Moves Towards Innocence
You have encountered a Great White Beast!
“It is precisely by denying culpability or assuming that one is not implicated in violent relations toward others, that one is outside them, that violence can be perpetuated. Violence, especially of the liberal varieties, is often most easily perpetrated in the spaces and places where its possibility is unequivocally denounced”[1].
Reconciliatory allyship shouldn’t be invoked to reinscribe settler virtues.
It should be contemplated alongside the concepts of implication, responsibilities to unsettle settler innocence, and to inspire action [2].
The form and the possible degree of acting as allies (especially from within institutions rooted in western-based thinking) depends on the complexity of one's entanglement and the privileges one has within the institution and other interlocking socially inherited structures[3].
The fallacy of imagining there is an easy road to reconciliation leading to superficial actions that alleviate settler guilt, but do nothing to repatriate land, or undo settler power, coloniality or privilege - and is also referred to as a "move towards innocence" [4].
- ↑ Berlant in Rothberg, M. (2019 p.49) The implicated subject. Stanford University Press.
- ↑ Grundy, M., Jiang, J., & Niiya, M. (2019). Solidarity as a settler move to innocence. Race in the Americas
- ↑ Rothberg, M. (2019 p.87) The implicated subject. Stanford University Press.
- ↑ Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 1(1), 1-40