Steven Newcomb: Racism still alive and well at Supreme Court

A couple of years ago, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was at a public function that Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK) was also attending. Upon hearing that Congressman Cole is from the Chickasaw Nation, Scalia said: “Don't forget you belong to a conquered race.”

Justice Scalia’s use of the word “race” places his comment in an obvious racial frame of reference. The idea of American Indians being “conquered” evokes the theme of inferiority (those deemed “conquered”), and superiority (the racial group said to have conquered “the race” treated as “inferior”). In other words, Justice Scalia’s comment was predicated on the idea of racial domination: “We are the victorious race and you are the inferior, ‘conquered race.’” In short, Justice Scalia’s comment was an open expression of racism and is accurately re-expressed in this manner: “Don't forget you belong to a dominated race.”

While I refuse to think or write of our Original Nations and Peoples as a “race” or “ethnic groups,” it is clearly a problem for a sitting Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to avow that he regards us as a “race” that is inferior as a result of that claim that we have been “conquered,” or, in other words, “dominated.”

While I prefer to frame the discussion more in terms of “religious racism” based on what I term the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination, Williams clearly demonstrates that U.S. federal Indian law is a system of ideas structured in terms of white superiority and non-white inferiority, which continues to be used by the U.S. Supreme Court in an anti-Indian manner to this very day. Anyone who would claim that racism has pretty much ended in the United States has no clue that the U.S. Supreme Court continues to make federal Indian law decisions based on racist precedents against our Original Nations and Peoples.

With regard to Justice Scalia's statement, Congressman Cole's office told me that he will not comment “on a private conversation.” His office did not say that the incident never happened, or that Scalia did not make that statement to representative Cole. His office simple characterized it as “private,” even though the congressman evidently later recounted Scalia's comment at a conference of lawyers in Oklahoma.