Coconuts are everywhere. If you walk into a grocery store pretty much anywhere in the United States, you’ll find a cornucopia of coconut products: coconut water, coconut oil, coconut macaroons, and, of course, husked coconuts themselves.

Most consumers spend little time thinking about where the coconuts in this “coco craze” come from. But according to a Samoan proverb, “The coconut is sweet, but it was husked with the teeth.”

For the Samoan farmers and workers of the early coconut industry, these sweet treats were a site of struggle against colonial rule and exploitative plantations. By launching cooperatives, Samoans proved themselves savvy participants in the expanding global coconut trade while seeking economic self-determination. Recalling that fraught history is a reminder of the importance of worker power in contemporary global supply chains—where many of the same inequalities persist.

Americans got their first taste of coconuts just over a century ago. In the mid-19th century, the U.S. Navy began eyeing the South Pacific islands of Samoa as a coaling station. Around the same time, British and French missionaries along with German traders opened the first trading stations in Samoa. They moved methodically to monopolize the import and export of goods essential to the Samoan economy, and by the late 19th century, coconuts and copra—the dried meat of the coconut—had become Samoa’s main export to Europe and the United States. There, the copra was processed into a variety of products, including high-quality soap, margarine, and even dynamite.

From the start, Samoans resisted the Euro-American monopoly of the lucrative copra trade. They quickly realized they were being cheated by outlanders. After weighing out copra at trading stations, Euro-American traders routinely paid Samoan producers 30-50% less than they should have.

In response, Samoans took out large lines of credit and endlessly deferred their payments, knowing that the lack of effective legal enforcement of debt defaults protected them from punishment. They also resorted to manipulating the quantity and quality of the copra they delivered to traders by soaking the copra in water or mixing in greener nuts of poorer quality.

The U.S. Navy established formal colonial rule over eastern Samoa in 1900. The next year, hoping to raise revenues and increase copra production, the cash-strapped naval administration introduced a copra tax. In the eyes of U.S. officials, requiring taxes to be paid in copra protected the “child-like” Samoans from exploitation by unscrupulous traders.

Samoans were slow to pay this new tax. Many Euro-American traders even tried to keep the Samoans from cutting copra to pay taxes rather than sell it to them for export. By 1902, Samoans still sold copra below market price, keeping the prices artificially low as long as the naval government used the copra taxes to finance its operations. “In some villages,” Governor Uriel Sebree noted, “the natives have already resolved to sell wholesale rather than individually, and thus get a higher price.”

In 1903, the naval administration cut out the pesky traders and took over the sale of copra. From then on, Samoan producers brought their copra to government-run stations and received a standard price per pound somewhat lower than the projected annual bid. This margin allowed the government to pay expenses such as transportation and wages for the stations’ clerks. After the year’s copra output was awarded to the highest bidder—generally an American or Australian firm—any remaining surplus was returned to Samoan family chiefs. But instead of cash, they received copra receipts that could only be used to purchase goods in official stores.

By and large, Samoans did not object to the U.S. government’s takeover of the copra trade, because it increased their profit margins. Just the year before, Samoan copra producers had founded their own copra cooperative. In an effort to outcompete foreign traders, cooperative members from the main island of Tutuila and the smaller Manuʻa Islands 75 miles to the east pooled production and distribution of copra.

For a few years, the producer cooperative worked well. The company operated stores in several villages across the islands and owned three motorboats to ship copra to Pago Pago for export to San Francisco. Most importantly, the cooperative protected Samoan copra production by adding a crucial distribution mechanism. But because it allowed its Samoan members to buy goods on credit, company debt continued to rise.

By 1907, rumors of embezzled funds and skyrocketing debt led the U.S. naval government to become a trustee of the company. Then, on the brink of World War I, U.S. officials determined that the cooperative had failed economically and should be shut down as soon as remaining debts were collected. As Governor C.D. Stearns summed up with characteristic condescension, “The natives are absolutely incapable of managing their own affairs in financial matters and it is believed that permitting them to establish co-operative stores and co-operative schooners has been a mistake.”

Yet what looked like failure to paternalistic U.S. officials in Pago had provided Samoans in Manuʻa with a much-needed way to pool resources and mitigate risk. For the moment, they refused to let the cooperative venture sink.

As it turned out, the cooperative did not survive much longer. In January 1915, a tropical cyclone devastated Manuʻa. Half of the 1,500 inhabitants of the islands had to be relocated because most of the food crops had been destroyed, along with the majority of the cooperative’s copra stock. It took several years for agricultural production in Manuʻa to recover, but the copra cooperative never did. By 1919, the former store of the cooperative had become a naval dispensary and wireless radio office. The following year, the Manuʻa Cooperative Company officially folded.

While the cooperative movement eventually collapsed under political coercion, it helped form the nucleus of a more sustained challenge to colonial rule in the 1920s. To protest Navy mismanagement, American Samoans organized a copra boycott and practically shut down the naval government, which depended on the taxes drawn from the sale of copra.

Faced with Euro-American coconut colonialism, Samoans resisted by holding on to their community-based farming practices and succeeded in protecting long-standing ways of life. At the same time, they adapted selectively to the new colonial world by founding cooperatives whose worker mutualism aimed for greater economic self-determination.

Remembering the deep colonial roots of coconuts—and many other products—on American shelves helps put current frustrations, whether about stocking speed or quality, in perspective. With colonized workers serving American consumers, early 20th-century coconut production in Samoa carried the seeds of today’s global division of labor. Then as now, American consumers should push for worker control over the means of production and distribution of the tropical fruits they have come to love.

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“I thought they died out,” a woman remarked flippantly to my friend just the other day. She, like many Indians, has long believed that Anglo-Indians ceased to exist when the British left the subcontinent. But despite a recent Indian government effort to strip us of our legislative protections after a bogus census count, we have endured.

I am Anglo-Indian—AI, as we are commonly known. I am not dead. In fact, there are over 350,000 of us in India today. And our history tells the story of a group of people that straddle two worlds, offering a glimpse into the complexity of colonial and postcolonial life. It is also the story of how a small minority group has nurtured a deep sense of community for hundreds of years in Indian society, which has both embraced us and held us out as vestiges of a foreign occupation.

Yet we have remained invisible in most colonial histories. Article 366(2) of the 1950 India constitution defined an AI as “a person whose father, or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line, is or was of European descent, but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is, or was, born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein, and not established there for temporary purposes only.” My childhood friend Barry O’Brien, in his exhaustive book The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait Of A Community, traces the story of AIs, “one of the oldest and largest communities of mixed descent people in the world,” back to 1498 “when Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, set foot on the shores of Calicut—a whole century before the British arrived in India.”

All my grandparents—Wilfred Mayer, Mary Michael, Benjamin D’Monte, and Vida Chatelier—were born in British-ruled India, as were their parents and most of their grandparents. My parents, George Mayer and Alicia D’Monte, were born before India won independence in 1947.

My family spread out across the subcontinent following the veins of the growing railway network. My grandfather Benjamin D’Monte was an engine driver who succumbed to lung cancer after a brief life spent shoveling coal into the belching boilers of English engines. His daughters, my mother, and her sister, Lourdes, grew up in a railway colony in the southern Indian town of Podanur.

Moira’s parents, Alicia and George Mayer, at their wedding in 1965. Courtesy of author.

Annual Prize Day at Frank Anthony Public School, with leaders of the Anglo-Indian community seated in the front. Courtesy of Karen Mayer.

From left to right: George Mayer, Moira (Mayer) Shourie, Jill (Mayer) Morris, and Alicia Mayer at the All India Anglo-Indian Association All General Meeting (AGM) Ball in 1995. Courtesy of author.

Anglo-Indian leaders at an All India Anglo-Indian Association All General Meeting (AGM) in 1980. From left to right: George Mayer, Josep Fusté, Maj. Gen Williams, and Malcolm Booth. Courtesy of author.

Over centuries, Anglo-Indians have formed composite identities in the multiracial population of India. Like our forebearers, AIs are Christian and multilingual: our mother tongue is English, and we often speak Hindi and the languages and dialects of the places we originated from (like Konkani, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu). For generations, we married mostly within our community. We exist outside the Hindu caste system, and have been referred to in derogatory terms like half-caste, kuccha bachha (half-baked child), and no one’s favorite, “bastards of the British.”

We have endured slurs and been alienated by our own people. We have been made the punching bag of every nationalist politician. The Indian stereotypes of Christians in general and AIs in particular are promiscuous, drunk, lazy louches. Hindi movies reinforce this idea by naming cocktail waitresses—symbols of loose morals—Mary. It was particularly harrowing for my parents to raise three daughters in a society that saw girls wearing skirts as fair game for sexual harassment.

This alienation had at least one positive effect: AI women gravitated toward careers that went against the restrictive gender norms of Indian society, working in public-facing jobs as teachers, nurses, secretaries, and flight attendants. As people with professional training and college degrees and a mastery of speaking English, many AI families rose into the middle class within a generation of India’s independence.

Our in-between status also created cohesion. In 1926, Sir Henry Gidney formed the All India Anglo-Indian Association to create a central financial, political, and cultural hub for our community. Among its early leaders was Frank Anthony, a London-educated lawyer, who in 1942 negotiated with Gandhi, Nehru, and leaders of the independence movement to enshrine legally-protected representation for Anglo-Indians in the infant country. Still, at that time, many AIs left India along with the British and emigrated to other Commonwealth countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

But AIs have found ways to keep our subculture alive through music, food, and the annual general meeting. AGMs are usually held during the Dussehra-Diwali holiday season in October and cover a wide range of issues, from education and sports to civic participation. While our parents engaged delegates from all across the country in debates about the future of our community in the great hall of Frank Anthony Public School in Delhi, we kids played childhood games that morphed into teenage dance parties that blossomed into romantic relationships. Every year new couples found love, new romances were celebrated, new babies were christened. Moira Georgina Mayer was one such baby, crowned “Most Beautiful” in 1973, and paraded by Mr. Anthony’s wife, Olive, or “Beaut,” as she was affectionately known. And so we Anglo-Indians ensured our longevity and our sense of identity, even as a mere 0.01% of the Indian population.

I remember Christmas dances filled with the music of our very own Cliff Richard (born Harry Rodger Webb in Lucknow in 1940) and Engelbert Humperdinck (born Arnold Dorsey in Madras in 1936). Where ladies copied fashions and hairstyles sported by Hollywood stars like Merle Oberon (born Estelle Thompson in Bombay in 1911). And the menu consisted of dishes like glassy, pepper water, jalfrezi, country captain, and yellow rice with ball curry, a bed of turmeric-tinged coconut rice with a spicy tomato-based meatball curry. After all the uncles and aunties turned in for the night, we teenagers would bring out guitars and makeshift drum sets for spontaneous jam sessions, dancing along to ABBA, Lobo, Boney M., and Shakin’ Stevens. Often, a power outage would send us out to the school’s cricket field, where our neighbors from the surrounding Lajpat Nagar colony would pour out onto their balconies for respite from the oppressive heat and to enjoy the spectacle of Anglo-Indian youngsters partaking in wild revelry. On those nights the unofficial AI anthem was “Roll Out the Barrel,” a song that perfectly captures our lightheartedness, and love for a dance and a stiff drink to wash off the day.

I moved away from India to the U.S. when I was 24. Because I didn’t marry an Anglo-Indian man, my children are not AIs. But I continue to share the rich and hybrid culture we made our own with them. And so, the essence of so much of my community survives. I feel that they sense it in the way I speak, in the AI lingo I use when speaking with my sisters that sends my sons into conniptions (“Come on men Moira-girl, chuck off in the mouth,” which is AI-speak for “have a bite to eat, Moira”). And in the subtlest of my mannerisms. And not least in the food that nourishes us, often drawn from the handwritten cookbook my own mother gave me as a parting gift before I boarded my flight to Boston for graduate school, filled with recipes for Nana’s roast, bloody cutlets, mixed grill, and that signature dish of Anglo-Indians everywhere: yellow rice and ball curry.

The Anglo Indians Favourites Playlist:

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Mishra recounted the anecdote during last night’s Zócalo/UCI Forum for the Academy and the Public event, “Can Decolonization Explain Everything?”

Today, from fashion to the academic syllabus, the effects of the process of decolonization are everywhere. And while decolonization may not explain everything, the panelists agreed that the work—which is political, economic, and intellectual in nature—is an integral part of the story of now.

“Many people in this country here don’t fully appreciate the significance of the colonial experience and the process of decolonization as a political revolution, as a revolution of racial justice, as an economic revolution, and as something that continues to reverberate in the 21st century,” said Kal Raustiala, director of the UCLA Burkle Center, who served as moderator of the conversation.

When we think of decolonization, we think of it as beginning in the 20th century, as peoples of Asia and Africa sought to regain sovereignty from Western imperial powers, Mishra explained. “These were nations that liberated themselves after extremely long, hard-fought battles with Western European powers, by which I mean mostly France and the United Kingdom and to a certain extent Belgium and Holland.”

Now, some 60 to 70 years later, he said, you can see how countries that have been the most “empowered as part of this process,” like India and China, have become “more and more assertive internationally.” This shows up even in Russia’s war in Ukraine, he pointed out. One reason why much of the world outside the West is not condemning Russia “has at least partly to do with the fact that the Soviet Union was supporting the process of decolonization when Western powers were resisting it,” he said. “These memories do count.”

Panelist Laila Lalami, a novelist who was born and raised in Morocco—which was a French colony from 1912 to 1956—spoke about the long process of decolonization, one that affects entire generations even if those generations have never lived in a colony.

“All stories we grew up with were all driving to the same point: that we were supposed to yield,” she said. For her grandmother’s generation, it was a story of physical compliance. She recounted to Lalami how she was walking down the street carrying her baby, who was lighter-skinned than her, when a French woman stopped them and accused her of stealing the baby. “This embodied colonial thinking,” Lalami said, “this attitude where you can just help yourself to another baby—violate a person’s physical integrity.” For her father’s generation, it was a story of economic compliance. Working for French bosses, he always felt like he was being passed over for promotions. And for Lalami’s generation, it’s a story of cultural compliance. As a child seeking books, the ones available to her in Morocco were predominantly in French. “Much of my early exposure to literature was in a colonial context even though I was born and raised in a completely independent country,” she said.

Artist Serge Attukwei Clottey, who works primarily with found materials from his hometown, Accra, Ghana, shared several of his projects with the audience, including “Yellow Brick Road” (2018), “Sea Never Dries” (2023), “Tribe and Tribulation” (2022), and “Gold Falls” (2022).

“I believe that decolonization can be very practical within the immediate space. Because I follow the mantra: Think global, act local,” Clottey said.

Audience questions relayed in person and via a live YouTube chat asked the panelists to consider questions around the nature of American empire, human colonization of Mars, and whether the British Commonwealth—a “meaningless institution,” Mishra said—provides an easier exit from empire.

The last question of the night asked the panelists to consider the language of decolonization—is the term still centering colonizers? Is Indigenizing the same movement, or something further?

Clottey discussed language itself: “Power relationships are tricky. I think that Africa still feels very much like we don’t have control.” We spend so much money to go to the U.K. to speak English, he said.

Lalami reflected on the fact that, throughout the panel, she was speaking about Morocco as a former colony of France, but Morocco itself was a country with Indigenous people before the arrival of Arabs in the 7th century. “The Indigenous people and the Arabs have intermarried so most Moroccans are both Amazigh and Arab but it’s only very recently that things like the language rights of Indigenous people in Morocco have been recognized. Finally, you can walk down the street and actually see signs that are in Tamazight, and Arabic, and French.”

But this, she added, only started because of Amazigh activists. “So I agree, it’s interesting how we can be talking about these processes and inadvertently framing them in ways that continue to center the person holding the power.”

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It was 1950, and the world was in flames: In Vietnam, Iran, Madagascar, Algeria, West Africa, South Africa, Tunisia, Malaya, Burma, and Cuba, wars of counterinsurgency were being waged against colonial powers that refused to leave. Women, with weapons in their hands and the courage to hide soldiers, grow food for the frontlines, and pass messages across their battlefronts, took part in fighting these wars for independence. At the same time, they sought peace, freedom, and women’s rights.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, they erupted in protests to demand an end to imperialism—the starting point for imagining decolonization as a global culture.

Today, corporate sponsors have sought to commodify International Women’s Day and turn it into women’s access to rule like capitalists. But this 1950 fight for decolonization built a culture that—if you look closely—still fuels the revolutionary spirit, and promise, of the day.

International Women’s Day began as a way to join working-class women’s struggles for basic rights to livelihood with middle-class women’s fight for the vote. At the International Socialist Women’s Congress, held in Copenhagen in 1910, German activist Clara Zetkin proposed holding an international women’s day in March. These meetings and demonstrations incited protests, including the Russian Revolution in 1917. From 1922 onward, the day was mostly celebrated as a holiday in the USSR and socialist countries to honor women’s rights gained under socialism.

The need for a decolonial agenda around International Women’s Day arose from the Global South, during the anti-imperialist Asian Women’s Conference held in Beijing, China, in December 1949. There, attendees found solidarity and carried that spirit back home in countless manifestations of anticolonial feminist activism. During those 12 days in Beijing, women from across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and South America forged a movement for all women to fight against colonialism and demand equal rights with full sovereignty. Many women from colonized countries had already joined their countries’ battles to crush colonial occupation. They had their own slogans: Bury the corpse of colonialism! If anyone is oppressed, no one is free! And they demanded that women from colonizing countries dismantle their countries’ war machines.

Women at the conference gathered at the National Art Academy tables. Courtesy of Sophia Smith Archives, Smith College.

Attendees took that charge with them when they got back home. Just two weeks after returning from Beijing, for instance, Jeanette Vermeersch, a parliamentarian and member of the French Communist Party, addressed the French parliament to call for the withdrawal of France from Vietnam: “The Vietnamese people are fighting a just war,” she said, “a war in the defense of your aggression. You are fighting an unjust war, a colonial war, a war of aggression.”

Through networks of anti-imperialist and socialist women’s groups, the message of the Asian Women’s Conference traveled around the world. It would be a global, coordinated refusal of imperialism. The conference resolution spread: Celebrate International Women’s Day, a day for working-class women’s struggles, like never before.

When International Women’s Day arrived, it joined together women from all around the world in the anticolonial struggle for their full emancipation, as women from colonizing countries like France and the Netherlands demanded an end to imperialism in solidarity with women from Vietnam, Indonesia, Tunisia, and beyond. This included the demand that women hold equal rights to fully enfranchised men, not the truncated rights of colonized men with negligible rights to vote, apartheid rules of unfree movement, fettered access to jobs, and stolen lands.

The day punctuated ongoing insurgencies by people who were geographically far from each other, but were bound by common occupiers of colonial nations.

In Mar del Plata, Argentina, leftist women’s groups—such as the Union of Argentine Women and the Women’s Cultural Group—held the Congress for Peace in dozens of cities around the country to evade the authorities (who had banned their activities) and fight for a decent standard of living and political rights. In Brazil, women chose to protest the high-level U.S. economic delegation visiting Rio de Janeiro. They printed 100,000 leaflets and covered the city with 20,000 posters under the name “Protect Brazilian Petrol” to condemn the economic treaty signed with the United States. Their slogans sought peace and an end to U.S. interference in the Brazilian economy—its own form of neoimperialism—and protested the high cost of living.

Across the world, in Damascus, the Union of Syrian Women led a demonstration of women and children to the parliament to condemn war. Their protests were not without cost. Amine Aref Kassab Hasan, who had recently returned from the Beijing conference, was beaten and arrested, along with two other women and a 5-year-old girl. In Homs, another delegate of the Asian Women’s Conference, Salma Boummi, along with five other women and girls were arrested for a similar protest for peace. But in the face of the Syrian government’s violent response, 13 Syrian women’s organizations presented a memorandum to the Constituent Assembly to demand women’s equal rights, particularly equal pay for equal work. Though they were beaten back, the movement pressed onward.

Anticolonial leaders of the women’s movement, like Celestine Ouezzin Coulibaly (familiarly known as Macoucou) and Baya Allouchiche, took the lead in organizing working-class women in their countries, but also in their regions of North Africa and West Africa, respectively.

The Mongolian delegation at the conference. Courtesy of Sophia Smith Archives, Smith College.

In Ivory Coast, Coulibaly toured Sudan, Upper Volta, and Ivory Coast to spread the word after attending the Beijing conference. She described the solidarity of women she witnessed, and she told of the success won by communist women in the People’s Republic of China, who drove out an army that had far greater armaments supplied by the Americans. After touring the region, Coulibaly led demonstrations of thousands of women on International Women’s Day in Grand Bassam, the French colonial capital of Ivory Coast, in protest of police repression and the murder of women who, in December 1949, had demanded the release of political prisoners who fought for independence from French colonial rule.

Like Coulibaly, after Allouchiche returned from the Asian Women’s Conference, she galvanized women in Algeria to join the anticolonial struggle. She toured Algeria and Morocco, spending 12 days in the radical province of Oran, where women were not yet organized. She described a world of solidarity among women, one that refused to buckle under the yoke of colonialism nor the yoke of patriarchy. She dared them to imagine: “the sun that has risen in Beijing will shine for us too!” Her speeches held in the month of February tipped the balance toward solidarity and a wage strike among dockworkers. Only a week before International Women’s Day 1950, over 300 Algerian women joined the strike on the docks of Oran to protest poor working conditions and to refuse to load ships with soldiers and supplies for the colonial counterinsurgency frontlines of Vietnam.

Global anticolonial solidarity required resistance in colonial centers. Delegates from the Netherlands, the United States, France, and England who attended the conference in Beijing took direction and brought colonized women’s struggle home. On the same day as the protests in Syria, Lebanon, Ivory Coast, Argentina, Brazil, and Algeria, Dutch women supported dock workers who refused to load ships with American armaments bound for the Dutch occupation of Indonesia by laying in the road and blocking the trucks from reaching the docks. In Enshede, Dutch women connected Dutch peoples’ high cost of living to the priority given in the national budget for military purposes over the needs of the working population of the Netherlands. Bread not Barracks, they shouted.

Formal colonialism fell in the decades after the 1949 Asian Women’s Conference. But economic colonialism continues today. Economic blockades have human rights consequences and debt packages dictate national policies. But women’s struggles for decolonization, peace, and equal rights hasn’t ebbed. If we turn our heads to Latin America, one memorable slogan from strikes held on International Women’s Day—“What they call love, we call unpaid work!”—draws the connections between the debt bondage and the need for women to provide structural networks of care. Femicide, drug trafficking, border policing, and U.S. intervention in Central America and Mexican economies have fueled endemic murders of women and girls. We see inspiration, too, from women in Mexico reacting to this, to join their internationalist call against systemic femicide, for “Ni Una Mas!” (Not One More).

International Women’s Day in 1950 revived the fight for anticolonial, anti-imperialist solidarity on the terms of the people most oppressed. Our regional and national women’s struggles are still global, still marked by economic and political colonialism in new forms. Survival for many is still precarious—we have a strong tradition in International Women’s Day to imagine an alternative future without inequity.

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On February 6, two earthquakes struck near the border of Turkey and Syria. Measuring 7.8 and 7.5 on the Richter scale, they have, to date, claimed over 50,000 lives.

Those of us who respond to such disasters cannot help but wonder how much bigger the next humanitarian disaster will be, and how we will be able to cope with it.

The sheer number and scale of humanitarian emergencies have increased drastically over the last few years. Conflict, war, climate, and natural disasters are all burgeoning as we speak. But are humanitarian agencies “fit for purpose” in this tumultuous environment? In other words, are they able to meet the standard principles that they themselves created? If not, how must their approach and structure change, as each disaster creates bigger challenges than the previous one?

These questions that besiege the humanitarian aid industry do not just stem from a lack of financial or human resources. They emanate from several ethical and moral questions plaguing the sector: Who is saving whom? Who is worthy of being saved, and why? And who makes that decision?

As much as these questions should not even be asked in the humanitarian assistance sector, the more they are being demonstrated by the sector’s actions.

The premise of humanitarianism—a selfless human act—is that every life is worth saving. But the humanitarian aid industry is operating on another premise altogether, one based on its roots as a bureaucratic, post-colonial phenomenon, created by rich countries of the Global North. From the start, this has encouraged the sector to perpetuate the myth of the “white savior.” By suggesting that only these agencies of the Global North have the means and the will to pull people out of the rubble and provide life-saving assistance, this has positioned the Global North as the source of hope for affected populations. In doing so, the organizations have granted themselves the power to determine who “deserves” to be saved.

The near complete diversion of humanitarian resources from Afghanistan to Ukraine when war broke out in the latter in early 2022 is an example of this. Afghanistan was reeling from the Taliban takeover only six months earlier when, suddenly, the industry deemed the Ukraine war more important. This same industry also continues to neglect other urgent conflict zones such as Yemen; Tigray, Ethiopia; and Palestine.

Similarly, the Pakistan Floods in mid-2022, which displaced over 33 million people and placed a third of the country underwater, did not receive attention from international agencies until well after a month of the disaster. Comparatively, the response to the Turkish earthquake was far more immediate. But there, too, the response varied drastically between Turkey and war-ravaged northwestern Syria, with the latter being starved of resources due to international sanctions against the Assad regime.

The most ethically ambiguous example was the recent decision by many humanitarian agencies of the Global North to suspend their activities in Afghanistan in protest over the decision by the Taliban to ban Afghan women from working with international humanitarian aid agencies. This pitted the issue of the freedom and rights of women against the neutrality of providing life-saving assistance to populations in distress.

One can make an argument over the worth of all these cases. Of whether funds are better spent on one disaster over the other. Or if one crisis is more accessible and contained than the other, or “easier” to address. Or even that severely prolonged humanitarian cases show no hope for improvement, therefore are no longer worth investing in. But it is not for the humanitarianism sector to make any of those arguments. Its job should be to save lives no matter what. Not abandon them.

Becoming the “moral agents” of sorts for the disaster-affected has led humanitarian agencies to become seriously disconnected from the nature of the emergencies they address, not to mention dangerously politicized. They are now grappling with a largely unethical dilemma: the prospect of having to choose between emergencies and choose between countries. Choice was never part of the humanitarian ethos. But somehow, it is becoming the norm. So too is the battle to “own” the affected. Which agency gets where first? Who stays the longest? Yes, resources are scarce. But evidence shows that the industry is prioritizing crisis events based on the importance of the geopolitical region in question, rather than the crisis itself.

These critiques do not in any way reduce the importance of all the humanitarian workers who risk their own lives in emergencies to save others. This is about the humanitarian aid industry as a whole, which has become tangled in issues of power, control, and authority that are direct legacies of colonialism. This is about the tussle between the white saviors of the Global North and recipients in the Global South, where the majority of the disasters are taking place today.

Humanitarian aid has become a battle of supremacy that is as much about wealth and race as people in crisis. So, what is the solution?

It’s not “localization,” where international agencies pledge to give a portion of funds directly to local organizations per non-binding agreements such as the Grand Bargain or the Charter4Change. The “local” response to humanitarian disasters is not only inevitable; it has existed for time immemorial. No one really waits for the United Nations or others to come and save them. Countries have to respond themselves from the very outset of a disaster. But our dependence on the international system of aid has led us to undermine the humanitarian expertise and ability to respond to emergencies of countries in crisis.

Instead, we must go back to the original ethos of humanitarianism, in which affected populations come first, regardless of where the disaster has struck.  Agencies must respond to every form of crisis in a manner that takes the nature of the disaster into consideration; access, or lack of it, cannot be an excuse.

The humanitarian industry must decide if it wants to save lives or be politically motivated to do so. One does not mix with the other. To face emergencies, the agencies of the Global North must combine forces with humanitarian networks all over the world. They must seek out partners in each country, and work through and with them instead of working at cross-purposes. They must broaden their view of humanitarian expertise as being available only in international organizations based in the Global North. They must support humanitarian emergencies on the call of the countries facing the disaster, not control the entire response altogether. Most of all, they must not pick and choose emergencies based on geopolitical locations. Disaster, in any form, affects us all.

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In November 1620 the Mayflower deposited about 100 Pilgrims at the Wampanoag community of Patuxet, which the newcomers renamed New Plymouth. A year later, the English and Wampanoags enjoyed a three-day feast. For generations, Americans have celebrated that meal as the first Thanksgiving.

As traditions go, Thanksgiving seems pretty secure, though the recent redefinition of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day suggests that even once-sacred holidays can change. Columbus trotted through American culture until 1992, the 500^th anniversary of his first voyage. That year, Native and other scholars fueled a campaign to redefine the holiday by emphasizing Columbus’s role in brutal conquest, enslavement, and ecological catastrophe. But this was not the first effort to redefine America’s origins.

In the 1820s and 1830s, a Pequot minister named William Apess took aim at what would become Thanksgiving—arguing that the nation needed to rethink the colonization of New England, and view it through Indigenous perspectives. What does it mean when a nation extracts a benign interpretation of the past from a tangled and often violent legacy of encounters and conflicts? Indigenous peoples’ experience of conquest and colonization pivoted on dispossession. Shouldn’t that be part of the story too?

Apess tackled these questions at a time when prominent politicians linked the Pilgrims’ experience with two hallmarks of American democracy: the right for any community to govern itself, and the right for individuals to practice their faith without government interference. In the era of Indian removal, these notions became embedded in the federal government’s efforts to expand the nation westward into lands held by Indigenous peoples whom the Constitution excluded from exercising such rights.

In 1829, Apess’ A Son of the Forest became the earliest published Indigenous autobiography in the United States. He reported he was born in 1798, the grandson of “a white man” who had married the granddaughter of Metacom, the Wampanoag leader known to the English as King Philip. A Son of the Forest detailed Apess’ struggles with alcohol, and how he quit drinking and became ordained as a Methodist minister.

Apess was a leader in the Massachusetts Indigenous peoples’ battle to preserve their lands and to take greater control over their communities in an uprising known as the Mashpee Revolt of 1833-1834.  The Mashpees (or Marshpees) “wanted their rights as men and as freemen,” he wrote.  Apess and the Mashpees invoked the language of the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when the state of South Carolina failed in an effort to declare federal tariffs unconstitutional.  They tried to prevent white intruders from taking wood from Mashpee lands, which landed Apess briefly in prison.  Many non-Natives feared the implications of Apess’ stand, but their counsel, who was not Native, compared his clients to the patriots who had thrown tea into Boston Harbor in 1773.

Soon after, Apess turned his attention to the history of early New England.

In the midst of a war in 1637—less than 20 years after the famous Plymouth feast—Pilgrims and their allies set a Pequot town on fire and shot those who tried to escape. They killed 400 to 700 on a single night, including children and elderly people. They captured Pequot survivors and shipped them to the Caribbean as slaves. Forty years later, Apess’ ancestor, Metacom, led multiple Indigenous communities to battle for their homelands in a conflict known as King Philip’s War. From 1675 to 1677, Indigenous and colonial soldiers laid waste to each other’s communities, and colonists again bought and sold Indigenous captives, creating a market in enslaved bodies. The colonists believed Metacom and his allies posed the most serious crisis they had ever faced. After Metacom died in Rhode Island on August 12, 1676, English soldiers decapitated him, and colonists mounted his head on a post in Plymouth as a warning.

In powerful 1836 speeches and a book called Eulogy on King Philip, Apess used his ancestor’s story to redefine the colonial era. Unlike promoters of the myths surrounding Plymouth, Apess saw the 17th century as an era of struggle and sacrifice.  He described the Pilgrims as trespassers who took land “without asking liberty from anyone.” Apess castigated colonists for selling Metacom’s son into slavery, an act he called shocking by “a people calling themselves Christians.” He suggested that Metacom, rather than the English, was the true exemplar of Revolutionary ideals and sacrifice.

Apess delivered his eulogy twice in Boston in January 1836, but he soon after disappeared from the historical record. In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. He asked all Americans to recognize the strength of the country, and to seek divine protection for “all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” engulfing the nation. But by then, the association of Plymouth and the holiday had already taken hold. Thanksgiving festivities continued to emphasize a sanitized version of events in early New England—and to wallow in nationalist pride, rather than reckon with the implications of European conquest.

For decades, scholars of early American history ignored Apess’ books, though an edition of his complete writings in 1992 brought new attention to his critique of early New England. By then, other Indigenous writers and speakers also thought it necessary to challenge the romance of the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving.

In 1970, an Aquinnah Wampanoag activist named Wamsutta Frank James delivered a speech in Plymouth that put the Indigenous experience at the center, not the periphery, of the history of the United States. Rather than celebrating a tradition of religious freedom and democracy, he spoke of centuries of prejudice and dispossession.  His words had lasting impact: Each year on the fourth Thursday of November, Indigenous and supporters congregate on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to mark the holiday James suggested renaming the National Day of Mourning.

There’s a rich and still too-little-known tradition of Indigenous writings like Apess’, including Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s early 17^th century account of his travels and the many texts of Samson Occom, a Mohegan who raised funds later used (against his wishes) to establish Dartmouth College. Many of these authors offered penetrating critiques of the European conquest and colonization of the Americas. Like Apess, they bore witness and their words invite a similar reckoning.

Looked at from the vantage points of 1637, 1676, and so many other moments in our country’s history, that three-day meal in the autumn of 1621 was less a predictor of future good will among all Americans than a historic aberration. Thanksgiving may well survive for centuries. But as the rethinking of Columbus Day and the public’s broader understanding of slavery and American history through educational programs like “The 1619 Project” have shown, it is not too late to make progress. Rather than see this holiday as an opportunity to gorge on a meal and dwell on naïve fantasies about a period of accord, it could become an opportunity to retell the history of the United States, putting Indigenous experiences at the center instead of the periphery.

The post We Can Tell New Thanksgiving Stories appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For health reasons I have to stay out of the water for the next couple weeks so I am dreaming about surfing, thinking about surfing, writing about surfing, doing everything but actually getting wet.

In any given session I paddle over whitewash, holding myself up like I’m doing a pushup on the board while I paddle out toward the lineup to keep my momentum going, so I’m not pushed back towards the shore. The whitewater sweeps underneath me, brushes my nose, chills my hands. I paddle to take off—so much paddling, just always paddling—going right and gauge the angle of my rail in relation to the face of the wave. I balance. After the wave peters out and I paddle back out, I park myself in the water next to my board to pee and hope no shark swimming by mistakes my vertical body for a seal. I think about confidence.

I sit on my log in the lineup, waiting, watching the horizon (no glasses, no contacts, just vibes) in between bits of conversation. I say hi to everybody; I’m from a small town. I call my board a log but it’s not, it’s a performance longboard for a man twice my size, a literal dad board for going fast and doing longboard cutbacks. I prefer riding hand-me-downs. It’s another way to be connected with the people I surf with and the water I surf in.

I grew up surfing as a white settler on yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash land on the Central Coast of California. I grew up wearing a hand-me-down wetsuit to ride a dinged green yard sale funshape in the cold water of the future Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary; listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers; and in the traces of United States military infrastructure. I knew from a young age (and with lots of rage) that Junípero Serra had colonized what is currently called San Luis Obispo with Misión San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, in large part by enslaving Chumash people. I had no idea until recently, however, that the intertwined infrastructures of resource extraction and the United States Navy, which continue Serra’s legacy of colonization and extraction, had fundamentally shaped the built environment and accompanying values of my hometown full of surfers.

Surfing has a reputation for embodying all the most annoying and violent aspects of white masculinity, and for good reason. Contrary to its roots as a kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) cultural practice, modern surfing as widely distributed by white men has been a font of rugged masculinity, hyperindividualism, and conquering (especially when it comes to big waves). I’m thinking of white locals in my hometown telling visitors “we grew here, you flew here”; of white men stealing the waves of people they don’t know; of the way professional surf contests as late as the 2000s were set up to give women the worst conditions to surf in as well as far-from-equitable prize money; of white American men leasing private islands to capitalize on as surf resorts; of literal surf Nazis. I’m thinking of how in the early 20th century, the Manhattan Beach, California city council used eminent domain to take the land from the Bruces, a Black family. Of how it took the Bruce family nearly a century to recover their land.

Closer to my home, the economy in Morro Bay has largely revolved around the fossil fuel, military, tourism, and (associated) real estate industries since the early 20th century.

At the Chevron Estero Bay Marine Terminal, crude oil was loaded onto tankers from 1929 until 1999. In 1940, the U.S. Navy “established an amphibious training base” in Morro Bay due to its coastal location and harbor, town boosters Roger Castle and Gary Ream report in Images of America: Morro Bay. “By the end of the war,” Castle and Ream continue, “[the base] would occupy more than 250 acres and provide many improvements to the town.” These improvements included infrastructure in the commercial part of the harbor, the Embarcadero, that enabled the town to boom following the war. (It’s worth noting that there is no mention of yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash history or culture in Castle and Ream’s book.) In the 1960s, the U.S. Navy built Defense Fuel Support Point Estero Bay just east of Highway 1 “to store and transport jet fuel to the Naval Air Station in Lemoore, California.” Its two tanks held roughly 4,350,000 gallons of jet fuel each. It is now a superfund site.

These industries offered high-paying jobs that afforded their employees—mainly white men—the ability to live on the coast. The white men who dominated these industries were, therefore, the same as those who dominated surf lineups. They brought the mentalities of the industries into the lineup with them. With this information, surfing begins to look less like a fun pastime and more an offshoot of a grim regime dependent on toxic chemicals, mass death, and uncheckable greed.

In The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay), explains the connection between surf culture and the genocidal policy of the settler state of Australia. She notes that as early as the start of the 20th century, ocean recreation activities (such as surfing) became a tool for white settlers to claim access and control to Indigenous land — practices further developed by policymakers who relegated Indigenous people inland and onto reserves and missions based on the legal fiction of terra nullius. This displacement was not accidental in Australia, nor was it in California.

This policy of genocide was not unique to Australia, but rather a transnational concentration of power in the hands of settler governments — of which the military is just one arm. In Moreton-Robinson’s words, “[i]t takes a great deal of work to maintain Canada, the United States, Hawai’i, New Zealand, and Australia as white possessions. The regulatory mechanisms of these nation-states are extremely busy reaffirming and reproducing this possessiveness through a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession.”

The performance of masculinity in settler states like Australia and California is tightly linked with upholding colonizers’ whiteness. Whether those who perform them realize it or not, the aggressive behaviors listed above are grasps to maintain a status quo that overwhelmingly favors a white patriarchy that manages how wealth, power, and free time for recreation flow.

Yet this status quo is not set in stone. Surf Equity, a social movement that works for “equity, inclusion, and equal pay” for professional women surfers, organized and finally got women invited to the 2018 Maverick’s Challenge off of Half Moon Bay in California (though the contest, one of the preeminent global big-wave surf contests, didn’t go ahead that year). Practicing surfing as a shared activity across gender, age, and class lines is much more in line with how surfing was traditionally practiced in Hawai’i prior to colonization.

Crucially, since time immemorial, the lands and waters of what is currently called the Central Coast of California have been the home of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe. The proposed Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary will reinstate some Chumash sovereignty over these waters in a protected area that will extend from the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Ocean and climate scientist Priya Shukla points out that the sanctuary will not only restore “decision-making power to the original stewards of these natural resources” but also “[elevate] Chumash ‘thrivability’, which values the interconnectedness between the natural marine environment and local human community members.” I can’t wait to surf in it.

The post Surfing the Tides of History in Northern Chumash Land appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those who were forced into the ships of the infamous slave trade probably thought of themselves using ethnic and territorial terms that have been lost to us. But across the ocean, enslavers and local elites lumped Africans of many different backgrounds into a single category of debasement, “Negroes,” and sustained this category through laws that regulated freedom.

But the creation of racial identity through legal means took some surprising turns.

From the beginning, enslaved people and free people of African ancestry used those same laws to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. They created spaces for communities where “blackness” and freedom were not only possible, but foundational.

Although free people of color were few in number compared to enslaved people, and lived on the margins of plantation societies in many ways, the contests over their identities, status, and rights were the terrain on which race was made. Legal contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims of citizenship would be tied to racial identity.

By the early 18th century, Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (all colonies themselves, of the Spanish, British, and French Empires, respectively), had legal regimes that constituted blackness as a debased category equivalent to enslavement. But 150 years later, by the mid-19th century, the social implications of blackness in each of these regions were fundamentally different.

In Cuba in the 1850s, a free man of color could marry a white woman, attend public school, and participate in a religious association that gave him opportunities to be part of public life. But, in 1850s Louisiana or Virginia, a free man of color saw his churches and schools being shut down, faced prosecution for marrying across the color line, and ran the risk of being kidnapped, imprisoned, and even re-enslaved for remaining in the state in which he was born.

In Louisiana or Virginia, when a person sought to prove in court that he was not a person of color, he would bring evidence of civic acts, because citizenship and whiteness were so closely linked in political thought and legal doctrine that a citizen must be a white man, and only a white man could be a citizen. In Cuba, similar conduct was not necessarily incompatible with blackness.

The key to understanding these divergent trajectories lies in the law of freedom. Different approaches to freedom were rooted in various legal traditions. The right to manumission, for example, was firmly entrenched in the Spanish law of slavery, and so in Cuba manumission, or release from slavery, was not tied to race, a crucial difference from both Louisiana and Virginia.

One turning point in this story was the Age of Revolution. The populations of free people of color, who claimed freedom in rising numbers, exploded in all three jurisdictions, and the example of the Haitian Revolution inspired the enslaved as it struck fear in the hearts of enslavers.

But the expansion of freedom meant different things in the Spanish empire and in the U.S. republic. Communities of people of color in Cuba and Spanish Louisiana owed their existence to legal understandings and customary practices anchored in traditions of the ancien regime. Enslaved people who managed to purchase their freedom or, more rarely, obtained manumission through other means, became members of highly stratified societies. Black freedom did not imply social equality and republican rights.

By contrast, in Virginia during the Age of Revolution, the expansion of manumission, and the increase in freedom lawsuits, were tied to questions of citizenship, and of black participation in the new political order under conditions of equality. Enslaved and free people of color alike infused these questions with a sense of urgency, as they made use of every available legal loophole to purchase or make claims for their own freedom. Their actions produced dramatic results: by the early 19th century, the proportion of free people of color in Virginia had increased significantly.

Virginia’s white citizens witnessed these trends with horror and petitioned to outlaw manumissions. It was, literally, a reactionary request: to restore the colonial law of freedom. The 1806 law requiring freed slaves to leave the state fell short of that goal, but marked the first step towards a social order in which blacks could only exist as slaves.

After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, whites’ political will to exclude free blacks intensified. Slaveholding states in the U.S. South responded to threats of rebellion, and to Northern abolitionists’ demands for immediate emancipation, with a defense of slavery as a positive good: the best possible condition for debased “Negroes.” To galvanize the support of non-slaveholding whites, Southerners cemented white solidarity by defining citizenship and voting rights along racial lines.

This movement created a paradox: egalitarian democracy would go hand-in-hand with the expansion of racist practices and ideologies. As slaveholders appealed to non-slaveholders with the promise of broad citizenship rights for all white men, free people of color became increasingly anomalous, and even dangerous to the polity. That is why colonization efforts that sought to remove free blacks to a distant location in Africa prospered in 19th-century Virginia and Louisiana (which changed hands to the United States in 1803), but not in Cuba.

That is also why Virginia and Louisiana acted in the 19th century, especially in the 1850s, to end the possibility of manumission, self-purchase, or freedom suits. By 1860, free people of color in Virginia and Louisiana were increasingly forced to leave the state upon emancipation or to live under threat of prosecution. A few even chose “voluntary” re-enslavement in order to remain with their families.

Free people of color continued to claim freedom in court, and fought tenaciously for the basic rights to a homeland, to remain close to friends and kin, and to live in their communities of origin. Yet they saw their militia and schools shut down, and their churches survived only under white leadership. Increasingly contested battles in court over racial identity attested to the growing anxiety over black citizenship and the need to prove whiteness in order to claim basic rights.

By 1860, Cuba had diverged significantly from Louisiana and Virginia—not in its legal regime of slavery, but rather in its regime of race. Enslaved people in Cuba took advantage of legal reforms that were not intended for their benefit to carve out greater freedoms for themselves. But in Virginia and Louisiana, where the status of communities of color was reduced to something closer to slavery, race rather than enslavement became the true “impassable barrier,” in the words of Justice Roger B. Taney. In Cuba, where free people of color could be rights-bearing subjects, enslavement was the dividing line.

Laws regulating free people of color also served as a template for post-emancipation societies seeking ways to keep black people in their place. Slavery laws did not translate forward in the same way that regulations based on race did. When Southerners sought to restore the antebellum order after the Civil War, they could not re-impose slavery, but they passed Black Codes whose language echoed the laws regarding free people of color almost exactly. Under the Black Codes, freedmen could enter into contracts, own property, and appear in court on their own behalf. But in myriad other ways, their lives were constricted, just as they would have been if emancipated before 1861.

In the U.S., laws limiting the immigration of free people of color from one state into the other were the first immigration restrictions. These statutes echo into the 20th century—and to the present day—in limitations on the right to immigrate into the U.S. based on racial and national identity. In Cuba, on the other hand, legal racial barriers came under increasing attack even before final emancipation in 1886. In the 1880s, limitations on interracial marriages were eliminated and racial segregation in public services and education was outlawed. These changes were an imperial imperative. As the colonial state of Spain sought to retain control over its restive colony of Cuba, it had to cultivate the political support of the free black population. By 1898, the island’s short-lived political regime of “autonomy” recognized black males as voting subjects with equal rights.

The transition from black slavery to black citizenship was neither linear nor preordained. It was as contentious and ferociously contested a process in Cuba as it was in Virginia and Louisiana. But the new struggles for standing and citizenship took place against the backdrop of significantly different legal regimes of race. From being enslaved to being a citizen, the connecting tissue before and after emancipation for black people was not “from slave to citizen,” but from black to black.

The post The ‘Ferociously Contested’ Story of How Blackness Became a Legal Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.