Palestinian Erasure and Dehumanization in Introductory Sociology Texts

Abstract

Settler colonial projects erase Indigenous peoples and their histories to justify expropriation of sovereign land. Educational curriculum plays a central role in settler colonialism by denying both long-standing connections to the land and dehumanizing those on it, relegating them to objects to be controlled or assimilated by colonizers, positioned as the colonized land’s rightful owners. This has long been the case for Palestinians. Violent expulsion from their land began with the settler colonial Zionist project in the late-19th century, a time of global colonization, and continues into the present, alongside the denial of Palestinian subjectivity and ‘permission to narrate’ their own history in public, political, and academic discourses. This paper examining US-based college-level introductory sociology textbooks finds that they replicate and perpetuate colonial narratives through Orientalist ascriptions and Palestinian de-Indigenization, while eliding the settler colonial and apartheid conditions under which they live, thereby contributing to the settler project themselves.