I don't understand. Why is it that blackness is always assigned, but you have to fight to prove indigeneity?
Blackness isn’t always assigned, it’s also cultural, but it has and continues to be coercive because it was a way of constructing a foil that define and create whiteness, to allow it exist. Blackness was supposed to be a purposely restrictive category, a box, a constraint.
Race is often defined visually, because it was through anti-Blackness that the modern concept of race was developed. To understand Blackness, is to understand anti-Blackness: it’s fundamentally a lived experience (because of racialization) and a sociopolitical understanding/self-awareness of the structural positions that are imposed on Black peoples.
Reading about the history of the one-drop rule in the US will help clarify this; Blackness is considered and treated as a social contagion, the antithesis to human. Not just non-human but anti-human. And in this way, connection/involvement to these communities and identifying with that ancestry lends understanding and involvement in Blackness. “Black” is not a homogenous category, but an expansive one that is consistently reduced.
It’s not that one has to “fight to prove Indigeneity”. Because of anti-Blackness, Indigeneity is seen as mutually exclusive with Blackness. It is also seen as beneficial because it is perceived to legitimize existence: with a past, a history, a culture. Indigeneity is believed to provide continuity.
While Blackness is an experience of ‘social death’, an ontological event horizon, Indigeneity has been used by white people and is coveted by them to situate themselves on the land, to provide themselves with resources, material and otherwise, as part of the project of colonialism. The formation of these narratives, in which settlers claim ancestry and equate that with Indigeneity, are ways that they more than justify their continued violence.
The question you pose to us is a historical one. Today’s dynamics are formed and informed by the past. But it’s also one the elides the fact that Black folks, Amerindian ancestry or not, have dual histories and heritages here and in Africa; to be Black is also to be Indigenous: it is to be Afroindigenous.
The Indigeneity of our peoples did not end with slavery. It only continues, often transformed, purposefully elided by anti-Blackness, by civil society, which restricts and reduces. One only has to look at what Indigeneity is, who Black peoples in the Americas are, our cultures, our connections to the land, our histories and languages to understand. Afroindigeneity is this dual heritage, to these lands and to Africa, it is having histories (including Black trans-Atlantic chattel slavery and the Middle Passage), it is having cultures which are surveilled and vied for by the world over. How white folks designated Blackness (social death) and separated themselves (civil society) from it to define themselves, but continue to appropriate and consume Blackness/Black culture is not so different from how these same white settlers continue to promote and purport Indigenous death and extinction to situate themselves while consuming their histories/cultures/ancestries to legitimize it. For whiteness to exist and survive and thrive, we must be dead or die.