Proponents of Native removal racialized Cherokees to deny their sovereign status

Evidence

Jackson’s rhetoric emboldened state leaders who already felt that Indigenous lands of the South should be occupied by their citizens instead of by Native Americans. Some advocates for white occupation and Native expulsion used explicit racial arguments, challenging the unique status of Native people as citizens of tribal nations. The editor of one Georgia newspaper, for instance, insisted that Cherokees were “a colored people” and therefore not due the respect of legal protections accorded to sovereign tribes. When it came to differentiating between Native Americans and people of color, he contended, “Abstractly, there is no difference.” Despite vociferous protest by Native leaders and white allies, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to remove tribes from their homes and lands east of the Mississippi and relocate them on land west of the river. On May 28, 1830, Jackson signed the bill into law. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 494

Categorization

• XREF: Could connect to interest in how racial classification was deployed politically to strip legal protections — parallels the reframing project’s focus on how categorization serves foundational projects.