Is Settler Colonialism Just Another Study of Whiteness?

This paper is part one of a much larger class-based analysis of the “settler” identity. In order to better understand the settler’s legibility and illegibility within white settler colonial nations, this paper argues that existing settler colonial scholarship has overwhelmingly favored dialectic understandings of settler/Indigenous relations alongside Eurocentric narratives centering feelings of shame, guilt, and uncertainty. This Eurocentric bias in settler colonial studies not only reinforces white supremacy, but is in itself a form of white supremacy by perpetuating the same systemic erasures of anti-Blackness, minimizing racialized stories, and decentering Indigenous knowledge. By segregating minorities from their role and complicity in benefiting from and upholding the status quo of white settler colonialism, settler colonial studies inhibits our critical understanding of the settler identity by naturalizing settler supremacy as whiteness. Reading across white and diasporic settler colonial scholarship through a lens of racial melancholia, this paper ultimately leads to its conclusion that settler and settler colonial studies are class-based categories guarded by the social hierarchy of white supremacy that continues to disrupt peaceful co-existence with Indigenous laws.