If the only version of an other a person an individual able to see is the one they can imagine and feel inside of themselves, many others will always be invisible or less than human, no more than a passing curiosity.  Something as mundane as the immense joy that comes from eating a favorite dish becomes peculiar to disgusting based on cultural palettes and morality. Feelings are fickle and easily changed when trying to connect to the unrecognizable through avatars of the self. Empathy is already its own failure because it is the embodiment of a colonial sentimentality based on missionary thinking. Letting empathy should be central to any decolonial project, especially as we need to work across difference to imagine and create new worlds.

Rather than understanding decolonization as a political project of undoing, I understand it to be a project of what can become. In that sense, letting go of empathy, facing its other side, is a decolonial project. Understanding decolonization as an orientation towards the future complicates empathy as empathy creates a false engagement with the past that concurrently erases the present and denies those who are not part of the existing power structures, those who are voiceless and invisible, the ability to be part of the future. This is an enforced affective incompleteness for those who exist outside of dominant power structures as well as a for those who, after going through an experience designed to create empathy either through technology or culture. Decolonization and time, primarily as informed by Frantz Fanon are central frameworks for my understanding the other side of empathy. I do not have a frame to replace empathy, though I do allude to and push on a few suggestions I find useful for my own thinking. What I do want to do is provide a provocation and a space where we can let go of temporality bound in colonial ideals of goodness and badness, of missions, and almost humans, to imagine what might become if we replace understanding and connection through feeling, or empathy, with mutual recognition, action, and hopefully compassion. Without a compassion based on love of self, to let go of empathy does not stop the self-alienation and annihilation so central to colonial thinking and launches a person into an existential crisis.