A thought, perhaps a warning, that came to mind after today's #RaceB4Race panel, esp. what it takes to ID & reject white settler colonial, imperialist, anti-Black (&) racist habits of thought. Ignore if you like, but readers: seatbelts on. A small thread... 1/

Acknowledgement 1: It is possible to feel a profound pleasure, an endorphin rush even, in experiencing a decentering of "you" as a thinker/scholar when encountering what one might call "the thought-ways of the Other." 2/

That feeling of movement, of shift, of pleasure or curiosity or "discovery" or enlightening or...or...or... You see where this is going? For a knowing subject interpellated in "Western" (capital) structures, this. Is. A trope. That feeling is a "type." 3/

Why is this important to identify? B/c as @DrDadabhoy, @EricLDeBarros1, & @brenna_duperron variously, polyvocally spoke on in today's #RaceB4Race, the capacity for WSC/anti-Black racist/imperial sentimentalism to recapture & recouperate/defang ethical critique is powerful. 4/

That feeling, as experienced in a colonizer's language, encountered in discursive fields created for global North consumption of the ways of the Other, on the territories, waters, bodies, & lives of Others, is NOT to be trusted. It may be a door for you. But it treacherous. 5/

I recognize & honor the courage it takes to write/speak profound differences in thought-ways in the face of risk of endless commodification, circulation, appropriation, & misprision--all w/in histories of colonial & imperial extraction that just do not quit. It's dangerous. 6/

So when you feel that shiver of pleasure at realizing that you have encountered something SO different, a way of analysis & inquiry & reconceptualizing place/person/ethics/all that decenters YOU, please. Please let that be enough. Please see the trap of the trope. 7/

Because to detach that stmt, that Native "method" or anti-Orientalist push or antiracist talk-back from its source(s) & to use it as a ship to sail right back into extraction, appropriation, imagining of "Other Ways"...I'm trying explain how that trip is predicated on erasing. 8/

In particular, I am inspired by the care w/ which Brenna situated a "method" in the scholarship of a particular Native thinker/writer in a particular Native collective Peoples in her particular use of it. 9/ #RaceB4Race

This careful situation is not just citational practice. In my seeing, it is good manners. It is proper circumscription. It is landed, place-based, language-based, People-based, historically located, activated by this specificity. 10/

My concern is every time something is written/presented with this kind of care, the structures in which it is received continue to make readers/listeners think that this kind of "encounter" was an invitation to fantasize about all the other Other ways to think. 11/

This is what I mean by that giddy feeling of difference being a trope, a trap: you should pause & think before taking that flight of fancy into analytical practices inspired in your mind by what was translated into English as "Two-Eyed" seeing. 12/

That feeling indexes the "discovery" literature in "our periods": Mandeville's Tales, Columbus' letters, Hariot's Brief History, on and on. 13/

So here's the main thought: if one knows that encountering the thought-ways of "the Other" gets you there, that the rush of decentering tends back towards re-appropriation & erasure of core values, analytics, ontologies, & good manners, maybe catching this is a first step. 14/

There are so many amazing, polylingual, place-based, diverse (yes, truly!) ways to define & know (the) world(s). The number of distinct languages in Pacific Oceania alone is in the 1000s. How many different analytical methods might that make in re-reading & re-thinking? 15/

There is no need to erase that fact through inspired flights of the (Western) mind's fancy. We study that. We don't need to replicate it. We should be familiar with this discovery/encounter trope & what it continues to do in our own scholarship. 16/

Please let the decentering be enough. Let the briefest moment of peeking at Another Way, even seeing w/ the eyes of a foreigner, be enough. And let those who work in those "other" ways have room to do their work w/out reappropriation & recirculation in service of what oppresses.

Ok, that was not brief. But I hope those who came along for it see some of what's at stake. The RaceB4Race community of scholars makes possible imagining disruption of these crushing structures & dynamics. Let this be my kako'o of that effort. Amama, ua noa! /fin

Post-script: after re-reading this thread, it occurs to me that it may have been a failure of mine, a failure of courage, that led to my request not to have my talk at RaceB4Race: Appropriations live-streamed or recorded. To navigate the encounter dynamics has its costs. /okfin