Defining Colonization & Other Revolutionary Terminology
From a Radical Chicana Feminist Professor
As I witness one of the most divisive moments of my life, I feel emotionally dysregulated to even write this. Social media right now, is both dumpster fire and for better or worse the place where so many are looking to have a voice. It is a place to organize, to inform, to educate, to learn. In the face of a media system and education system that fails us time after time, people are taking it upon themselves to seek and disperse the information the media will not give us. Media information that is often curated and disseminated by the powerful of this country and the world for that matter. I am talking about both government and corporate elites. About those invested in maintaining the status quo. The status quo created by “imperialist-white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy.” (bell hooks)
At the same time, social media is a place filled with hateful rhetoric, violent discourse, and misinformation for the ages. It all has me feeling saddened, disillusioned, hopeless, and anxious as fuck. I find myself doom scrolling hoping to find the voice of reason, hoping to find someone or something that will capture my feelings, thoughts and sentiments in this moment. But my search often comes up empty, I find myself getting lost in the images of death, and words of anger. Where is the hope?
Then I remember that in times of great emotional crisis, I am not alone, I have my community, my friends, those who will remind me of the hope, because hope lives within them, within us, within our human to human connections. I seek out those voices in my community who seem to be able to speak from a nuanced and well informed perspective. Notice I did not say neutral, I said nuanced.
I also fall back on my own education, my own journey sifting through the history texts, the archives of social movements, the spiritual stories of my ancestors. I dive into learning mode, into research mode, into hunger and thirst for clarity. I always find such solace in the halls of literature and testimonios.
We all have roles in the movement for justice and liberation. Some roles require us to move fast and urgently. Some roles require us to pause, witness, gather information, integrate it and then act. As an educator, I know my role, and I take it seriously, and I know how my time is best used to serve this moment and beyond. The following are thoughts and clarifications I have been able to come to after moments of pause and integration. After sharing space and dialogue with my community.
Reminder, as you read through the following, I am an Ethnic Studies & Gender Studies Scholar and professor who has read, researched, and sifted through many theories regarding these terms. As a Chicana with ancestry in Mexico and Texas, I have a lived experience of ancestral and historical colonization and genocide be it physical, cultural, spiritual or otherwise. Still, I don’t claim to know everything there is to know about these terms. I am merely offering some clarity in the face of a lot of misleading, misunderstood, superficial or misuse of these terms on social media. Of course, these are not the end all be all definitions of these terms, as terms evolve based on time and context. Furthermore, I acknowledge these definitions may or may not be applicable to all political, historical situations or contexts. However, I invite you to sit with these offerings, consider their applications in different situations, and then decide whether they help you to make sense of what’s happening or not. This is my attempt to offer some clarity as we navigate this contentious moment in revolutionary rhetoric.
On Land Back
Land back is not a call for genocide.
Land back is not a call for ethnic cleansing.
Land back is not a call for displacement.
Charlie Amaya Scott says, “What land back demands, dreams, desire[s] is the return of land as our relative and the restoration of our relationship TO a relative and with such a return comes a transformation of our society and of our humanity.”
On Colonization
Colonization is not JUST about the taking and appropriation of land and resources.
Colonization is not JUST about individual people in isolated moments doing/saying racist, sexist or otherwise oppressive things.
Colonizers' most insidious project is to colonize the mind.
Colonization is a mindset. Colonization is ideological. Colonization is rhetorical.
Colonization is about ways of being, ways of knowing, ways of relating.
The colonial project normalizes hierarchical power structures, ie, racism, sexism, ableism, heternormativity, etc.
Colonization normalizes cycles of violence that calls abusers victors and the spoils of war, freedom.
Colonial empires attempt to convince its citizens and the world that their freedom and safety hinges on the ability to defend themselves militarily. But I ask, freedom for who, and why does freedom rely on violence against others?
Colonization wants us to believe that competition and scarcity are normal ways of life and that the only path to true freedom is through individualism and upward mobility.
Colonization institutionalizes these ways of being, knowing, and relating to the point where it makes it hard to imagine a world outside of these structures.
What we are witnessing are the final desperate attempts at maintaining colonial ways of being.
On Genocide
Colonization relies and is contingent on genocide.
Genocide is not JUST about the killing of a people, but about killing the very notion of being a people, aka dehumanization.
Genocide is not JUST about the numbers of dead bodies, but about death of the ABILITY to live. Death of quality of life.
Even if Palestinians survive, what life do they have left to return to in Gaza with the amount of destruction?
Colonization focuses on the genocide of children in order to prevent a future generations of a people.
Historical example: The kidnapping of Indigenous children into boarding schools. Google articles about all the mass graves found under many of these sites across North America.
On Cultural Genocide
Genocide is cultural.
Genocide is the erasure of culture or demonetization of cultural practices.
Genocide is the erasure of cultural history, especially when there is attempt to replace it with the history of the colonizer.
Genocide is subjugating, exotifying, or otherwise inferiorizing cultural ways of being, practices and customs.
When you erase a culture, you erase a people.
Example of historical erasure: The erasure or minimization of the experience of systematic enslavement, disenfranchisement, policing and imprisonment of Black people from “American History,” because it would make white people feel guilty.
Example of cultural inferiorization: Romanticizing “western values” as somehow superior or more evolved. When Chelsea Handler argues for the need to preserve western values in the Middle East, she positions herself as somehow superior to non-western people which is the very definition of racism. She also assumes that ideologies of sexual freedom, freedoms of speech are somehow uniquely “Western.” History proves that in fact most indigenous populations around the world embraced sexual and gender freedoms throughout history. It was not until European colonization that imposed puritanical sexual and gender social norms in order to uphold patriarchal white supremacist power structures. “Western values” do not inherently hold some moral high ground, and to argue they do is racist by definition.
Example of cultural erasure:. “Kill the Indian, save the man.” A slogan used during the colonization of the Americas to justify the physical and cultural genocide of Indigenous people. When indigenous children were kidnapped and taken to Indian boarding schools they were violently discouraged from practicing cultural language and customs and forcibly made to learn “American” cultural norms. This is cultural genocide.
Example of cultural erasure: Americanization programs in places like Texas post Mex/American War. Religious leaders backed by the government went into Mexican communities and discouraged them from speaking Spanish, and imposed forced assimilation.
On Spiritual Genocide
Genocide is spiritual.
Genocide is the erasure of spiritual practices, spiritual beliefs, or spiritual connections.
Genocide is the bombing of spiritual sites like mosques, temples or churches.
When you erase a people's connection to spirituality, you erase their humanity.
Intent v Impact
Though legal definitions of genocide might focus on the intent to do these things. Those definitions are often formed after historical moments of genocide when we can retrospectively see the evidence of intent.
Within those historical moments there were accepted arguments for the justifications of what would later be called genocide.
I would argue that on one hand intent should not have to be proven if the impact is still genocidal. Palestinians are dying en masse, many of whom are children. Regardless of intent the impact of Israeli military tactics are enacting genocide.
On the other hand, people in power in Israel have made their genocidal intent pretty clear. I have yet to hear a clear distinction by Israeli leadership between Hamas and Palestinians civilians. Furthermore, I don’t know how eight months in you can still claim accidental tragedy or collateral damage. It is no longer accidental, it is intentional and I shutter to imagine the evidence that will be provided years from know when we will all finally agree this is a genocide.
We have a unique opportunity to call it what it is NOW and prevent further harm.
On Decolonization
Decolonization is not about the destruction of people, it necessitates the destruction of SYSTEMS.
Decolonization is not about gaining equality to those in power, rather it is about imagining and creating a world that does not revolve around hierarchical power structures.
We can no longer uphold colonial modalities of freedom and survival that rely on ideas of supremacy, cycles of violence and military defense.
Decolonization is…
Decolonization is about land back as defined by Charlie Amaya Scott.
AND
Decolonization is about extricating the colonial mindset within us, both as individuals and as a collective.
Decolonization is about naming the ways we have inherited methods of domination as our default, then divesting from these modalities of colonization, so we can demand true liberation for all.
Decolonization is about assuring “the most vulnerable people are able to access the resources and full human rights to live self-determined lives without fear, discrimination, or retaliation.” (Sistersong.org)
Decolonization NOW
Decolonization is already in process.
Ex. Queer folks remind us of the ways our ancestors understood gender and sexuality as inherently expansive by reclaiming these ways of being, knowing and relating within a modern world.
Ex. Reclamation of our ancestral spiritual practices, our cultural practices, our ancestral languages.
On Liberation
My liberation is not contingent on the oppression of others.
Liberation is made possible only when we see each other as human, when we see the inherent goodness and value in each and every person.
Liberation is extricating the oppressor within us, and creating new ways of being that rely on a shared sense of humanity.
Liberation is made possible not when we ignore the material realities that create division, but when we embrace our differences and create a new world based on mutual respect, equity and love.
Liberation is about the creation of a new world, new systems, new ways of being that allow all people to “have safe and sustainable communities.” (Sistersong.org)
Liberation is born in the imagination. To dream the impossible, to manifest that which does not yet exist.
If we walk the path of liberation, we must first be able to name colonization and genocide when we see it, recognize the ways its ideology has indoctrinated us all into hierarchical thinking. We must then divest from colonial ways of being. Decolonization is to divest, to dismantle the systems that oppress us, to return to our humanity. Decolonization is to destroy the systems that harm us. Liberation is to build the systems that assure our survival and give us the ability to thrive. Liberation is imagination. Imaging what world we want to create and just start doing it. We don’t have to wait for the destruction of colonial structures to already invest in new ways of being. We create the infrastructure we need so that we can more easily divest from colonialism.
Liberation is NOT a destination, it IS the journey. It is movement, it’s a verb, it’s in the doing, not the arriving. It requires trial and error, its the willingness to fail and recommit, willingness to get up and try again.
Liberation is NOW, not some far off distant future.
Liberation is living, breathing, heart beating.
Liberation needs nurturing, it needs water, sun, rest.
Liberation comes in waves, in cycles. Do not fret if we feel abondoned by it, if we feel like we are drowing in cyncism. We do not fear the night for we know the sun will rise again.
Liberation is the spark of hope, of desire, of joy. Liberation live in the movement, in the dance.
Liberation lives in me.
It will not be easy, it will not be perfect, but if we stay committed we can lay the foundation for a different world.
“We will resist, we will reclaim, we will liberate, we will celebrate.” (Las Doctoras)