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.