Based on your hostile attitude and clear adherence to critical race theory, I fear that we will never agree on this topic, no matter how long we were to continue this discussion or how much reading I were to do. So I will start by letting you know this will be my last comment in this discussion. Feel free to further tear into me after this but I am exercising my right to stop participating in this discussion.

You need to answer for why you aren’t curious enough to actually explore the scholarship on this topic but you’re more than willing to wade into arguments with people on the Internet.

I am not under an obligation to answer for anything actually as this is not a court of law. This mentality alone does not make me hopeful for your vision of the future. Nevertheless, my answer is that I do not make a habit of debating people on the internet on this topic. I once had a somewhat related discussion on Reddit with someone on the Israel-Palestine question (although that was a number of years ago and my stance has shifted somewhat on that issue since) but nothing beyond that. I guess this was just something unresolved in my mind from 2020. I have done plenty of reading on politics since I first became familiar with these slogans but I never really ended up diving into this topic and I don’t think that really has a lot to do with being in a “network of whiteness”. Obviously, this is a more prominent topic in indigenous communities than for other Americans but that has little to do with " whiteness ".

Yes, because abolitionism has a long and storied and deep history and it attacks white power structures

I am pretty sure that even countries such as Cuba and China and other communist ruled places do in fact have law enforcement. So while there may be many grave issues with the American criminal justice system, I cannot consider complete abolition of the police to be anything but a crackpot idea of American anarchists.

That’s called agitation. It’s not a policy. It’s doing exactly what it was meant to do, which is piss you off.

How is that “strategy” supposed to lead to anything positive exactly?

The reality is that many white people are likely going to need to go back to Europe because they will resist black and indigenous sovereignty and what it will entail.

So what you are saying is that there is no place for non-black/non-indigenous Americans within the current borders of the USA except under “black and indigenous sovereignty”, so much for any kind of democratic or peaceful outcome, I guess. And how exactly do you envision white Americans going " back" to Europe, except for a very small number who were born there or otherwise have European citizenship? Aside from the fact that your phrasing hints at what amounts to continental scale ethnic cleansing despite your assertion that that is “impossible”, most European countries are not going to welcome foreigners just because they apparently had an ancestor that was from there. Some countries are willing to give you citizenship if you can prove that one of your ancestors had that citizenship but AFAIK far from all.

Show me where Pol Pot’s ethnic cleansing used “vague language”. Show me the vague language being used by Israel and the USA in their ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Obviously, you can say what you mean when you are already in a position of power and not particularly worried about future accountability. If you are political marginalized at the moment, however, it is probably a better strategy to remain as vague as possible about contentious issues so you can appeal to largest amount of people possible. This is politics 101 really.

places where they actually have sovereignty today, as a great example.

I think we both know that that sovereignty is quite limited compared to your vision. The reservations are still under the authority of the federal government, the most powerful government in the world even. And the reservations are still located in the territories of states that are much more powerful in many different respects. No one in their right mind believes that the reservations would be allowed to ethnically cleanse non-indigenous people if they wanted to do that unless those other governments decide to give them the legal authority to do so. Note that I never said that I believe the majority of indigenous people believe in your ideology or the rhetoric that I mentioned previously or that it is only indigenous people that do.

French Guiana, St Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Martin, Martinique, and Guadelupe won’t literally be part of France. The British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Anguilla, The Caymans, Montserrat, and Turks and Caicos won’t literally be part of the UK. Puerto Rico will be independent. Hawaii will be independent. Sint Maarten, Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire won’t be literally part of the Netherlands.

I don’t disagree with any of this.

Like, do you even understand how these borders came about? Or the names? America is named after an Italian. Once decolonization is effective, the name will from its inhabitants, not from its conquerors. The names of the states, just the NAMES not even the borders, are named after kings and queens of Europe (Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Carolina, Louisiana), European colonizers (Pennsylvania, Washington), a number of European places (Jersey, York, Hampshire), and a number use names from the colonizer languages (Colorado, Montana, Vermont, Nevada). These places ALL had names given to them by the inhabitants of the land before a foreign king granted ownership of that land to random settlers who landed, killed a bunch of people living there and their ways of life and then gave it names.

I am familiar on a basic level with the history of the colonization of the Americas. I would like to remind you that the non-indigenous residents living within the borders of the present day US are, in fact also its inhabitants and not conquerorsh

The larger answer, however, is that people are going to get displaced within the territory called the USA today, because climate change is making the current situation unlivable. Additionally, people are going to be displaced where there are big projects to correct the relationship with the ecosystem. People are going to feel displaced when told they can’t consume water at the rate they consume it anymore. People are going to feel displaced when sections of highway are torn up and dams are dismantled to return ecosystems to sustainable states.

I don’t disagree with this but none of this has anything to do with telling people to fuck off to a foreign country that they have virtually no connection to.

There will be violence. It’s inevitable, because the oppression will not stop unless it is forced to stop.

There is a difference between violence against power structures upholding the status quo/authorities (i.e. basically legitimate targets under the Geneva Conventions) and violence against civilians and I think you know that.

We know that slaves were captured and suffered great violence, but slaves should never kill their masters - that’s only slightly better than traditional fascism

Are you seriously comparing random working class/middle class Americans who are not black or indigenous to slave owners?

Fuck you.

This type of stuff is exactly why I have decided to not further participate in this discussion and why I do not get along with most of the American “left”. But who knows, maybe this toxicity and the obsession with race and other forms of identity politics is purely a result of American history and it could never have ended up any other way. Maybe you are right and after a long and horrible conflict (some form of) your vision will emerge from the ashes. I just know that there would be a lot of death and misery in between and that I (and along with me probably a fair number of people globally) will not consider that “justice”.

This is just ignorant.

You don’t just get to say that because it was someone’s granddad who made the decision we all have to live with it now because granddad is dead and gone.

Nobody is saying we have to live with the status quo or that there does not have to be major restitution of some sort. But your vision of what seems to essentially amount to a black --indigenous dictatorship (with token representation of other ethnicities, I am sure) and everyone who disagrees being ethnically cleansed to other continents (because making them refugees is the only way that a majority of those people have any chance of being accepted by your desired receiving countries) is unlikely to be considered appealing or even acceptable by the vast, vast majority of the American population and probably much of the world.

People don’t craft messages based on what makes you comfortable.

If you are hoping to genuinely win people over (who are not gullible) rather than implement a vision almost exclusively through violence, you should probably care.

I think it may have been a mistake to subscribe to World News; I did not come to Lemmy to have these kinds of discussions. I should probably stick to less political communities in the future.

Finally, I apologize for accidentally hitting the reply button to soon.

First of all, you make a lot of assumptions. I do not see myself as a “victim”. I was not even born in the US and am not from the Americas or any other country with a settler colonial history. I could always go back to where I was born, so I do not view this through some kind of personal lens. But some European (or other non-indigenous) descended Americans actually have lived here for many generations and then there are non-white Americans who came here as refugees, for example, and they do not have the luxury that I have. You are correct that I have not read the work of an indigenous scholar on this topic. That is because my exposure to this kind of rhetoric has been through people chanting this in unrelated contexts/activism. AFAIK those people were not even indigenous themselves. I am sure that there are books and academic papers written by indigenous people out there outlining ideas on this topic.

But let me also say that it is unclear to what degree the people who chant these vague slogans believe in what any given academic paper or book espouses. This is essentially similar to the whole ‘defund the police’ situation. Many “left wing”/" progressive “/liberal people claimed that this did not actually mean abolishing the police and that claims that it does are merely right wing fear mongering. Then someone literally writes an op-ed in the NYT that " yes, we do mean abolish when we say defund”. And I have seen people online express the opinion that all European descended Americans should just “go back” to Europe. Maybe this is an extreme, fringe view, maybe it is not. But the vague language surrounding this subject does not fill me with hope that it is. My worry about ethnic cleansing is not the result of some kind of projection; it is the result of people chanting these kinds of slogans and talking about “decolonization” being (seemingly deliberately) vague about what this actually entails in practice and the knowledge that rhetoric about people 'not rightfully belonging" somewhere historically has led to horrific bloodshed and ethnic cleansing. None of that anything to do with historical European colonization of the Americas but with much more recent history.

So assuming that you are in fact familiar with a wide body of work on this subject by actually indigenous people and that are your views on the subject are informed by that, what does “ultimately redrawing the borders” mean in practice. Does everybody who currently lives within the borders of the United States get to stay within that area at least (which does not inherently mean there would be no ethnic cleansing but at least means it would be far less egregious than expelling people from an entire continent)? I am not in favor of the exploitation or oppression of indigenous people but at the same time I am not in favor of ideologies that believe that we can simply turn the clock back centuries and achieve some kind of historical “justice” through violence. That is in my opinion only slightly better than traditional fascism. We have to achieve the closest possible thing to justice within the constraints of the realities of today and with the people who are alive today and who are not responsible for the actions of people generations ago. Finally, I am not a fan on vague slogans in general, especially in the context of issues as sensitive as this one.

And how exactly do you imagine this “decolonization”? I always hear these slogans such as “land back” but nobody ever elaborates what stuff like that actually means, so I come to the conclusion that either it is just another empty slogan so “progressives” can feel good about themselves or what they have in mind is basically ethnic cleansing and they don’t want to say that (out loud).