In February 2025, after Donald Trump’s executive orders banning support for initiatives of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and signing the “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday” Executive Order, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) eliminated a grant program that offered support for projects that “extended outreach to underserved communities, and shifted its priority to supporting work that focuses on the upcoming 250th anniversary of U.S. American independence.[i]
Both the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities had already been at work in the planning of the 250th anniversary since 2019. What seems new, but not surprising after Trump’s inauguration, is the direct connection between celebrating the anniversary of U.S. independence and the disinvestment on initiatives that aim to address the challenges faced by disenfranchised communities in the U.S. Also important in this context is that state agencies focused on the humanities and the arts have for the most part quickly fallen in line with the new directives.
Thus the time is apt to ask: What does the 250th anniversary of the U.S. mean for the “condemned of the earth” (Frantz Fanon) who inhabit the lands and territories of the U.S. American empire-state, including Indigenous Reservations and unincorporated territories/colonies?
Since the U.S. overrepresents itself as “America,” the invitation is open to everyone else living in the lands that were baptized with that name by Europeans, and since the U.S.’s borders exceed its national territory—consider its military bases and military interventions as well as its degree of influence throughout the globe—the invitation is also open to probably everyone in the planet, particularly places where U.S. funding and weapons have caused or are directly causing unspeakable harms.
In opposition to directives from the White House, the NEA, and the NEH, the question to consider in turn is: What is the significance of the 250th birthday of U.S. independence when examined from below?
Given the suppression of critical race theory, gender and sexuality theories that question the naturalization of gender roles and sexual practices, as well as epistemological formations and discourses that oppose settler colonialism and global coloniality, it seems particularly important to make sure that we consider these forms of analysis when exploring answers to this question.
At the same time, it would be important that these contributions do not stay within the boundaries of the humanities and the liberal creed that sustains them.[ii] Instead, they should seek to connect with the long history and contemporary expressions of organizations, communities, and movements that aim to create spaces for being, thinking, and acting otherwise than according to modern/colonial mandates, expectations, and scripts. Different from resilience and broader than resistance, the task at hand might be a matter of “combative decoloniality.”[iii]
An exercise in decolonial thinking, I suggest that a proper understanding of Western modernity requires that we consider the importance of the 250th anniversary of the United States of America and that we approach it in relation to the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas.
That the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas remains highly relevant today is clear in the continued work of Indigenous and Black organizations that came together in that context.[iv] Also important to consider is that the combative decolonial thinking of these organizations played a major role in the formation, refinement, and/or dissemination of various forms of analysis that go by the name of decolonial theory.[v] Connecting the histories of the invasion and invention of the Americas, and the foundation and spread of U.S. America, reveals the presence of interconnected principles that explain the proximity between Europe and the United States on the one hand, and between the United States and the modern political Zionist project of colonization in Palestine, on the other. I will proceed to briefly sketch these three principles: the Coloniality Principle, the U.S. Principle, and the Modern/Colonial Zionist Principle.
The Great Catastrophe and the Formation of the Coloniality Principle
The Indigenous and Black organizations that contested the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Americas made clear that the “discovery” represented no less than a Great Catastrophe with continued impact until the present. Crucial in this Great Catastrophe of “discovery” and the start of the Middle Passage was the formation of a new principle of self-understanding, social classification, and planetary organization that consistently challenged the dominant Christian metaphor of the “Chain of Being” by creating a system of dehumanization and exploitation that was premised on the ontological difference between the conquerors and the colonized/enslaved.[vi] In the context of the Great Catastrophe of “discovery,” the plantation system, and the Middle Passage the enchanted world of the “Chain of Being” gave way to an inferno of sorts driven by a new principle: the Coloniality Principle.
The Coloniality Principle reproduces dehumanization through racial and colonial difference in all areas of social existence. It involves a multiplicity of techniques of land appropriation, labor exploitation, and population control including ethnic cleansing, genocide, settler colonization, new forms of colonization, extractivism, the imposition of gender and the deprivation of gender, and torture as a basic element in the constitution of society.[vii] This happens within and across nation-states.
The Coloniality Principle is embedded in the dominant culture and in dominant institutions, but it is most terrifying when it drives the minds of colonized and racialized peoples themselves. Steve Biko pointed to this when he wrote, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”[viii]
Frantz Fanon wrote an entire book entitled Black Skin, White Masks about this phenomenon based on his experiences as a black colonial subject in the Caribbean and France, and later warned us in The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre)about the danger against reproducing the Coloniality Principle in the construction of new nations.[ix] Tragically, by at large, the nation-states that fought for their independence and became nation-states continued, rather than challenged, the Coloniality Principle. Among these, the United States plays a particularly important role since it renovated the Coloniality Principle, making it central in the formation of modern nation-states.
The U.S. Coloniality Principle
If there is any question about the philosophical and political connections between the “discovery” of the Americas and the formation of the U.S. suffice it to consider the landmark Supreme Court case of Johnson vs. M’Intosh in 1823, which became the first legal formulation of the “Doctrine of Discovery.” Invented in the context of this legal case, the “Doctrine of Discovery” offers an understanding of Christian justifications for claiming ownership over the lands of Indigenous peoples presumably “discovered” in the Americas.
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Marshall stated that “the title by conquest is acquired and maintained by force. The conqueror prescribes its limits.” He added that “However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land and cannot be questioned.”[x]
The Coloniality Principle is thus at the heart of the U.S.’s form of sovereignty. The U.S. quickly became a model for the transformation of the Coloniality Principle into a principle of national organization which would not only survive the end of European empires, but also become central in the formation of nation-states everywhere, including Europe. This process did not start in the U.S., but the U.S.’s decisive break from the European monarchical order in 1776 and its quick transition from a colonial territory to a nation-state that incorporated the techniques of colonial organization should not be underestimated—much less considering the strong reassertions of this principle 250 years after the declaration of independence.
The presence of the U.S. Coloniality Principle, or U.S. Principle, is evident throughout all the incorporated lands that form the United States, and particularly in geopolitical spaces like Indigenous Reservations in the United States, and the unincorporated territories/U.S. colonies of Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It is also felt strongly in spaces like Gaza in Palestine, which the current U.S. President has imagined as a U.S. property and a potential “Riviera of the Middle East.”
That Trump made these statements next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House and that Netanyahu reacted positively indicates the extent of the proximity between the principles driving both states and their current leadership. A thorough consideration of the modern western “civilization” continuum and its Coloniality Principle demands an analysis of its multiple “frontiers,” particularly those where settler colonialism is enforced by the might of state apparatuses that count with strong security and border forces, carceral regimes and/or large prison industrial complexes, aggressive militaries, and nuclear weapons. These considerations make it important to consider the ties between the U.S. Principle and the Modern/Colonial Zionist Principle.
The Modern/Colonial Zionist Principle
For more than a century, Palestinian existence has been severely undermined by principles of social and political organization that emanate from the Coloniality Principle, including the principles of imperial formation that drove the British Empire, and the U.S. Coloniality Principle. What makes the case of Palestinians a particularly relevant one to understand the ramifications of the Coloniality Principle and the US Principle is that Palestinians live under the direct control and occupation by a state apparatus driven by its own unique form of the Coloniality Principle and the US Principle, namely, the Modern/Colonial Zionist Principle.
Modern/colonial political Zionism combined the idea of Zion with the affirmation of Western modernity and the modern nation-state. In the process, it integrated the basic world picture at the center of the Coloniality Principle and generated its own variation of this principle. The colonial basis of the modern political Zionist project was clear from the start. It is evinced in expressions such as those of Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, who in a letter to the British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes referred to his plans for settlement in Palestine as “something colonial.”[xi]
A number of modern political Zionists, from Ze’ev Jabotinsky in 1921 to Benny Morris in 2004, have made clear the links between the colonization of Palestine and the colonization of the Americas, particularly the United States, making the point that “America would have remained a wilderness if white colonization had been conditional on the consent of the red Indians,” and that “[e]ven the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.”[xii]
The implications cannot be more clear: colonization equals civilization, and civilization justifies annihilation (ethnic cleansing and genocide) as well as dispossession. Here we find a foundational logic in the formation of modern nation-states that is particularly prominent in state building projects that consider themselves to be at the “frontier” of Western civilization.
The idea of the modern nation-state is the bridge between the Coloniality Principle as it worked in the making of European colonies, and the US Principle, as it functions in the transformation of a former colony into a modern/colonial and settler state.
Modern political Zionism feeds from and reproduces both principles, the Coloniality Principle writ large and the US Principle, leading to a reproduction of the links between colonization and genocide. It is thus not surprising that we witness a substantial alliance between the political Zionist leadership in Israel and the white supremacist and racist government of Trump in the United States.
While much has happened in the last 250 years, modernity/coloniality and its core principles continue to shape the policies and politics of the U.S. Today, like yesterday, and surely tomorrow the imperative remains: to counter the catastrophe (nakba) of modernity/coloniality by exposing the genocidal dimension of its principles and contributing to struggles for decoloniality everywhere.
[i] Isa Farfan, “NEA Throws Grant Program for Underserved Communities,” Hyperallergic. February 6, 2025. URL: https://hyperallergic.com/988542/nea-throws-out-grant-program-for-underserved-communities/
[ii] I do not have space here to develop a decolonial critique of the humanities, but part of it can be found in Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Combative Decoloniality and the Abolition of the Humanities,” in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature, ed. by Laura Rebecca Brueck and Praseeda Gopinath (New York: Routledge, 2025): 33-52. Given the limited extension of this reflection, I include various references to other publications where I develop some of the ideas that are found here.
[iii] The notion of combative decoloniality is rooted in Fanon’s view of decolonization and it echoes the insurgent spirit of the “combative summer” of 2019 in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico. See Fondation Frantz Fanon, “L’appel de la Fondation Frantz Fanon,” Le Centenaire Frantz Fanon, URL: https://centenaire.fondation-frantzfanon.com/le-centenaire-appel-a-projets/; Mireille Fanon Mendès France and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “For a Combative Decoloniality Sixty Years after Fanon’s Death: An Invitation from the Frantz Fanon,” Fondation Frantz Fanon, November 30, 2021, URL: https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/for-a-combative-decoloniality-sixty-years-after-fanons-death-an-invitation-from-the-frantz-fanon-foundation/; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Liberation Philosophy and the Search for Combative Decoloniality: A Fanonian Approach,” in Struggles for Liberation in Abya Yala, ed. by Luis Rubén Díaz Cepeda and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2024): 11-28, URL: https://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/3X/13941812/139418123X-36.pdf; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Palestine, the War Against Decolonization, and Combative Decoloniality,” in The SAGE Handbook of Decolonial Theory, ed. Jairo Fúnez-Flores, et. al. (London: SAGE publications, forthcoming); Zandi Radebe, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Combative Decoloniality and the BlackHouse Paradigm of Knowledge, Creation and Action,” in Knowing-Unknowing: African Studies at the Crossroads, edited by Katharina Schramm and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 281-305 (Leiden: Brill, 2024): 281-305, URL: https://brill.com/display/book/9789004701441/BP000023.xml For analysis of the “verano combativo” (combative summer) in Puerto Rico see Joaquín Villanueva and Marisol LeBrón, “The Decolonial Geographies of Puerto Rico’s 2019 Summer Protests: A Forum,” Society and Space 41.4 (2020), URL: https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/the-decolonial-geographies-of-puerto-ricos-2019-summer-protests-a-forum
[iv] Osvaldo León, “La campana 500 Años de Resistencia: 30 años de una iniciativa pionera,” Pressenza. 2022. URL: https://www.pressenza.com/es/2022/10/la-campana-500-anos-de-resistencia-30-anos-de-una-iniciativa-pionera/
[v] For an elaboration of this point see Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Aníbal Quijano and the Decolonial Turn, “ Theory, Culture, and Society. Online First. 2025. 1-9.
[vi] See Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Religion, Conquest, and Race in the Foundations of the Modern/Colonial World,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82.3: 636-665.
[vii] For an expanded account see Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Frantz Fanon Foundation. October 23, 2016. URL: https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/ For a comprehensive analysis of the coloniality of gender see María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia (2007) 22.1: 186-209; María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25.4 (2010): 742-759. See also Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press: 1986);Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); Catherine Walsh, Rising Up, Living On: Re-Existences, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023); and Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso, María Lugones, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, eds. Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).
[viii] Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (Johannnesburg: Picador Africa, 2004): 74.
[ix] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004.
[x] See Betty Lyons and Adam D.J. Brett, “However, Extravagant the Pretensions of Johnson v. M’Intosch,” Canopy Forum, March 23, 2023. URL: https://canopyforum.org/2023/03/23/however-extravagant-the-pretensions-of-johnson-v-mintosh/ See also the website for the “Doctrine of Discovery Project” on “The Religious Origins of White Supremacy: Johnson v. M’Intosh and the Doctrine of Christian Discovery” (https://doctrineofdiscovery.org).
[xi] The Palestinian scholar Hatem Bazian wrote a book in conversation with Herzl’s expression. See Hatem Bazian, Palestine, “…it is something colonial” (The Hague: Amrit Publishers, 2016).
[xii] Robert Weltsch, “A Tragedy of Leadership (Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist Movement),” Jewish Social Studies 13.3 (1951): 220; Ari Shavit, “An Interview with Benny Morris,” Counterpunch, Jan. 16, 2004, URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2004/01/16/an-interview-with-benny-morris/; see also Bazian’s comments on the quote from Morris in Bazian, Palestine, 210.
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