludes that the Gracias al Sacar, along with their present-day implications, undermine an essentialist view of race, revealing the negotiability of race status and its dependence on social and material norms

  • A Country Within a Country: Redrawing Borders on the Post-Colonial Sovereign State

    This Essay seeks to identify the conflict that exists between the demands for self-governance by Canada's First Nations and the interests of the Canadian state. The author elucidates this conflict by identifying two major differences between the perspectives of Canada's First Nations' demands for self-governance and the interests of the Canadian state: the privileging of the collective versus the privileging of the individual, and the two very different notions of "territory." The author concludes that the doctrine of sovereign statehood as developed out of European Nationalism stands as an obstacle to the self-determination of non-western peoples such as the First Nations because it requires the people within the territory of the state to have no allegiance apart from the state. Yet the author concludes that it is precisely this doctrine of sovereignty that may lead to some possibility for reconciliation. International organizations, created in the post-war era in response to the realization that global problems need global administration, offer a model, in that they have international administrative jurisdictions directly in contravention of the territorial sovereignty of states. The author argues that territory is no longer necessarily the characteristic of a political entity in the international arena, and therefore it is possible to imagine the recognition of stateless nations as subjects of international law.