Du Bois and others did not explicitly use the term “settler colonial” (it would be decades until the term was in wide circulation). Yet their analysis of colonization was adapted to the particularities of the American experience, and therefore distinct from various European imperial experiments, like those of the British in India or the Belgians in the Congo. In the U.S. context, these thinkers argued, self-government and economic prosperity for racial insiders proceeded through institutions that were designed to extract much-needed land and labor from Native and outsider groups, in the latter case particularly enslaved African workers and their descendants.
This fact generated some striking conclusions. For starters, it meant that unless Americans confronted the exploitative nature of their economic system, formal legal equality alone would never produce Black freedom. A liberal frame ignored how racial hierarchy had been woven into the fabric of American capitalism, in both small-scale production and large-scale industrialization. And if this was true, this also meant that the legal-political infrastructure of the country was organized to sustain such hierarchy. Therefore, any truly transformative response to American colonial conditions had to realize two facts. First, racial and class politics could not be separated. And second, change would require more than creative interpretations of existing text—it would necessitate basic shifts to the structure of American governance itself.
To set these shifts into motion, Black anticolonial activists would need to develop their own competing constitutional politics: a vision of alternative institutional design, values, and even governing text. Although it would be explicitly decolonial, change could not proceed in a way comparable to settings like the Congo, in which the relatively thin layer of power-holding elites were European colonial administrators without their own national movement or deeply felt connections to the land. As the great labor radical James Boggs maintained of the United States, all communities, those white and nonwhite, were permanently and mutually entangled. Decolonization, according to him, had to entail “tackling” together “all the problems of this society, because at the root of all the problems of black people is the same structure and the same system which is at the root of all the problems of all people.”