On Decolonization

I think a very important thing to understand about decolonization is that it's not a call for the colonizer to leave and 'go back home', whatever in the world that's supposed to mean.

Which is to say that no, decolonization doesn't mean, say, United States citizens whose great-great-great grandparents were British get shipped back to Britain when the Native Americans get their rights back. It doesn't mean that if one of your parents is native and one is from France they tear you half and half of you goes to France while the other half stays in Missouri. It doesn't even mean that if you immigrated here yesterday that you have to go back to the country you left. It doesn't mean that white Mexicans get sent back to Spain. And it doesn't mean Israelis have to leave their homes for Palestinians to be free.

What decolonization means is to end the apartheid, subjugation, murder, and genocide of indigenous people. To return the sovereignty of the land back to indigenous people. I also think that we may also have to give up the modern conception of a country--that the very idea of what a nation is needs to be able to accomodate the idea of nations whose lands overlap, even if their people answer to separate governing bodies. But regardless of how governance is assigned to land, I think that ultimately the people who make decisions about the land should be the people living there, not corporations and governments who only care to extract as much as possible from the land before turning it into a lifeless husk.

But I think one obstacle to ending the colonialist nightmare of the modern world is that so much of colonialism is about teaching people to think of others in terms of zero sum transactions--any gain to another must be a loss to yourself. But ultimately, I think the opposite is true--in destroying the world for others, we also ultimately destroy it for ourselves. And eventually the colonialist will see little choice but to focus more and more of their destructive energies on eradicating their own. After all, if they don't subjugate and kill you first, you would surely do the same to them. You're either with them or against them.  You're lesser than them, less intelligent, less noble, more violent. This omnicidal logic is the end stage of colonialism's zero-sum game.

Change may be frightening, and there is much we would have to work out to make things work. But the consequences of continuing on our current course are unimaginably worse.