Thoughts on Arizona and Oklahoma

Approximately one hundred years ago, Anglo settlers finally finished their colonization of Apache, Shoshone and Comanche lands.

In modern parlance, they committed race expulsion and genocide.

Asking "papers please" might seem like small potatoes, as a means of holding on to White domination of those colonized, genocidally cleansed lands, now that national border has fewer and fewer believers.

Let's remember, though, that the original justification for expulsion followed on Lockean theories of improvement, and the justifications for enclosure, and nothing has changed when it comes to White theories of domination: Whites improve and save what brown people cannot manage for themselves. Whites civilize. Whites legalize, they put the papers in order. Remember - the Lenni Lenape, the Shawnee, the Micmac, the Arapaho, the Algonquin, the Haudenosaunee, the Tsalagi, the Utes, the Comanche, the Pawnee, the Seminoles, the Lakota did not have paper titles to their land. The Whites had all the papers. And they still have them. Even today, it takes papers to belong to a First Nation, and papers to live on reservation land. And it takes just a few papers to strip mine and pollute that pittance of leftover land...

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Only thirty seven years ago, the Supreme Court managed to extend long understood privacy rights, following a chain of precedent extending back into the early days of the Republic, to a woman's self-possession. Last week, the assclowns of the Oklahoma state government discovered, ex nihilo, that women in fact and law need a doctor to rape them by violation with instruments before they can exercise those rights to self-possession and privacy. Let's repeat: in Oklahoma, a woman has to endure object rape, and then get permission papers, before she can exercise her own privacy.

What a truly progressive, modern age we live in. Surely, Barack Obama heralded the coming of hope and - fuck it, I don't even have enough snark left in me to continue the thought...