LAUSR

only to offer a new one in its stead. As she repeats throughout, “racialization and racial hierarchy” are “a function of colonialism—settler colonialism in our case” (pp. 40, 54). What results is the overextended claim that the “logic of [Indigenous] elimination” is the original template of all US racial violence: “the institutionalized racism we live with today originated in the strategies used to occupy indigenous lands” (p. 50). Saito casts chattel slavery and Jim Crow in a secondary role, curiously glossing slavery as the “settler colonial appropriation of their lives and labor” (p. 83). Little is gained from making chattel slavery derivative of colonization: for example, the rise of mass incarceration is analogized to prior moments of Indigenous elimination, rather than placed in a context of anti-Black racism. The analogy may hold at a high level of abstraction, but this does little to historicize mass incarceration in its more specific context (p. 102). Chattel slavery and settler colonialism are better understood as co-constitutive, equally foundational axes of US racial capitalism. To the degree that the settler-colonial analytic helps attend to the limits of antiracist politics vis-à-vis Indigenous dispossession, it is well taken. Saito is certainly right that antiracist movements challenging white supremacy must also foreground the fact that there can be no justice on stolen land, based on the notion “that all settler colonial institutions and relationships rest on the foundational colonization of peoples indigenous to this land” (p. 113). This emphasis becomes less compelling, however, when she sketches the terms of those remedial projects. Saito characterizes all people of color in the United States as “colonized,” an assertion common to Third Worldist discourse during the late 1960s apex of global decolonization (p. 110). She then takes this claim a step further, asserting that “people of color have been racialized in ways that prevent them from exercising their inherent right to self-determination” (p. 54). Indigenous peoples have indeed sought to enact an internationalist politics of selfdetermination, and her discussion of such struggles is excellent. However, in what sense do Latinx populations, Black people, and other racialized populations in the United States have—or even seek—an “inherent right” to self-determination under international law? Though all these groups have some traditions emphasizing selfdetermination, why ought they aim for “developing autonomous and self-sufficient communities” as the best path to liberation in the present (p. 208)? Saito’s pitch that all struggles against racial domination should take a nationalist form—what she calls “becoming nations” (pp. 199–200)—brings up two limitations. First, Saito neglects the revolutionary character of mass mobilizations for equal rights, which stand in tension with the nationalist strands of Black politics she traces throughout (p. 17). She comes close to conflating the civil rights movement itself with today’s resulting limitations of equal protection jurisprudence (pp. 154–65). In short, the narrative undersells tensions between different, overlapping antiracist and decolonial practices, which she instead portrays as a single struggle between one hegemonic project and its subaltern foil. Second, Saito does not tell us why “self-determination” for non-Indigenous racialized subjects is emancipatory, beyond the (crucial) imperative to resist territorial occupation and Indigenous erasure. Is “building self-sustaining communities” emancipatory because of the resulting politics of care toward human and other-than-human that is differently framed in Indigenous anti-extractivist movements and Black Lives Matter demands for police abolition and community reinvestment (p. 212)? Or is “cultural independence” good simpliciter—part of forging “identities” outside those “limited by the parameters of statehood and citizenship so central to the master narrative” (p. 206)? Moreover, the focus on community-based networks raises urgent questions about scaling up; for example, how do we build a multiracial, working-class coalition to fight climate change by transforming the state itself? My desire for a more robust defense of these specific forms of political resistance aside, Saito’s provocative book is a compellingly synthetic analysis of structural racism and settler colonialism.