Anti-Black Racism & Settler Colonialism

Ashon Crawley
Ethnic Studies
UC Riverside

“Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness” was a conversation that took seriously the intellectual and political exchange between Native Studies and Black Studies, focusing on how anti-Black racism intersects with settler colonial logics. An opportunity for exploration and critical conversation, “Otherwise Worlds” staged a series of discussions that sought to interrogate concepts such as “people of color” and how such concepts operate to dilute the specificity of state violence. Particularly with the rise of Afropessmism, increasingly more scholars in Black studies are focusing on the centrality of anti-Black racism within U.S. society. This work has intervened within Ethnic Studies by insisting on the specificity of anti-Black racism that cannot be addressed through either “people of color” politics or Ethnic Studies intellectual models. Similarly, scholars in Native Studies have often positioned Native studies in opposition to Ethnic Studies under the argument that Native peoples should be analyzed under the rubric of colonial domination rather than racial domination.

Not just a conversation of abstraction and critique, “Otherwise Worlds” proposed ways forward, ways to produce otherwise modes of being, otherwise modes of existence, that do not assent nor submit to the current epistemological ordering of the modern world. “Otherwise Worlds” presumed that possibilities for resistance, for refusal, are germane to otherwise existences, subaltern modalities, marginalized ways of life. The event explored the relationality between these forms of racisms and colonialisms and explored the political implications of these relationalities.