Justice Decolonized

Angela Davis: Intersectionality and the Abolitionist Vision. Davis’s work is exemplary in demonstrating that systems of oppression are interconnected. She does not analyze racism in isolation. In works like Women, Race, & Class, she meticulously documents how the experiences of Black women were marginalized within both the suffrage movement (which prioritized white women’s interests) and the Black liberation movement (which often prioritized male leadership). This analysis prefigured and informed the concept of intersectionality, later coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, which posits that forms of oppression (racism, sexism, classism) are not additive but interlocking, creating unique experiences of discrimination [1].

Davis’s later work on the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a critical application of this lens. She argues that the PIC is not simply a criminal justice system but a contemporary, racially gendered system of social control that echoes the histories of slavery and Jim Crow. It functions by criminalizing poverty and communities of color, thereby masking the systemic failures (like defunded education, housing segregation, and lack of healthcare) that it claims to address. Her perspective is not one of reform but of abolition—dismantling the entire carceral system and building community-based alternatives [2]. This is a structural analysis par excellence, seeing racism as embedded in the very logic of state institutions.

Achille Mbembe and “Necropolitics”: The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, building on Foucault’s biopower, offers a devastating critique in his essay “Necropolitics.” He argues that the ultimate expression of colonial racism is necropower—the power to dictate who may live and who must die. The racial hierarchy created a world where certain populations (the colonized, the racialized) are subjected to “living death,” exposed to death-in-life conditions, or deemed expendable. The colonial state exercises sovereignty through the capacity for massacre and creation of “death-worlds.” This is a profound theoretical articulation of the dehumanization inherent in racial capitalism and colonialism from the perspective of the violated [3].

The Tension of “Race” as an Imported Category: It is critical to note, as scholars like Mahmood Mamdani have argued in Citizen and Subject, that pre-colonial African identities were often rooted in locality, ethnicity, and kinship. The rigid, biological concept of “race” was a colonial imposition used to divide and rule. However, this does not mean marginalized groups ignore it; rather, they are forced to navigate a racialized global order not of their making. The critique, therefore, is also about the violence of being forced to define oneself through the oppressor’s categories.

Chinese-Indonesians: Racialization as a Political Tool. The discrimination against the ethnic Chinese minority is a clear example of racialization as a socio-political process. During the Suharto era, they were constructed as a perpetual “other”—economically dominant yet politically disloyal. This stereotype served a specific function: to redirect popular discontent away from the state and onto a visible minority. The marginalization was intersectional: it was not merely ethnic, but also socio-economic (casting them as capitalists) and religious (associating them with communism or non-Islam) [4]. Their experience demonstrates how racial hierarchies are engineered to maintain power structures.

Indigenous Groups: The “Savage Slot” and Resistance. For indigenous groups like the Dayak in Kalimantan, othering follows a colonial pattern of being placed in what philosopher Charles Mills called the “savage slot”—seen as primitive, backward, and closer to nature. This racialized stereotype, as noted in the Critical Asian Studies article, is not just an attitude but has material consequences, especially when their lands are targeted for resource extraction by the state and corporations [5]. Their resistance often involves a form of strategic essentialism: mobilizing a unified “indigenous” identity, sometimes by re-appropriating the very stereotypes of being “guardians of the forest,” to assert land rights and political autonomy against the state and capitalist forces. This shows how marginalized groups can tactically use identity categories for survival and resistance.

A poor, Dayak woman faces dispossession not just because of her ethnicity, but also because of her class and gender, which may make her more vulnerable to violence and less likely to have her voice heard.

A Black, working-class man in the U.S. is targeted by the PIC through the intersection of race and class.

A Chinese-Indonesian businesswoman faces discrimination at the nexus of ethnicity, class, and gender.