Narratives of black invisibility legitimate land seizures by erasing prior claims

Evidence

By falling back on the myth that black people are invisible, Harrison affirms the Rhodesian standpoint that “the African’s claim to the land he and his ancestors … occupied for centuries [i]s as limited as that of the animals that roamed [it]” (Magubane, 1996, p. 166). In that regard, his memoir absolves the Rhodesian regime and helps mollify the consciences of the beneficiaries of racially lopsided Rhodesian policies. As deployed by Harrison, the myth that black people are invisible sustains the illusion that Rhodesians did not rob anyone when they parceled out land among themselves. Invisibility implies insignificance. Positing given groups of people as invisible implies that such people do not have rights worth respecting. When a given people are deemed to have no rights worth respecting, their humanity is placed in jeopardy. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists, 57

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The logical chain — invisibility to insignificance to unworthiness to dehumanization — is a paradigm-quality account of how colonial supremacy rationalizes dispossession.
• XREF: Directly parallels the machinery of settler grievance that the reader is testing for dissolution or transfer under white displacement in Zimbabwe. — connects to: Rendering black people invisible legitimated colonial land seizure. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 56; King linked exclusion-from-neighborhood logics to genocidal denial of black existence — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 271; Counterfactual questions about a raceless history conceal denial — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 127 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Rendering black people invisible legitimated colonial land seizure. #corroborates (0.96) — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists, 56
• King linked exclusion-from-neighborhood logics to genocidal denial of black existence #corroborates (0.88) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 271
• Neglected recordkeeping of Black graves functions as erasure of lives #exemplifies (0.86)
• The race-as-emergency-explanation framework licensed mass colonial massacres #corroborates (0.83)
• Denying descendants’ claims to the images perpetuates the systematic subversion of Black property rights #exemplifies (0.82) — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 786
• Digital enclosures fence off identity the way land enclosures fenced off land #expands (0.79) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 297
• Historical records structurally conceal assimilated minorities and amplify failure narratives #expands (0.78) — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1152
• Identity claims to territory arrive as retrospective legitimation #expands (0.76) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 122
• Counterfactual questions about a raceless history conceal denial #complicates (0.74) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 127
• Security registration programs racialize groups by concretizing essentialized categories #qualifies (0.72)