The formative influence of colonial conquest on US politics remains peripheral in American political science and public law. Most accounts of racism in the discipline still consign Indigenous dispossession to the nineteenth century or to a confused subsidiary of the Black–white binary. Indeed, US political scientists have long interpreted racism as democratic exclusion, bias, and discrimination while allowing territorial annexation, forced incorporation, plenary sovereign power, and labor exploitation to recede to the background. Recent interventions in political theory and American political development—informed by Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies—have brought colonial conquest back in, complementing an efflorescence of scholarship on racialized regimes of policing and incarceration. Natsu Taylor Saito’s Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law aims to bring these dynamics together in a theory of structural racism.

Drawing on Derrick Bell’s “racial realism,” Saito connects a historical-structural analysis of US racial orders to a contemporary politics of decolonization. “This process,” Saito argues, “requires conceptual frameworks unconstrained by the ‘consensus reality’ reflected in the master narrative of American history” (p. 2). Post-1965 American exceptionalist narratives portray the United States as a “nation of immigrants” committed to the progressive inclusion of excluded subjects (p. 53). Against this, Saito places a conception of the United States as a settler-colonial empire at the center of her attempt to account for the durability of racialized hierarchy in American politics.

By settler colonialism, Saito means an axis of colonial rule by which a new “settler” society establishes its institutions by expropriating the land and resources of preexisting “Indigenous” societies. In the now-classic account that Saito draws from Patrick Wolfe, settler colonization functions through a “logic of elimination,” whereby the settler society expands and consolidates its territorial base through strategies of massacre, removal, and cultural obliteration. US state formation and legitimacy both function through the territorial occupation of Indigenous lands, yet invasion is now rendered invisible to most of the non-Indigenous population.

Saito argues that much about the variation and persistence of racial domination is illuminated once we consider the United States as a settler colony today. In particular, Saito sheds light on the colonial conquest of Indigenous peoples and the selective dynamics of forced incorporation and expulsion of Afro-descendant populations, as well as the large and diverse group of those whom she calls “migrant others.” Indeed, the chapters are divided among accounts of the position of these three groups.

An immigration regime that historically gave immediate citizenship to those deemed white and consigned nonwhites to coercive labor has been recoded via the “nation of immigrants” narrative as voluntary “assimilation” into American freedom (p. 53). Saito instead frames a colonial relationship defined by the expropriation of Indigenous lands (and those of Mexico, Alaska, Hawai’i, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines) and coercive labor regimes of slave and migrant laborers to work that land. For example, that Chinese railroad workers and Latinx farmworkers among others were and are racialized as foreign—as eternal outsiders whose status as full members of the polity is perpetually deferred (even when they become US citizens)—suggests how the colonial effort to rule over others constructed via difference is itself a core feature of US racial orders.

Saito suggests that recasting the constituent features of US racial orders allows for a “wide array of remedial options for race-based injustices” (p. 53). Accordingly, I consider the limitations of her analysis by asking how her project helps rethink horizons for remediating racialized injustice and domination today.

To start, Saito’s analysis uproots one “master narrative” only to offer a new one in its stead. As she repeats throughout, “racialization and racial hierarchy” are “a function of colonialism—settler colonialism in our case” (pp. 40, 54). What results is the overextended claim that the “logic of [Indigenous] elimination” is the original template of all US racial violence: “the institutionalized racism we live with today originated in the strategies used to occupy indigenous lands” (p. 50). Saito casts chattel slavery and Jim Crow in a secondary role, curiously glossing slavery as the “settler colonial appropriation of their lives and labor” (p. 83). Little is gained from making chattel slavery derivative of colonization: for example, the rise of mass incarceration is analogized to prior moments of Indigenous elimination, rather than placed in a context of anti-Black racism. The analogy may hold at a high level of abstraction, but this does little to historicize mass incarceration in its more specific context (p. 102). Chattel slavery and settler colonialism are better understood as co-constitutive, equally foundational axes of US racial capitalism.

To the degree that the settler-colonial analytic helps attend to the limits of antiracist politics vis-à-vis Indigenous dispossession, it is well taken. Saito is certainly right that antiracist movements challenging white supremacy must also foreground the fact that there can be no justice on stolen land, based on the notion “that all settler colonial institutions and relationships rest on the foundational colonization of peoples indigenous to this land” (p. 113).

This emphasis becomes less compelling, however, when she sketches the terms of those remedial projects. Saito characterizes all people of color in the United States as “colonized,” an assertion common to Third Worldist discourse during the late 1960s apex of global decolonization (p. 110). She then takes this claim a step further, asserting that “people of color have been racialized in ways that prevent them from exercising their inherent right to self-determination” (p. 54). Indigenous peoples have indeed sought to enact an internationalist politics of self-determination, and her discussion of such struggles is excellent. However, in what sense do Latinx populations, Black people, and other racialized populations in the United States have—or even seek—an “inherent right” to self-determination under international law? Though all these groups have some traditions emphasizing self-determination, why ought they aim for “developing autonomous and self-sufficient communities” as the best path to liberation in the present (p. 208)?

Saito’s pitch that all struggles against racial domination should take a nationalist form—what she calls “becoming nations” (pp. 199–200)—brings up two limitations. First, Saito neglects the revolutionary character of mass mobilizations for equal rights, which stand in tension with the nationalist strands of Black politics she traces throughout (p. 17). She comes close to conflating the civil rights movement itself with today’s resulting limitations of equal protection jurisprudence (pp. 154–65). In short, the narrative undersells tensions between different, overlapping antiracist and decolonial practices, which she instead portrays as a single struggle between one hegemonic project and its subaltern foil.

Second, Saito does not tell us why “self-determination” for non-Indigenous racialized subjects is emancipatory, beyond the (crucial) imperative to resist territorial occupation and Indigenous erasure. Is “building self-sustaining communities” emancipatory because of the resulting politics of care toward human and other-than-human that is differently framed in Indigenous anti-extractivist movements and Black Lives Matter demands for police abolition and community reinvestment (p. 212)? Or is “cultural independence” good simpliciter—part of forging “identities” outside those “limited by the parameters of statehood and citizenship so central to the master narrative” (p. 206)? Moreover, the focus on community-based networks raises urgent questions about scaling up; for example, how do we build a multiracial, working-class coalition to fight climate change by transforming the state itself?

My desire for a more robust defense of these specific forms of political resistance aside, Saito’s provocative book is a compellingly synthetic analysis of structural racism and settler colonialism.