What people are missing in the Greenland debate is not a technicality of citizenship or electoral legality. It is the structure of power that keeps repeating itself across the settler-colonial West.
This is not really about whether the Greenlandic Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, can lawfully hold office.
Of course he can. He has a Danish father and a mother born and raised in Greenland, and he meets every formal requirement. That point is trivial, and focusing on it is a way of dodging the real issue.ย The real question is why, across every settler-colonial society; Indigenous welfare and political destiny are so reliably mediated by white-presenting figures, even when those societies are overwhelmingly Indigenous in population.
Greenland is 90 percent Inuit. Yet when power reaches its most visible, internationally legible form, it is once again carried by someone who presents as Danish, speaks the language of European governance fluently, and is immediately readable to Western capitals as โsafe.โ This is not accidental. It is structural. Continue reading Greenland, Trump, and the Comfort of White Intermediaries