ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that 1619 marks the beginning of an outlaw nation, marking the violent advent of chattel slavery in the United States. Over the next 400 years, slave codes, black codes, convict lease, and Jim Crow, and other targeted disenfranchisement policies, laws, and statutes, not only protect the white polity in the United States from a population that has been systematically denied rights that white citizens enjoy (and demand) from their state institutions. Drawing on historical examples of subjugation and Black American resistance to such outlaw practices, I argue that such a government’s legal reasoning is Hobbesian and Manichean: might makes right. The settler colonial hegemony utilizes Hobbesian social contract theory to justify oppression of Indigenous nations and people of African descent. Ultimately, my postcolonial ideology critique showcases that an investment in legal protection for subalterns is futile; specifically, the abstract-rights-bearing individual is a ruse, and a belief in the race-neutral rule of law has been convenient in buttressing white supremacist terror in all its myriad variations. Outlaw violence by the settler colonial state triggers insurrectionist justice demands from below.
