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Decolonizing the Frame: How the Culture-Centered Approach Exposes the Structural Link Between Zionism and White Supremacy

From the New York Times

The global political landscape often presents conflicts as isolated events rooted in ancient hatreds. The Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) insists we look deeper—at the structure of power, the systems that marginalize culture, and the mechanisms that silence voice. It situates these forms of cultural erasure in the context of the erasure of voice and the project of expelling colonized peoples from land and livelihood.

Applying this lens reveals that the ideologies of Zionism and White Supremacy are not merely analogous forms of ethno-nationalism, but deeply intertwined colonial projects rooted in the same Western imperial structure that sought to dominate both land and people.

The Core Structure: Settler Colonialism

The CCA argues that communication and culture are shaped by underlying structures—the political, economic, and institutional arrangements that allocate power. Both Zionism and White Supremacy function as archetypal settler-colonial structures.

  • White Supremacy (Classical): The colonial structure established by European powers (e.g., in North America, South Africa, Australia) required the assertion of the colonizer's racial superiority ("whiteness") to justify the dispossession, enslavement, and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans. The structure demanded that the land be "cleared" and the settler class be privileged.

  • Zionism (Settler-Colonial): The political project of establishing an ethno-state in Palestine, predominantly driven by European nationalism, relies on a parallel structural logic: the necessity of replacing an indigenous population (Palestinians) with a preferred settler community to ensure demographic and political dominance.

The core structural link is the demand for exclusive sovereignty over stolen land, achieved through the systematic erasure of the indigenous population’s culture and presence. In both cases, the settler group—regardless of their internal ethnic diversity—is structurally positioned as the "civilized" master of the territory, while the indigenous population is racialized, delegitimized, and denied agency.

The Cultural Erasure Mandate

The CCA centers on how marginalized cultures are suppressed by dominant power structures. For both White Supremacy and Zionism, the act of colonization must be preceded and maintained by cultural warfare.

Silencing Indigenous Voice and History

  • Denial of Voice: The CCA highlights the crucial role of communication systems in maintaining hegemony. Both ideologies rely on narratives that present the settler as the native and the native as the aggressor or anomaly.

    • In the context of White Supremacy, centuries of historical erasure framed the continent as a barren frontier, effectively silencing the pre-colonial histories of Indigenous nations.

    • In the context of Zionism, the narrative often employs the concept of "a land without a people for a people without a land," which fundamentally denies the existence, history, and culture of the Palestinian people, thereby justifying occupation as "settlement" or "return."

  • Racializing the Threat: The continuous process of land theft and structural violence is justified by racializing the colonized "other." The systems need to communicate that the Black or Indigenous person (or Palestinian) is a perpetual threat to the "civilized" settler state, making surveillance, policing, and military action appear necessary for "security." This is where the selection's critique of AI surveillance and disproportionate targeting becomes acutely relevant: modern surveillance technologies are the structural communication tools of the colonial state.

The Intertwining of Identity and Privilege

The structural linkage becomes explicit when examining how White Supremacist groups often express support for the state of Israel. This is not a contradiction; it is a recognition of shared structural goals:

  1. Shared Logic of Exclusion: White Supremacists see the establishment and maintenance of an ethnically exclusive state, achieved through military dominance and border control, as a desirable model for their own racial goals. They admire the successful implementation of a settler-colonial project that prioritizes one ethnic group over all others.

  2. Racial Hierarchy: Historically, White Supremacist thought has often positioned European Jewry in a complicated, often contradictory, relationship with "whiteness." However, in the context of the Middle East, the settler-colonial structure itself often confers structural "whiteness" onto the dominant group relative to the racialized Palestinian "other," aligning with the global hierarchy of Western-backed power.

As the CCA teaches, structure determines privilege. In a world defined by Western colonialism, the state whose power structure is based on successful, armed ethnic exclusivity finds alignment with other ideologies seeking similar racial and territorial purity.

The Call for Decolonial Solidarity

The CCA demands that we move beyond surface-level political analysis and center the voice and agency of the colonized.

To truly address the violence of both White Supremacy and Zionism, the required response must be one of decolonial solidarity. This means recognizing:

  • That the struggle for Palestinian liberation is structurally identical to the struggles of Indigenous peoples, Black communities, and colonized peoples globally.

  • That challenging the core colonial structure—the right of any one group to establish exclusive sovereignty over stolen land through violence—is the only path to genuine peace and cultural flourishing for all.

The CCA offers the necessary tool for this diagnosis: by revealing how power structures silence culture, we can empower the collective voice needed for global decolonization.

References

Dutta, M. J. (2023). Theorizing southern strategies of anti-racism: Culturally centering social change. In The Routledge handbook of ethnicity and race in communication (pp. 301-314). Routledge.

Dutta, M. J. (2024). Resisting an unfolding genocide: reflections from radical struggles in the Global South. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 110(2), 294-304.


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