(...) Though seeming like another Trump diversion soon to be blown away and forgotten by the president’s next tweetstorm, the question of the Greenland Purchase continued to receive serious consideration and comment throughout the next week. Other Republicans rushed to get in front of this snowballing possibility: Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas claiming credit for coming up with the idea months ago. Seeing a fundraising angle, the National Republican Congressional Committee began hawking t-shirts emblazoned with a map of the USA that included Greenland as the 51st state.

Lost amid the groans and guffaws over the President’s evident lunacy and megalomania, was the simple fact that the entire idea rested on the racist foundations of the nation. The idea that territories can be bought and sold (Greenland has enjoyed an expanding scope of home rule since 1979) is a remnant of colonialism. Such ideas are fundamentally structured around concepts of racial and cultural hierarchies, as only territories populated by nonwhite and non-European people are ethically exempt from the liberal principles of sovereignty and therefore viewed as commodities to be traded (just as the bodies of slaves were).

The act of purchase was historically made in one of two different racist forms. Americans assuaged their slight pang of Enlightenment guilt over seizing the land of indigenous nations by the act of a ceremonial purchase and the bedrock capitalist instrument of the contract. Great powers routinely traded and swapped the lands of subject peoples with no pretense of such fictions of their equality and agreement. Both forms of colonial seizure were supported by racist notions that First Peoples were savage, incapable of self-government, and best served by the tutoring of colonial rule and the blessings of the marketplace.

Greenland is a nation comprised mostly of First Nation, Inuit people. Eight in ten Greenlanders is ethnically Inuit as is the nation’s official language. Such demographics situate Greenland well within the scope of colonial logic. That the Trump administration approached Denmark to make the sale, rather than the Naalakkersuisut, Greenland’s parliament, follows in the footsteps of countless colonial transactions of the past. Reports that Trump floated the idea of offering Denmark the territory of Puerto Rico in exchange for Greenland merely reiterates the colonial logic that all people of color inherently lack the capacity for sovereignty and are therefore fungible. (...)

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 Such ideas are fundamentally structured around concepts of racial and cultural hierarchies, as only territories populated by nonwhite and non-European people are ethically exempt from the liberal principles of sovereignty and therefore viewed as commodities to be traded (just as the bodies of slaves were).
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