It's not race essentialism, it's fairly mainstream academic postmodernist/marxist decolonial history.

The way I was taught it, in the mid 1900s as the modernist "scienitific history" narrative started to crumble there was a growing realisation that objectivity doesn't exist and striving for it is rarely useful.

What historians do isn't so much present objective truths about the past as reframe it through the lenses of our own experience.

That the histories of colonised peoples are presented through the lenses of colonisers working in coloniser institutions is in itself an act of colonial violence.

What this means isn't that anyone should never write a history of a race that isn't theirs but in doing so you should be extremely careful and respectful of colonised peoples voices about their own histories, interview and cite them as much as possible, even if the form they're in doesn't conform to western academic narrative histories standards (ie, oral histories, word of mouth anecdotes, heavily fictionalised accounts) present them as uncritically as possible, and if you do have to be critical of them be sure to critique your own criticism from a decolonial standpoint. When telling the history of colonised peoples try to do it from their own perspective (not merely as an ancillary of the narrative of whoever brutalised and exploited them) and if not in their own way then at least respectfully of their own ways of telling stories about the past.

While criticisms of subaltern studies and decolonial history do exist claims that "decolonial history is race essentialism" and "so white people aren't allowed to write history any more?" are the "reverse racism" of the academic world, complete bad faith chud shit, and treated as such by anyone who's not themselves a megachud.

If you want to learn more I'd strongly recommend reading chapter 6 of Dipesh Chakrabarty's Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History - Provincialising Europe as an introduction.

That's what I remember anyway. It's been a little while.

And from a quick skim of the article, that's exactly what Carolyn Nakamura is doing, not criticising Graeber and Wengrow for being white boys "constructing a narrative" but for telling the story of colonised people in the form and from the perspective of their colonisers.

I think that's a fair criticism.

Two white people employing the modern, western view of history as a single, all-encompassing, chronological collection of facts, ignores the multiplicity of conceptions of history, which either were destroyed and erased by colonization, or that remain but are not taken into account because they don't play nicely with the colonial concept of time and history. This can be done out of well-meaning ignorance of one's own biases, or because it doesn't serve the purposes of the work. It's not malicious on its own.

The problem is not acknowledging this shortcoming, especially when one presents oneself as a sort of authority in the field of anthropology (which I don't deny Graeber and and Wengrow are/were), and when one uses anthropological, ethnographic, and archeological research to support one's claims. Furthermore, the author takes special issue with the instrumentalization of a second hand account of the thoughts of a prominent Native American person as an avatar of their whole community, and of their collective knowledge as a whole. In short, it's ahistorical and Great Man Theory, only used for BIPOC people instead of old white men.

Besides, I think it's a fair criticism that claiming that native american peoples, or any indigenous peoples for that matter, have concepts that can be one-to-one translated to a modern/post-modern framework is fundamentally flawed. For example, the fact that we take for granted that we all agree on what 'freedom' means, and how that concept is constructed (to whom it applies, to individuals or communities, whether it applies only to humans or also to nonhumans and nonliving things), is a common colonizing thought pitfall in which one can easily go into because we just don't give the same value and consideration to anything outside the western, modern framework in which we are embedded.