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I was rereading J. Sakai’s Settlers for the third time when I started thinking about something that has bothered me for years about the way liberals argue with Republicans. There is a whole genre of liberal political commentary built around catching the right contradicting itself. Republicans complain about government spending and then support enormous military budgets. They complain about immigrants taking jobs while supporting an economy that depends on immigrant labor. They complain about foreign countries taking advantage of America while defending the institutions that give America its position in the world. The liberal response is usually to point at the contradiction like they have finally found the loose thread that will unravel the whole thing. Someone posts the two statements beside each other, adds a screenshot, and waits for the Republican to realize that he has been defeated by basic logical consistency. More importantly, I think on some level they already know it is there.
That was what clicked for me while rereading Sakai. The contradiction isn’t necessarily a mistake in the political worldview. Sometimes the contradiction is doing something. It allows someone to understand himself as the beneficiary of a social order in one moment and its victim in the next without ever having to reconcile those positions. The Republican who celebrates American dominance and then complains that the rest of the world is exploiting America doesn’t need those ideas to fit together according to the standards of a liberal debate club. They only need to explain different experiences at different moments. When America is powerful, its power belongs to him. When the consequences of that power become expensive, unstable, or personally inconvenient, responsibility suddenly belongs somewhere else.
Liberals keep treating this as hypocrisy because hypocrisy is comforting. If the problem is hypocrisy, then revealing the inconsistency should weaken the belief. You can pull up the old tweet, show the voting record, compare the two statements, and wait for embarrassment to perform political education. Then nothing happens. The contradiction gets pointed out for the thousandth time and everyone involved returns to exactly the same position. At some point you have to consider the possibility that the contradiction persists because it serves a purpose.
That is what keeps bringing me back to Deleuze and Guattari them alongside Sakai gave me a way to think about the contradiction I kept seeing in American politics. Sakai’s Settlers insists that Amerikan political consciousness can’t be separated from the material history of settlement. The settler wasn’t simply dropped into an already existing country and handed a neutral position within it. Settlement produced the world in which he understood himself, which meant that relations created through conquest could eventually stop appearing as relations at all. They became ordinary life. People rarely experience what has always surrounded them as a privilege granted by history. They experience it as the natural starting point from which everything else is measured. Once that position becomes ordinary, its erosion doesn’t necessarily feel like the loss of an advantage. It can feel like something has been stolen.
Liberals repeatedly misunderstand what they are looking at when they collect screenshots of conservative contradictions. They assume they are exposing a failure of reasoning when they may actually be looking at a coherent feature of settler political consciousness. Someone can understand America as enormously powerful while simultaneously believing Americans are uniquely victimized. because the contradiction isn’t incidental to the worldview. The settler has to live inside a material order whose history he has largely been taught to forget. He experiences the benefits produced by that history as normal and experiences disruptions to those benefits as something being done to him. Once you understand that, the endless liberal ritual of catching Republicans contradicting themselves starts to look almost quaint. They noticed the contradiction correctly. They just assumed exposing it was the same thing as explaining it.
Ask an Amerikan about an ancestor who crossed an ocean or a prairie and you'll hear about courage. Ask the same person about someone crossing a border today and you'll hear about invasion. Both answers come out sincerely, often from the same mouth, and the seam between them rarely gets noticed.
I. The Run
At noon on April 22, 1889, soldiers stationed around the Unassigned Lands in Indian Territory gave the signal, and somewhere around fifty thousand people who had spent days waiting at the boundary surged across the prairie. Some came on horses. Others arrived in wagons or aboard trains that had been packed with claimants waiting for the hour when movement would become legal. The land had been obtained by the United States through the post-Civil War treaties it imposed on the Muscogee and Seminole nations, and President Benjamin Harrison had opened roughly two million acres to settlement by proclamation. The rules followed the basic machinery of federal homesteading. A qualifying claimant could occupy land, improve it, remain on it for the required period, and eventually receive title from the government. The Oklahoma Historical Society estimates that around fifty thousand people surrounded the territory that morning and that roughly eleven thousand agricultural homesteads were claimed during the run.
Some claimants did not bother waiting for noon. People slipped across the boundary ahead of the signal, hid themselves, and positioned themselves to seize better claims before the crowd arrived. They became known as Sooners. The name survived so thoroughly that Oklahoma eventually adopted "Sooner" as part of its public identity, which means that a state born partly from an organized land rush memorialized the people who cheated at the land rush. There are moments when history saves the critic the trouble of writing a joke.
For decades afterward, Oklahoma schools reenacted the land run. Children dressed in period costumes, pulled wagons across schoolyards, and staked claims to little patches of grass. In 2014, a Choctaw mother in Oklahoma City described being told that her daughters could sit in the office or take an unexcused absence rather than participate. Native parents and educators pushed the district toward alternatives that taught the history without asking Native children to play the people being dispossessed.
Before noon, the federal government held the settler population at a line, and at noon that same government released the crowd into motion so that individuals could stop moving on particular parcels. Movement was how immobility got produced, since a claimant raced across the land to plant a stake and establish that somebody else had better keep moving. The celebrated migration lasted an afternoon, and the defense of what it produced has lasted generations.
The settler has to move before the settler can defend being settled, and the state has to disorganize one territorial relation before it can recognize another. A population celebrates the ancestor who crossed territory in search of a future and can later experience another population crossing territory as a danger to everything the ancestor built.
These positions are easy to dismiss as hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is too shallow, since a hypocrite understands the contradiction and conceals it. The pattern I'm interested in works even when both sides are sincerely believed. The pioneer's movement can genuinely feel like freedom while the migrant's movement genuinely feels like invasion, and the same political culture sustains both experiences by attaching them to different positions in the territorial order. I've been calling this pattern settler schizophrenia, a term I'd better define before anyone decides I've diagnosed Oklahoma.
Schizophrenia here comes from the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially the two volumes they published under the shared title Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus in 1972 and A Thousand Plateaus in 1980. They use schizophrenia to describe a process through which established codes break down, social relations become mobile, and flows of labor, money, signs, land, identity, and desire escape older arrangements.
Clinical schizophrenia is a psychiatric condition experienced by actual people. They have enough to deal with without being held responsible for the Homestead Act.
The settler half of my phrase comes from a different theoretical history. It comes from arguments about conquest, land, race, and the political formation of the white Amerikan working class. J. Sakai's Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern is central here because Sakai insists that class consciousness in the United States can't be understood without asking what conquered territory did for the people who received access to it. The question he forces onto the table remains unavoidable: what happens to class consciousness when a worker can imagine escaping wage dependence by becoming a proprietor on somebody else's land?
Read together, Sakai and Deleuze and Guattari describe a peculiar subject: capitalism loosens the settler from an older territory and conquest supplies another, and the settler experiences the second movement as liberation from the first. The society built from this movement then teaches his descendants that the territory produced through movement is permanent, and settler schizophrenia names the political consciousness that can inhabit that sequence without feeling it as a contradiction.
It celebrates movement when movement creates settler possession and turns territorial once possession has been achieved. It leans heavily on the state while teaching the owner to imagine private property as something that exists before the state, and it inherits the material consequences of history while treating historical explanation as an accusation against the present. It imagines Amerika as universally open to reinvention and still goes looking, periodically, for the people whose presence supposedly threatens the country's authentic identity.
White Amerikans are central to this story because the settler order developed around white political membership, white access to land, and legal distinctions separating settlers from the Indigenous and Black populations over whom the emerging state exercised radically different forms of power. What I'm describing is a political machine, and the people come afterward.
II. What Deleuze and Guattari Meant by Schizophrenia
Gilles Deleuze was already an established philosopher when he met Félix Guattari after the political upheavals of 1968. Guattari came from a different world. He had spent years working at La Borde, an experimental psychiatric clinic where conventional distinctions between patient, analyst, institution, and everyday work were being questioned. Their collaboration produced books with a reputation for difficulty that occasionally becomes an excuse for never stating what they were actually arguing.
Every social order organizes flows. People move, goods move, desire moves, money moves, land changes hands, bodies reproduce, and information circulates, and political institutions decide which of those movements are permitted, which become obligations, and which get treated as threats.
Earlier social orders often organized these flows through relatively durable codes. Kinship could determine inheritance and religious law could determine marriage, and political rank could fix who owed labor to whom. A peasant might be tied to a particular place by legal status and customary obligation, and by dependence on land that couldn't simply be sold like a stock.
Capitalism requires a different degree of abstraction. Land becomes alienable and labor becomes purchasable as time, and money permits exchange between people who share no kinship and may never meet again. A person can theoretically sell her labor in a place where nobody knows her family, and capital can abandon one region and reappear somewhere cheaper. The commodity doesn't care whether the person who buys it knows the person who made it. Deleuze and Guattari call this process decoding because relationships previously organized through thicker social codes become available for circulation through money and contract.
Their account follows Marx closely at important moments. Near the end of the first volume of Capital, Marx describes the violent historical process through which English peasants were separated from common land and transformed into workers possessing little besides their capacity to labor. The worker appears in the market as legally free because she can sell labor to different employers, although the loss of independent access to the means of living makes the sale economically necessary.
Deleuze and Guattari read capitalism through this encounter between decoded labor and decoded capital. The worker has been loosened from one territory and money from older political restrictions, and when the two flows meet, capitalism takes off.
Their word deterritorialization describes this loosening. A territory in their work is larger than a piece of dirt. It can be a social arrangement that gives people a stable location within a system of meaning and power. Deterritorialization occurs when that arrangement breaks apart or loses the capacity to hold the elements passing through it.
A society composed entirely of deterritorialized flows would be difficult to reproduce. Capital needs workers mobile enough to move where employment exists, and it also needs them disciplined enough to appear at the factory tomorrow morning. Property has to circulate, and somebody still needs an enforceable title. Families can become more flexible, while children still have to be raised somewhere. Money can cross borders, while contracts still depend upon legal jurisdictions.
Capitalism therefore constructs new territories, and Deleuze and Guattari call this reterritorialization. The nation becomes one of these new territories and the private household becomes another, race can become one, and property certainly does. The market loosens people from older relations while the state, the family, national identity, and legal ownership give them somewhere else to stand.
That's why their schizophrenia shouldn't be confused with simple disorder. It describes a system that produces its own instability because the instability is productive. Capitalism has to disassemble relations that obstruct circulation, and it then has to keep the consequences of circulation from dissolving the social order that continued accumulation requires.
Political commentary has a bad habit of assuming that exposing a contradiction defeats an ideology. Someone discovers that a person who hates the federal government depends on a federally backed mortgage and waits for the revelation to destroy the person's worldview, or points out that a politician praising free markets supports a subsidy and assumes the contradiction will prove fatal. Usually nothing happens, because a contradiction can weaken a theory while a social system can run on one.
The Amerikan settler order ran on exactly that kind of contradiction, and it did so with unusual literalness because it deterritorialized territory itself. Existing relationships between Indigenous nations and land had to be broken, subordinated, legally narrowed, or politically erased before the settler property system could appear universal, and the ground had to be transformed before the deed could look natural.
III. A Petty Lord of His Own Land
Sakai came to his study of white workers from a political experience far removed from the academic history profession. In the author's note to a later edition of Settlers, he recalls working as an Asian domestic worker in California, participating in civil-rights organizing, and later working alongside people involved in international liberation struggles. He began what became Settlers in the 1970s because the class politics of Euro-American workers seemed inadequately explained by the socialist literature available to him.
His target was the reassuring story in which poor Europeans arrived in North America, became ordinary workers, and were then manipulated by capitalists into racial hostility against people with whom they shared an underlying class interest. Sakai disputed the assumption that exploitation exhausted the material position of white labor. He wanted to know what else white workers received through membership in the settler order, and his answer begins with land.
In the first chapter, Sakai emphasizes that many migrants came from social strata capable of imagining independent property ownership as a plausible goal. He draws heavily on histories of colonial migration and labor to argue that access to land changed the meaning of wage labor in the colonies. A worker who might remain dependent on wages in Europe could imagine accumulating enough to acquire a farm or business in North America. The horizon itself mattered.
Property offered an exit, and that distinction changes politics. A permanent proletarian can imagine freedom through changing the relation that makes her proletarian, while a worker who experiences proletarian status as temporary can imagine freedom through becoming an owner. The second worker may resent the employer intensely and still keep a strong investment in the property order, because her grievance is partly that she hasn't yet reached the position she wants. The lottery ticket shows how a future position can organize behavior long before anyone wins.
In the final chapter of Capital, Marx discusses Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of colonization. Wakefield had recognized that capitalism had trouble reproducing a stable wage-labor force wherever workers could obtain land cheaply. Marx enjoys the example because it demonstrates his point that capital is a social relation. Ship capital and a labor force to a colony where workers can walk away and establish independent livelihoods, and the capitalist can discover that wealth alone doesn't produce a proletariat.
In Sakai's reading, the worker's escape from wage dependence requires available territory, and available territory has a history, which in the United States includes Indigenous dispossession. The worker's freedom from one form of dependence can therefore be made possible through somebody else's loss of territorial control.
That makes the settler subject more complicated than either the heroic pioneer or the racist dupe. His freedom can be real and its conditions can be colonial, and both propositions belong in the same sentence.
The Homestead Act makes the relationship impossible to miss. The federal government eventually distributed around 270 million acres under the homestead system. Claimants generally had to be citizens or prospective citizens, reside on the land, improve it, and meet the law's procedural requirements before receiving title. The settler did real work, and the settler also entered a field constructed through federal law.
Amerikan political mythology often treats labor as though it explains the origin of ownership by itself. Someone cleared the land and built the house, and property followed. The mythology begins with the worker because beginning earlier gets awkward: beginning earlier brings in the treaty and the survey, and it may bring in a population whose relationship to the land didn't fit the property regime being imposed on it. Sakai's contribution is forcing the story backward, so that the individual proprietor stops being the beginning and becomes an outcome.
In Sakai's account, European workers could experience severe exploitation while possessing political possibilities denied to enslaved Africans and heavily constrained for Indigenous peoples. An indentured servant might experience brutal labor conditions. His status nevertheless contained a temporal endpoint and a possible future within the settler polity that chattel slavery explicitly denied to the enslaved African.
The political effect of this difference exceeds income. A person can identify with the society she expects to enter, so the settler order didn't need to make every white person rich; it needed to make membership materially consequential.
Cheryl Harris later gave a legal vocabulary to part of this process in her 1993 essay "Whiteness as Property." Harris argues that Amerikan law historically converted whiteness into a status with property-like characteristics through the intertwined histories of conquest and slavery. Whiteness came with recognized expectations and benefits and with forms of exclusion that law helped protect.
This helps explain why white poverty doesn't automatically negate racial advantage. A poor white worker can be exploited and can also occupy a legal and political status historically distinguished from populations subjected to other forms of domination, and materialism requires holding both relations at once.
I read Settlers as a test rather than a scripture. Any theory of the Amerikan working class has to survive the land question: it has to explain why property acquisition mattered, and it has to explain why workers could fight employers ferociously while defending political arrangements that subordinated other workers, racialized labor markets and citizenship included. A theory that explains only exploitation describes one relation and mistakes it for the whole society, and the settler becomes visible only when the rest of the map is put back.
IV. The West as a Line of Flight
Frederick Jackson Turner made the frontier the foundation of Amerikan character in his famous 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." He took the 1890 Census announcement that a distinct frontier line could no longer be identified and transformed it into an interpretation of national development.
Turner argued that the existence of western land had repeatedly offered Amerikans an escape from older social constraints. The frontier loosened hierarchy and encouraged individualism, and it gave class tensions somewhere geographic to go. Turner's thesis has been debated, revised, criticized, and repeatedly declared dead by historians who then discover that Amerikans keep talking like Turner anyway. Turner and Sakai sit strangely close together, since both think land shaped Amerikan consciousness and both read western movement as a way social pressure got displaced, and they disagree only about the people already on the land.
Turner's famous "free land" gets much less conceptually clean once freedom is understood as a relationship among people rather than a characteristic of acreage. The land looked free from inside the settler system because Indigenous claims had been politically discounted, and Sakai restores those claims and changes the moral geometry, so that Turner's escape becomes somebody else's invasion.
Deleuze and Guattari were fascinated by Anglo-American literature for similar reasons. They saw writers such as Melville as unusually interested in flight and in refusing inherited forms, and their America is filled with lines moving toward horizons. The romance has a blind spot, because a line of flight crosses somebody's ground.
Their own later concepts contain the means to correct it, because a line of flight carries no automatic moral virtue. A movement escaping one system can become destructive inside another, and deterritorialization can open possibilities and generate new forms of domination.
The Amerikan frontier is almost a textbook example. A younger son leaves Europe because property feels unattainable and a worker moves west because wage dependence feels suffocating. The desire for escape is completely intelligible from the settler's position, but the territory receives it differently: movement that looks emancipatory from behind the wagon looks like dispossession to the people watching the wagon arrive. The same line carries both relations.
Settler schizophrenia keeps those two relations apart. The settler remembers the escape while the political order absorbs the enclosure into ordinary law, and the two stop appearing together.
Once the frontier closes, the cultural form survives, and Amerika keeps producing frontier solutions. The suburb becomes one and entrepreneurship another, and space itself eventually becomes a frontier because apparently one continent was insufficient for the metaphor. The recurring promise is that a conflict built into the society can be escaped by finding somewhere else to stand, so people are told to move and start again, to own something and build something.
Individual exit can be liberating, and it turns into a political problem when it depends on an imagined empty territory whose existing relations can be ignored. The frontier habit makes a travel plan out of a social problem.
V. The Grid
The frontier mythology loves motion, but property requires measurement. In 1785, the Confederation Congress adopted a system for surveying western lands that would divide territory into six-mile-square townships and subdivide each township into thirty-six sections of one square mile, or 640 acres. The rectangular survey became one of the most consequential pieces of institutional infrastructure in Amerikan settlement. Seen from an airplane, large parts of the Midwest still show the geometry: roads follow section lines, fields meet at right angles, and property descriptions rely on coordinates set by surveyors who sometimes arrived before the settlers whose claims those coordinates would organize.
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish smooth space, which in their work describes forms of movement less organized around fixed coordinates and predetermined pathways, from striated space, which is measured, divided, compared, and made administratively legible. The Amerikan land grid is striation with paperwork. It translates territorial complexity into comparable units, so a section in one township can be described through the same abstract system used anywhere else, and land becomes easier to sell because the purchaser doesn't need to understand the place through the relationships of the people living there. The territory becomes legible to a distant state and the parcel to a distant market. The grid is political before it becomes psychological: once it has existed long enough it stops looking imposed and starts looking like geography, which is one of the achievements of settlement.
The General Allotment Act of 1887 pushed the individualizing logic more deeply into Indigenous landholding. Federal policy divided tribal land into individual allotments and opened land classified as surplus to non-Indigenous settlement. The Bureau of Indian Affairs now describes allotment as involuntary and reports that more than ninety million acres passed out of Indigenous ownership and control before the policy was ended in 1934.
Allotment did more than steal acreage. It attempted to change the form of the relationship to acreage, pressuring the collective political relationship of a nation to territory into the individualized property form the settler state recognized. The Indigenous person could remain while the Indigenous nation's territorial relation was weakened.
Patrick Wolfe's theory of settler colonialism helps explain why this distinction matters. Wolfe argued that settler colonialism should be understood as an enduring structure organized around access to land. Elimination in his account includes physical destruction, although the logic can also work through assimilation, legal reclassification, child removal, or property regimes that reduce the political capacity of Indigenous peoples to remain collective territorial subjects.
That's why settler colonialism doesn't end when open warfare does. A reservation boundary can remain politically contested, jurisdiction can remain contested, and land ownership can remain fragmented through policies whose origins lie a century earlier.
The Amerikan owner is often imagined as standing opposite the government, though the government has spent an extraordinary amount of time producing owners: it surveys the land, recognizes title, maintains the records, runs the courts that enforce contracts, writes the rules of inheritance, and decides which claims fit the property system. Once those activities become ordinary, they disappear from the ideological picture.
Government becomes visible when it taxes the owner or restricts land use. The state that protects the existing distribution counts as neutral and the state that changes the distribution counts as political, which has obvious ideological advantages, since a person can experience ownership as the absence of government after government has finished manufacturing the conditions under which ownership means anything. Amerikan libertarianism occasionally discovers tyranny at the exact moment the government finishes helping with the closing costs.
The settler form of anti-statism appears when existing property relations are treated as though they precede political authority, and they don't. The deed is a social relationship recognized by institutions, and that makes it political.
VI. Whiteness as a Territory
Settlers didn't arrive as a single European people. They arrived with national antagonisms, different churches, class distinctions, regional cultures, and languages that could make neighbors mutually unintelligible, and whiteness helped produce a new political sameness out of them. It operated as a territory of membership.
Groups now treated as unremarkably white could experience periods of intense exclusion, and the boundaries of whiteness shifted because racial categories developed through politics rather than descending intact from biology. The law demonstrated that flexibility repeatedly.
The first federal naturalization statute in 1790 restricted naturalization to a "free white person." That racial limitation remained central to federal naturalization law for generations. In Ozawa v. United States in 1922, the Supreme Court concluded that a Japanese immigrant could not qualify as white for naturalization and treated "white" as corresponding to what was then called the Caucasian race.
Only a few months later, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind confronted an applicant who could point to contemporary racial classifications that placed people from parts of India within the Caucasian category. The Court shifted the test and held that statutory whiteness had to be understood through the popular meaning attached to "white persons" by the supposed common understanding of Amerikans.
In those two cases the scientific rationale changed and the border stayed. Whiteness didn't need a stable essence because its political function was stable enough, which was to separate populations eligible for full incorporation from populations whose presence could be managed through different rules.
Harris's idea of whiteness as property matters so much to a theory of settler consciousness because property has boundaries and carries a right of exclusion, and whiteness could work the same way. A white person with little wealth could still hold a form of recognized standing.
W. E. B. Du Bois famously described part of this standing as a public and psychological wage. White workers in the post-Reconstruction order could receive social recognition and access to public institutions unavailable to Black people even when their economic wages remained low.
Desire enters the class analysis here. Political membership can pay in status, and status becomes intensely valuable when material security is limited, so the settler worker can fight capital over wages while defending racial membership, since the two struggles concern different parts of his position. There's no contradiction once the social field has more than one axis; the contradiction appears only inside a theory that insists the worker must have one objective identity capable of explaining every political investment. Human beings have shown considerable resistance to being that convenient.
The history also explains why settler consciousness can expand beyond whiteness. The Amerikan state can incorporate populations formerly excluded from the dominant political category. People of color can own property and serve in institutions historically involved in settlement, and immigrants from colonized nations can arrive in the United States and become participants in a settler property order. A Black person can experience anti-Black racism while holding a deed inside the same property system, and an Indigenous person can participate in capitalist markets while belonging to a nation whose political relationship to the land predates the United States.
VII. "The Chinese Must Go"
One of the clearest demonstrations of settler incorporation arrived in nineteenth-century California. Denis Kearney was an Irish immigrant who became a leading voice in the Workingmen's Party of California during the anti-Chinese agitation of the 1870s. His movement combined working-class grievance with demands to exclude Chinese laborers, and the politics eventually fed into state-level restrictions as well as the broader national campaign that culminated in federal exclusion.
Chinese workers had been indispensable to western development, including major portions of railroad construction. Their usefulness to capital did not translate into equal membership in the settler polity.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring Chinese labor immigration. The Library of Congress describes the law as the first major federal restriction on free immigration and notes that subsequent restrictions also denied Chinese immigrants the path to citizenship available to European immigrants.
Some of the most aggressive exclusion came from European immigrants who had themselves recently crossed an ocean, which looks contradictory only if migration carries the same political meaning for everyone, and settler society changes the meaning once the migrant is incorporated. The Irish worker can arrive as an outsider and later speak as part of the people whose territory requires defense, with whiteness performing the conversion: the recent migrant becomes a settler and the newer migrant stays foreign.
The speed of the transformation matters because it shows that settler consciousness doesn't require ancient ancestry, only a position. Someone who entered the national territory recently can become intensely invested in the boundary precisely because incorporation remains insecure, and belonging that had to be earned can create an especially strong desire to show that the category has standards.
The exclusion also had material effects. Chinese workers competed within labor markets, and removing them could change bargaining conditions for other workers, so the politics can't be explained solely as false consciousness. White workers could perceive concrete benefits from exclusion, and the racial ideology gave those benefits a moral language. The worker didn't have to choose between interest and prejudice because the social order had already joined them.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Wilhelm Reich asked why masses of people can desire political arrangements that look irrational from a narrow economic perspective. Sometimes they don't look irrational from the position people actually occupy: a worker can gain something through racial exclusion and lose something through capitalist exploitation, and the political subject is formed at the intersection.
VIII. The Suburb Was the Last Frontier
The geographic frontier eventually closed, and the property frontier moved closer to the city. During the twentieth century, homeownership became one of the principal mechanisms through which Amerikan families accumulated security and transmitted wealth. Public policy played a decisive role in expanding mortgage finance and suburban development, while racial exclusion shaped who could fully participate in the new property regime.
Residential segregation had many institutional sources. Local ordinances, restrictive covenants, discriminatory lending, real-estate practices, and violence all contributed. Federal housing policy interacted with these systems rather than standing outside them.
The political importance of suburbia comes from the way security was concentrated inside the house. A house became shelter and an investment and a school district all at once, and it could support retirement and become inheritance. Once several forms of security depend on one asset, protecting the asset becomes an understandable political priority.
A moral reading of homeowner politics is inadequate here. A homeowner defending scarcity is defending the primary asset through which the welfare regime has taught her to secure old age, and the institution has recruited her into the behavior. Asking individuals to abandon the incentive through exceptional virtue is unlikely to transform the system.
The racial history remains visible in contemporary wealth even after formal discrimination has been dismantled. Federal Reserve data from the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances found median wealth of about $285,000 among white families, compared with roughly $44,900 among Black families and $61,600 among Hispanic families.
Accumulation does the carrying here, and racial essence plays no part. A restrictive rule can disappear while the appreciation accumulated under it remains inside family balance sheets, and a family can inherit a house without inheriting the beliefs of the person who bought it. The asset doesn't need ideological continuity.
A liberal homeowner can sincerely oppose racial discrimination and understand redlining, and she can also oppose housing development because additional supply might affect neighborhood value or because density might alter schools, traffic, or local amenities. A lawn sign expressing universal inclusion can sit on the same parcel as a zoning objection protecting scarcity because one expresses moral identity and the other protects material security. Settler schizophrenia lets the two commitments coexist until a concrete decision forces them into contact.
Settler politics appears when ownership itself starts functioning as a claim to superior political authority over space, so that the resident becomes more legitimate because she owns and the newcomer becomes suspicious because she hasn't yet acquired the right kind of rootedness. The old frontier principle quietly survives, and arrival becomes legitimacy after enough time has passed.
IX. The Neighborhood
Large political orders survive through small habits, and Deleuze and Guattari make this point in their discussion of micropolitics. Political power doesn't live only in constitutions, armies, elections, or presidents; it also lives in ordinary expectations about authority and belonging.
A neighborhood can train people in territorial politics. The property line teaches a distinction between inside and outside, the homeowners' association teaches what legitimate occupancy looks like, and the neighborhood app teaches residents which bodies are worth noticing, while the police stand ready as the institution that can turn suspicion into state action. Together these institutions reproduce a territorial common sense inherited from the larger order.
The famous Central Park incident involving Christian Cooper in May 2020 showed how quickly these small relations can become racialized. Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, asked a white woman to leash her dog in an area where park rules required it. She responded by calling police and describing him as an African American man threatening her.
The significance lies partly in the institution she invoked. The park was public and the disagreement concerned ordinary use of shared space, and the conflict became racial and territorial through the expectation that police authority could decide whose account of danger would carry institutional weight. The encounter became nationally prominent partly because it happened on the same day George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police.
People experience the state as protector unequally. A property-secure subject can learn that calling the police restores order, while a population with a history of discriminatory policing can experience the same institution as a source of danger, and the institution contains both histories. Political arguments fail when one population's experience is treated as universal.
The settler analysis becomes personally legible to me here as a Black woman and a transsexual woman. Territorial belonging is rarely abstract when people decide your body looks out of place, and a person walking through a neighborhood can become a question: who are you visiting, why are you here, do you live nearby? The questions reveal an assumption that some people enter space already belonging while others have to account for their presence. Settler politics reaches its molecular form at exactly this scale: the nation says some people belong and the block rehearses the distinction in miniature.
X. Invasion
The frontier migrant eventually becomes the national native, rooted in a country where the family has lived for generations. A white family that has lived in Pennsylvania for two centuries can genuinely experience Pennsylvania as home, and the problem begins when rootedness becomes evidence that settlement no longer matters. The descendant of settlers starts experiencing the nation as a possession endangered by newer arrivals.
On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Protecting the American People Against Invasion." The order described recent unauthorized immigration as an unprecedented "flood" and framed enforcement through national-security and public-safety concerns. A separate proclamation the same day, "Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion," invoked sovereign territorial authority and directed actions aimed at what the administration formally described as an invasion across the southern border. The word "invasion" does more than describe unauthorized entry, because it converts migration into territorial warfare: a legal violation becomes a struggle over possession, and the citizen becomes an inhabitant defending a homeland against a migrant whose movement threatens sovereignty.
The political force of this rhetoric is not evenly distributed across the Amerikan public. PRRI reported in 2026 that 33 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that immigrants were "invading" the country and replacing its cultural and ethnic background, while 62 percent disagreed. The partisan divide was enormous: 66 percent of Republicans agreed, compared with 28 percent of independents and 10 percent of Democrats. Earlier PRRI data also found higher agreement among white Americans than among Black or Hispanic Americans.
Texas offers an especially sharp historical inversion. During the period of Mexican rule, authorities became alarmed by large-scale migration from the United States into Texas. The Mexican government's Law of April 6, 1830 attempted to restrict further migration from the United States, strengthen Mexican control, and limit the introduction of enslaved people. Immigration continued and political conflict intensified until the Texas Revolution transformed sovereignty over the region.
That history matters because contemporary invasion rhetoric in Texas takes place inside a territory whose political order was itself transformed through migration, settlement, revolt, war, and annexation. The relevant fact is memory: Amerikan political culture already holds a historical narrative in which population movement changes who governs a territory. Replacement anxiety turns that narrative around: the established population imagines itself watching newcomers arrive, and the historical settler becomes the person afraid of settlement.
This inversion can become violent. The man who murdered twenty-three people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 admitted targeting Hispanics and described his attack through a manifesto that used invasion language. The Justice Department later stated that he selected the border city in an effort to target Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants. The case shows how territorial rhetoric can fuse with racial threat under its most violent conditions.
XI. Capital Gets the Airport Lounge
The border becomes even stranger when placed beside the mobility of capital. Money moves across jurisdictions constantly, corporations reorganize supply chains, investment crosses borders electronically, and production moves when labor or regulatory costs change, so financial ownership can detach from physical proximity so completely that the owner of an asset may never visit the place where it exists.
That movement can destroy the stability of local life. A factory closes, a regional industry declines, a town loses its tax base, and housing becomes a speculative asset for people living somewhere else, while the people affected by these processes often have little direct power over them. Capital is abstract and the migrant has a face.
That creates a powerful opening for reterritorialization. The state may be unable or unwilling to promise that capital will stay in a particular town, but it can promise to control a geographical line. Economic sovereignty is difficult and territorial sovereignty is visible, so the border gives diffuse insecurity an edge.
This helps explain why economic globalization and cultural nationalism can intensify together, and the relationship holds no mystery once nationalism is understood as a compensatory territory. Capitalism destabilizes place, national identity promises permanence, markets treat labor as mobile, and citizenship creates a category that says who belongs: the economic order loosens while the political order tightens somewhere else.
The Bracero Program makes the contradictory relationship between labor mobility and territorial membership unusually clear. Beginning during World War II, the United States and Mexico created programs that admitted Mexican men as temporary contract workers, especially in agriculture and railroad work. Millions of contracts were issued before the program ended in 1964. The worker could cross, but membership didn't necessarily cross with him. The arrangement allowed labor to enter under conditions defined by employers and the state while preserving the worker's political foreignness, so the social machine admitted the flow it needed and limited the consequences it didn't want.
Deleuze and Guattari call capitalism axiomatic because the system doesn't need one grand moral code capable of making every rule philosophically consistent; it needs rules capable of managing flows. One rule admits labor, another controls residence, another governs family migration, and another removes people who fall outside the recognized category. Consistency is optional and function is mandatory.
The political irony is that capital often receives more freedom of movement than the workers whose labor gives capital its value. Money gets the airport lounge and the dishwasher gets an interview, which is my quota of border humor, and unfortunately it's doing empirical work.
XII. The Settler Left
Sakai's hardest argument was directed at the left, because the left often wanted the white worker to arrive theoretically purified. The usual class story says workers share a basic material interest against capital and racial divisions keep them from recognizing it, and that story can describe real situations: employers have used racial division to suppress wages and weaken organization, and workers can gain enormously through interracial solidarity.
The story becomes inadequate when some workers receive material advantages through the racial organization of labor, because at that point racism is doing more than producing misunderstanding. It is distributing jobs, housing, political standing, and the expectation of future ownership, and that produces contradictory politics without requiring stupidity. Sakai points to white labor agitation for western land as an example: demands for cheap land let the settler worker oppose concentrated wealth while still claiming territory produced through Indigenous dispossession, so the radicalism becomes horizontal among settlers and the hierarchy survives across the settler boundary.
The New Deal provides another version of the problem. Major pieces of social legislation dramatically strengthened protections for many workers while leaving important occupational categories outside early federal systems. Agricultural and domestic workers, sectors containing large shares of Black workers in the South, were excluded from key protections at the time. Historians continue to debate the mixture of administrative, political, and racial reasons behind the exclusions. The distributional effect remained racially uneven.
Social democracy itself can be territorial in this way. A political community can create generous benefits for insiders while policing the boundary around membership.
The settler logic appears when citizenship begins functioning as inherited property rather than political membership, and the country then becomes something the established population owns, and newcomers become people trying to acquire a share without having paid an imagined historical admission price. The price changes depending on whose ancestors are being remembered: a settler ancestor crossing a continent becomes proof of industriousness, while a migrant crossing a border can become proof that the border is collapsing.
That's why I read Sakai as a corrective to left-wing romance. If people were permanently determined by settler position, politics would be pointless, but solidarity exists because positions can be contested. People can act against relative privilege, organizations can produce new interests, and workers can discover that the long-term power won through coalition exceeds the short-term advantage won through exclusion. Sakai's real challenge is that there's no hidden universal worker waiting beneath history for the correct leaflet, so the organizer meets the worker history actually produced.
XIII. Moves to Innocence
A mature settler society eventually learns to incorporate criticism, and that's one of the most interesting forms of reterritorialization because critique itself becomes part of the national story. The country can acknowledge slavery and removal, and the historical wrong then becomes a stage in the nation's moral development, which leaves the present institution looking wiser because it has learned from the past. In that story, recognition becomes evidence that the underlying material relation has been resolved, with the country as the protagonist of the suffering it caused and the victim as a character in the nation's redemption.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang gave a useful name to one version of this process in their 2012 essay "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor." They criticize the expanding use of "decolonization" as a general synonym for making institutions more progressive and insist that settler colonialism concerns material relationships to Indigenous land and life. They describe rhetorical and psychological strategies that relieve settlers from confronting that material question as moves to innocence.
The concept is especially useful for institutions, and the land acknowledgment is the obvious case. An institution names the Indigenous nation whose territory it occupies, and the statement can correct historical erasure and create an expectation that the institution maintain real relationships with Indigenous communities. Those effects matter, and the open question is what happens next.
If nothing material changes, recognition can become a new source of institutional legitimacy: the institution proves its ethical seriousness by accurately describing the history of the property it continues to control. The critique has been incorporated and the territory remains.
Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone's "Land-Grab Universities" investigation traced nearly eleven million acres connected to the Morrill Act to land taken from around 250 Indigenous tribes, bands, and communities. Their research linked those transfers to fifty-two institutions that benefited from land sales used to build endowment principal.
A university can acknowledge Indigenous land in a building whose institutional history was partly financed through Indigenous dispossession, and some institutions have begun exploring scholarships, partnerships, land relationships, or other forms of repair. The distinction stays simple, because recognition changes language while restitution changes a relation.
The personal version of the same process appears whenever structural history gets converted into a trial of individual guilt. Someone says white families received unequal access to property, and a white person replies that her grandparents were poor, which turns the conversation moral: was my grandmother good, did my father work hard, did my family personally discriminate against anyone? Those questions don't resolve the property relation.
Guilt is appealing because it keeps the self at the center. The guilty settler can confess and the innocent settler can defend herself, and both remain protagonists while the deed waits quietly in the recorder's office.
Responsibility is less dramatic: a person can inherit an institution she didn't design, and she can alter it all the same, with no ancestral contamination ritual required. Materialism is merciful in a way guilt politics rarely is, because it doesn't require people born after an event to pretend they authored it. It asks what remains operative now.
XIV. The Schizo-Paranoid Circuit
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish a schizophrenic pole of social investment from a paranoiac pole, and the process I'm describing runs through both, which makes it closer to a settler schizo-paranoid circuit than to schizophrenia alone. The schizophrenic tendency decodes and escapes fixed organization, while the paranoiac tendency attaches desire to large identities, hierarchy, nation, race, sovereignty, and order, and the settler formation needs both.
The settler arrives through deterritorialization. The European leaves an older territory, the frontier breaks Indigenous territorial control, capital converts land into alienable property, and old social positions become unstable as migrants cross distance. Then the process reverses direction: the parcel, the border, whiteness, and citizenship all harden, the household becomes an inheritance machine, and the new territories present themselves as permanent.
The paranoiac moment arrives when movement threatens the territory produced by earlier movement. The political subject experiences change as dispossession, so demographic change becomes replacement, redistribution becomes confiscation, historical explanation becomes accusation, and Indigenous jurisdiction becomes disorder, and the subject seeks a harder boundary.
That circuit explains why contradictions don't disappear after being exposed. Each pole solves a problem produced by the other, since mobility creates instability that territory answers with control, and territory creates pressure that generates new movement, so the settler state lives through the oscillation. The system teaches people to experience selected movements as freedom and selected boundaries as nature, and the contradiction becomes common sense because its two sides appear at different moments. Calling the system hypocritical is insufficient for that reason, because the contradiction is doing work.
XV. The Map Speaks Back
The map is one of the settler state's most successful technologies because it makes relationships look like geometry. A border becomes a line, a reservation a colored area, a county a shape, and a parcel a set of coordinates, and the conflicts that produced the line disappear until someone makes a claim and the map becomes political again.
McGirt v. Oklahoma produced exactly this moment. Jimcy McGirt, a citizen of the Seminole Nation, had been convicted in Oklahoma state court for crimes committed within the historical boundaries of the Muscogee reservation. His jurisdictional challenge eventually reached the Supreme Court.
In 2020, a five-justice majority concluded that Congress had never formally disestablished the Muscogee reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Justice Neil Gorsuch opened the opinion by recalling the federal promises made after the forced removal of the Creek Nation and wrote that, because Congress had not said otherwise, the government had to honor its word.
The decision's political effect was enormous because it made the map speak historically. A space Oklahoma had treated as fully absorbed into ordinary state jurisdiction turned out to contain a surviving treaty relationship, and where the state had behaved as though time had resolved the matter, the Court asked what Congress had actually done.
That distinction cuts to the center of settler schizophrenia, because the settler order repeatedly treats duration as legitimacy: enough years pass, the political origin fades, and the relation becomes geography. McGirt reopened the temporal dimension by showing that the map had a before, the jurisdiction had an origin, and the treaty remained legally significant, which is deeply unsettling to a political consciousness that wants settlement to mean both occupation and conclusion.
The word "settled" is doing two jobs. The land has been settled and the question has been settled, and the settler needs those meanings to reinforce each other while history keeps separating them.
In 1889, settlers raced across land to establish claims, and in 2020 the Supreme Court confronted a surviving Indigenous political relationship within the state created by generations of those claims. Oklahoma turned the run into a childhood ritual in which the people whose political relationship to the territory had made it possible entered the lesson mainly as background, so a century later a court decision announcing that one of those relationships still had legal force felt to many Oklahomans like the past had unexpectedly invaded the present. The past had been there the whole time, and only the camera had moved.
XVI. History Is Alive Whenever It Legitimates and Dead Whenever It Complicates Possession
The Founders and the Constitution remain politically alive, a family homestead stays alive enough to become heritage, and the pioneer comes back every time a politician invokes self-reliance. History turns suspiciously ancient when it explains a present inequality. A housing policy from the twentieth century is suddenly too old to matter, a treaty from the nineteenth century becomes an artifact, and the accumulated value of inherited property becomes personal achievement. The settler wants a past that can legitimate belonging without creating obligations, and heritage provides that past, while structural history does something more dangerous by establishing causal continuity.
The method I call invariance asks what remains operative while visible forms change. The task is to follow what survives the transformation.
The frontier closes and territorial property remains. The racial covenant becomes legally unenforceable and accumulated housing wealth remains. Explicit white naturalization requirements disappear while national belonging can stay racialized in the political imagination. Allotment formally ends and fractionated land ownership and its jurisdictional consequences remain, a land acknowledgment appears while the institution may continue controlling the land, and the ideology changes faster than the material relation. Amerika often prefers redemption, and redemption has an ending, while material history keeps sending invoices.
XVII. The Settler Looks Into the Mirror and Sees an Individual
There's a fantasy at the center of Amerikan liberal individualism that the person arrives before society, so that the person works, buys, chooses, and succeeds while institutions appear as the environment around an already formed individual. The settler version makes the fantasy geographical: the pioneer stands on empty land and works, property appears, a family follows, and government arrives later, usually with taxes. The story is elegant because almost every causal relation has been edited out of the frame, and the individual only becomes intelligible once the social world is restored.
The settler really worked, and the question is what his work could become inside a particular institutional field. One person can work and acquire appreciating property, another can work and pay rent for decades, another can work land whose title belongs to somebody else, and another can be excluded from the market through rules she didn't write. The conversion of effort into wealth is socially organized, and settler schizophrenia hides the conversion by treating the outcome as autobiography.
That's why structural explanation can feel insulting. A person hears that institutions contributed to her position and feels that somebody has denied her labor, which makes emotional sense because Amerikan culture has taught her that deserving and independence depend on being the author of her own position. Historical causality introduces other people, and other people introduce claims and remember treaties, and they can ask whether the territory is as settled as the map suggests.
XVIII. The Settler Neurosis
The word schizophrenia in my title describes movement, and the neurosis appears around permanence. The settler lives inside a society created through displacement and wants the ground to stop moving.
The irony lies in the history through which permanence was obtained. Settler society required Indigenous territorial disruption, capitalism repeatedly required workers to move, and enslavement violently transported African people across an ocean and within the continent. Property markets reorganized cities while industrial capital built towns and abandoned them, and the national economy kept moving long after the frontier supposedly closed. The settler responded by constructing smaller sovereignties, with the house promising permanence, the neighborhood familiarity, the nation continuity, and the border an inside, while whiteness historically promised membership. Each territory gives the subject somewhere to stand while the social order underneath keeps changing.
The cycle is understandable without being inevitable. People can build different forms of security, and the state can provide social goods that reduce dependence on appreciating private property. Political institutions can create membership without turning it into ethnic possession, labor organization can build solidarities that cross national status, and Indigenous sovereignty can be treated as a continuing political relation rather than an artifact. The problem has never been the mere existence of boundaries; what matters is the relation a boundary protects and whose movement it regulates.
XIX. The Point Is the Relation
The concept becomes useful when several relations converge: a historically produced entitlement to territory is present, a movement or social transformation destabilizes that territory, a compensatory boundary promises to restore control, and the history of how the territory was produced drops out of the account of why the boundary is legitimate. I look for those four relations in Amerikan politics today, and I find them wherever land and belonging are in dispute. The January 2025 executive order that framed unauthorized immigration as an invasion carries the second movement, the one that treats the territory as finished and the arrival as a threat to it, and the first movement, the run that made the territory, never comes up. A neighborhood that fights an apartment building while its yards carry signs welcoming everyone has the same split, with the moral commitment and the property commitment living in separate registers until a vote forces them together. A university that opens a public meeting with a land acknowledgment and keeps the land is making a move to innocence, and a politician who promises to protect "the American worker" while the benefit and the border get drawn around who counts as one is bargaining over what membership pays, which is Sakai's labor aristocracy at work. The question I ask in each case follows from the land run: who moved first, who is being told to stop moving, and which of those facts is allowed to count as history?
The settler's society has sorted incompatible demands into different parts of ordinary life, and people can sincerely hold positions that look incompatible when abstracted from history. The settler can experience herself as independent because the state's role in producing her security has become invisible. She can celebrate immigration through her family history and fear immigration as a present territorial process, she can oppose racism and benefit from accumulated property shaped by earlier racial policy, and she can resent capital while identifying intensely with the nation through which capital's instability is politically managed. The contradictions are social before they become personal.
XX. The Ground
Settler schizophrenia applies almost perfectly to contemporary American politics, because the American subject keeps encountering institutions built around American power and experiencing them as evidence that America has somehow been cheated. NAFTA and the continental trade system that replaced it integrated production across North America in ways that benefited U.S. firms, investors, exporters, and consumers overall, even while particular industries and working-class communities absorbed severe losses that were never evenly repaired. The USITC has found small positive aggregate effects from American trade agreements while also finding that their gains weren't distributed evenly. Yet the political story becomes Mexico took our jobs, as though American capital hadn't helped design the arrangement, relocated production through it, and collected the returns. Something similar happens with America's overseas military presence. The bases are talked about as burdens America maintains for ungrateful foreigners, even though the Defense Department has repeatedly described forward deployment as a way to secure access, move forces quickly, sustain logistics, reinforce alliances, deter rivals, and preserve American influence in strategically important regions. Then there's the petrodollar, which becomes even stranger because the mythology usually obscures the stronger argument. There isn't one magical petrodollar agreement holding American supremacy together. There is a dollar-centered international financial system in which the dollar remains central to reserves, international lending, payments, debt, and trade, and the Federal Reserve openly acknowledges that this position lowers borrowing and transaction costs for Americans while widening the pool of capital available to the United States. Settler schizophrenia appears when the benefits of empire become so normalized that the settler can no longer recognize them as benefits. Cheap access to capital feels like the natural condition of money. A military network spanning the planet feels like charity. A continental production system organized heavily around American capital feels like foreign exploitation once some of its internal costs finally reach American workers. The settler experiences the consequences of the system while forgetting his country's position inside it, so every contradiction arrives wearing the face of an outsider. Mexico stole the factory. Europe made us defend it. Foreign countries manipulate our currency. The world is supposedly feeding on America while American state power, military reach, corporations, financial markets, and currency sit near the center of the very systems being described. Settler schizophrenia doesn't require the settler to be materially comfortable, because many Americans plainly aren't. It describes the ideological split that lets someone suffer real injuries produced within an American-centered order and then understand those injuries as proof that America itself is the colonized party.
Amerika keeps trying to become innocent without surrendering what its history produced. It wants the territory and the property, the inheritance and the institutions, and the emotional continuity of national history, and it also wants the freedom to declare the historical process finished whenever causality becomes uncomfortable.
The mistake is assuming that legitimate belonging requires innocence. A person can belong to the United States and understand that it was produced through conquest, and a white worker can be exploited and understand that exploitation never erased racial advantage.
The settler's deepest political desire is often for the argument to end. The land has been settled, the jurisdiction has been settled, the racial question has been settled, the border has been settled, and the past has been settled, and history remains rude enough to keep replying. The map speaks and the treaty survives, the inherited asset appreciates, the migrant crosses, the worker moves, and capital moves faster, while the settler rebuilds somewhere to stand and calls the new arrangement permanent.
The political subject isn't born carrying the contradiction. She learns it through property, the nation, the border, and the neighborhood, and she learns which movement counts as ambition and which counts as invasion, which acts of government count as the natural protection of order and which as interference, and where history begins. These lessons can be unlearned only after they become visible as lessons.
Amerika has spent centuries describing the person standing inside the fence. The history becomes considerably clearer when we finally ask who put the fence there.
Works Cited
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Used for desiring-production, capitalism's decoding of flows, schizophrenia as a social process, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, the capitalist axiomatic, and the paranoiac and schizoid poles of social investment.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Used for micropolitics, molecular and molar organization, smooth and striated space, lines of flight, territorialization, and the argument that escaping one rigid formation does not guarantee an emancipatory destination.
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Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. 1935. Used for the concept of the public and psychological wage attached to whiteness.
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Knight, Tara. "IF SEX IS MATERIAL, THEN ANALYZE THE FUCKING MATERIAL." Bundle of Styx, September 2026. Used for the method of invariance and its application to social relations that remain structurally operative through changes in ideology and form.
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Lee, Robert, and Tristan Ahtone. "Land-Grab Universities." High Country News, 2020. Their investigation traced nearly 10.7 million acres taken from around 250 Indigenous tribes, bands, and communities through more than 160 land cessions and linked the land to fifty-two land-grant institutions.
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Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I. Especially the sections on primitive accumulation and "The Modern Theory of Colonisation." Used for the separation of workers from land, Wakefield's colonial theory, and the problem cheap land posed for the reproduction of wage labor.
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