(Re)Building the Master's House: Dismantling America's Colonial Politics of Extraction and Exclusion

Abstract

As socioeconomic and legal inequality continues to be laid bare in the post-Trump United States—due to the convergence of political activity (including a national election cycle and an insurrection) with an economic downtown, a global public health crisis, and the impacts of climate change—one more fissure in the foundation of the American democratic project has become evident. Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett’s management of Donald Trump’s post-insurrection impeachment trial served as an indictment not only of the former President’s alleged misdeeds but modern-day American colonialism—still explicitly codified in law—that extracts service and capital from the Congresswoman and her constituents while excluding them from proprietor and contractor status in the American body politic. This Essay begins an extrapolative exploration of the theory of whiteness as contract as applied to political enfranchisement in the United States, making the case for dismantling present-day American colonialism and reconstructing an expanded version of American democracy as a way to revoke the country’s racial contract.

Keywords: colonialism, democracy, racism, race, Congress, constitutional law, contract, philosophy, politics, voting, enfranchisement