Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 10: The Colonial Hangover

Colonialism was the occupation.

It had soldiers and a flag and an administrator.

A place you could point to on the map and a date in the history books that hands you when it supposedly end.

Nigeria in 1960.

India in 1947.

The flags came down.

The governor sailed home.

the maps were recolored and the world agreed that this thing was finished but it was not finished i think a lot of this episode has mapped how it continues to organize the past the present and also the future and beyond what is not finished there is something that stayed the occupation ended on paper in most places and its logic did not because the logic had been installed too deep to live with the soldiers.

It has been installed in the mind, in the mouth, in the mirror, in the very idea of what a good life is.

The whole argument turns on one distinction.

The charge is not that anything foreign arise.

Things have always arrived.

Cultures have always met and borrowed and remade each other.

And there is nothing colonial about contacts as such.

The charge is that the arriving came inside a ranking, a hierarchy that fouled the colonizer's language and God and knowledge and faith above the ones already there.

And that is the ranking, not the contact that stayed behind.

Keep that line in your hand as you listen to this through everything that follows.

The wrong is never that the English came or that the medicine or that the faith.

The wrong is the other in which they were found and in the fact that we are still filing by it.

I know that it's all right fused, that you cannot in practice take the antibiotics without the system that certified it or the English without the ranking that carried it.

In this context, pulling contacts apart from hierarchy in the historical record is often impossible.

So the work is not to separate them in history.

The work is to separate them in judgment.