Dr. Tiffany King: We Need to Crash the US Settler State

Dr. Tiffany King, a tenured professor in the University of Virginia's Department of Women, Sexuality, and Gender, spoke last week in a virtual symposium hosted by Hunter College's Center for Puerto Rican Studies.

The symposium At the Edge of Each Other's Battles: Puerto Rican, Palestinian, Black & Indigenous Futures explored the "mutual solidarity" that is believed to exist between these communities. King and a Hunter College professor closed out the symposium with their panel, "Letters for Palestine: Storytelling as Praxis." We have excerpted clips from that even for this blog post, but we have made the entire discussion available for viewing should anyone wonder if we are taking comments out of context.

King argues that the Palestinian Resistance inspires Black and Indigenous feminists to "crash the US settler state."

"There is a certain kind of clarity that the resistance, the ongoing resistance in Palestine, is making very concrete and palpable for us as Black and Indigenous feminists: that we actually need to crash the US settler state, which has incredible reverberations and literally strangles the tentacles that are reaching into the Israeli state. So, it's like, no, our resolve to struggle with each other is, actually, we're recommitted to it in a different way with a different kind of energy."

At no point in the symposium does King explain what she means by "crashing" the US settler state, but the alignment with Palestinian resistance to Israel raises the question of whether she accepts the necessity for violence in the US.

One clue into King's thinking is her endorsement of the work of Melanie Yazzie. Yazzie, a University of Minnesota professor and an intersectional studies collective member of King's Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute (BIFFI) group, went viral earlier this year for calling to "dismantle the United States."

In the clip above, Yazzie speaks "of all liberation struggles ... that seek to seek a world of justice, equality, and peace that seek to dismantle the United States. I hope you seek to dismantle the United States. And if that isn't your politics, okay — I speak as if everybody has this commitment — the thing is that you should listen to indigenous people when they're telling you that this is the goal and that not only is this the goal but this is the starting point."

King sees the Palestinian "struggle" against Israel as entwined with anti-colonial struggles everywhere, including inside the United States.

"There's something about the relationship between the US and Israel that we always have to come back home. It's here, right, it's here, this is where Empire and the Israeli settler colonial state gets its formation. It's here, it's Europe, It's Great Britain, so we have to struggle to crash things here. And my students were very, very clear about this... The youth are getting it, the youth are getting it."

King discusses how her students are "fierce organizers" who are organizing Palestinian Liberation week at the University of Virginia, the schedule for which is shown to the right.

Says King: "It's our origins to trying to create these formations to think about diaspora and solidarities in our own work and thinking about how we use philanthropic dollars so that's real and that happens."

UVA doesn't get off the hook in her view. In the clip above King notes that Sonia Alconini and Kasey Jernigan, co-directors of BIFFI, a Mellon-Funded Intersectional Studies Collective at UVA, couldn't make an appearance at the symposium. King alluded to "work that we wanted to do as black and indigenous feminists to challenge ... the settler state, the settlement of University of Virginia ... which is still a plantation and has all of its plantation artifice up and artifacts."

(Lanice Avery and Marisa Williamson, highlighted in previous profiles published the Jefferson Council, also are part of BIFFI.)

The concept of settler colonialism doesn't apply just to Israel, the United States, or UVA — it extends even to the source of her foundation grants. By the mere fact of soliciting proposals, the Mellon Foundation engages in "a closed settler colonial formation."

King says she feels protected by tenure but worries about her safety at the institution. She refers to students who contacted the UVA administration — "snitched" in her words — about feeling uncomfortable with what she teaches. Regardless, she plans to continue. "I'm trying to really ride the wheels off of these institutional resources and go for broke."