Category: decolonization

• Draft Thoughts on Progress Pains at the end of the Human

  They say that yesterday is gone, but I can still see it on my calendar

  Pascal, the otter from Animal Crossing, today

  ETA: or progress isn’t linear time, it is colonization’s construct of time.

   

  Everything progresses. Time and progress are interchangeable and only move forward, we say, even as we know there are cultures and histories who have constructs of time that are non-linear. Our inability to “get” this is so strong that even Business Insider did a story with fancy graphics because to explain it with just words is too complicated for something assumed to be fundamental and universal. Western society, and the US, is unable to deal with the reality that progress is a social construct. Like most popular social constructs, it is tied to the ruling class and steeped in their ideologies. It is a newer idea that was contested when it came forward, but, much like empathy, cemented itself as a real thing that naturally happens. The idea of progress, much like technology, pulls with it the ideologies of the past.

  Progress is a form of uncontrolled expansion at all costs (colonial baggage) with no means to mitigate it. It is always out of (our) control. The “righteous” forms progress has taken on are wealth for the few through an ever-expanding economy and technology while many struggle to have enough to live (more colonial baggage). The economy and technology create distance between individuals interpersonally and socially (see us vs them, and the haves and have nots). Technology and wealth obscure reality. How fitting is it, then, that the safest way to connect at the moment is through a technological screen due to a disease that has been allowed to progress unmitigated in any scalable and practical way. And yet, essential workers and those who must work to live without stopping do not have the technological protections that will protect them from SARS-CoV-2’s progression through the country. In fact, progress means that we must encourage its progression if we want this version of society to continue. Children must progress in their attainment of formal education in person, even as it poses a major risk to themselves, the people who would have to support their attendance, and their families. Restaurants and stores must open. If we don’t have enough masks for everyone, we mustn’t make them mandatory. We must all be willing to spend, spend, spend, even if the true cost is the death of ourselves or others.

  In this moment of uncontrolled violent progress of an illness, there is a secondary crisis of progress: racism and the police brutality that keeps it optically central, moral, and righteous component of society. Understanding police as a socio-cultural technology shows that, especially in a narrative of progress, they are the group that exists to kill any person or movement that threatens a person or thing perceived as more valuable domestically. The ability publicly get away with extra-judicial murder (which exists for certain citizens against select groups, not just the police), and the economy are the most valuable things (US) American culture has created.

  This is the world of progress. Move forward at all cost and die by disease or neighbor. One would think that it would be move forward at all cost or there is certain death, but no. When humans are allowed to be inhuman in society for as long as they have been here, death is a gift, a sacrifice, a sacred thing we give to progress to keep ensure its expansion continues to accelerate. The party line that led an election to go back to some imagined great past, where progress didn’t leave everyone behind, just a few, is an acknowledgement that progress causes great harm. But, as is progress’ way, there is no going back once we remove humans from the narrative. Even for those that long for the days where subjugation, where people could be enslaved, and publicly lynched in front of a crowd, cameras and all, with pride are being gutted from the inside out. It is what they wanted without realizing it.

  The world does not have to be this way. We can collectively choose life, and, maybe even each other. We can say it is okay to stop progressing if what progress is carrying forward is not working. It has been heartening to see so many people around the country in the streets marching to do just that. Recognize that I, and my ancestors are part of this story, and our lives matter. Stop killing us. The technology of policing and the scale and extremity of its violent response to peaceful marches correlates with how little our lives are imagined to have value at a societal level versus even the right two breathe. I am hopeful that progress and its failure, how it has left behind the last few generations with nothing to grab on to, to ground themselves, has done the brainwashing that Universities often get blamed for by showing that hard work doesn’t pay off. If you ask to be acknowledged, we will gas you and take out your eyes. Citizens will be allowed to drive their cars into you, and the police will continue to kill without accountability or punishment. And all of these things will happen to you if you are out marching, are in your own home, walking down a street. Anything.

  I wish I could declare progress is dying and we are making a new world, but it is early days. And the exponential progress we are seeing requires those with power to be willing to step away from it and force the work that is its undoing simply by caring for and helping sustain everyone in this moment. For life. For the life of us all. The people are already out on the streets. They are already decrying this moment in their networks. They are already bearing witness to the death progress always carried in the murderous fear that made it de rigueur in (US) American culture and popular imagination. Progress has declared the end of the human. Are we ready to step up and stop it from completing its mission?

  Jade

  Jul 19, 2020

  decolonization, random thoughts

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• Draft Thoughts on Empathy and Decolonization

  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.

  Jade

  Jun 17, 2018

  decolonization, empathy

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• A very short correction to Decolonization : a very short introduction’s take on Fanon

  

  I was very excited to finally get my hands on the Decolonization: a very short introduction because I freaking love these short little books. Me being me I did the thing that I always do. I looked for Fanon on the index, and then read so I can figure out if the author and I align politically. On the one page that quotes Fanon it quickly became apparent that we do not. He states, and I quote, “Fanon was clearly wrong: some colonial regimes yielded to their subjects’ demands for independence without being coerced to do so by violence”.  Hashtag sad face.

  Holy bananas. So, yes, the first chapter of Wretched of the Earth is “On Violence”, but right from the get go Fanon places violence in things as banal as changing the name of a social locale or inviting certain people to events. The demand by colonial subjects for independence is an inherently violent act. Its a demand to break, destroy, and imagine something new. But we tend to not talk about the role of imagination in Wretched. If you look at the agenda on any conference engaging with Fanon, his call to violence is often called as a powerful prescription or a failed attempt to understand what it will take to decolonize. When I read Fanon though, I read him through his introductions, endings, and footnotes, the spaces where he often hid his utterances of hope. I cannot say this enough… to read Wretched of the Earth as a standalone book is weird. It is a follow up to Black Skin White Masks and you miss so much if you don’t read them together. Further, in the other books he wrote he comes down harder on what he really thinks fixes things: love and imagination.

  The death of the author is a concept that looms over engagements with critical theory. This in an of itself is a colonial impulse. It is how theorists like Derrida, Althusser, and writers like Camus (all from families who had been in Algeria for centuries/generations), lost their Africaness and how Fanon, a Frenchman (who was stationed in Algeria but born in the old (a slave) colony of Martinique and educated in France) gained his. Fanon was French. The death of the author also allows us to erase the perspective and position that came with Fanon’s profession.

  Fanon was a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, who wrote a thesis (required for his medical degree) working with neurologists and psychiatrist on how culture effects the manifestation of mental illnesses in Lyon. From there he went to a state run hospital in French Algeria (which was a part of France in the same way as Hawaii is to the US) at the end of their designation as département, as they were being decolonized. In this space he saw violence, the kind that is outlined in the BSWM and Wretched. He also knew that, like most psychiatric practices, to heal people would take even more (mental and sometimes self-inflicted/perceived physical) violence, and love, and imagination. To get people to love themselves and to transcend to a place that is not what colonization “says I am” which was the only message they receive is violent. To get the colonizer to acknowledge this? More (psychic) violence.

  At times there will be physical violence, but more often than not, it is mental anguish.  The impulse to latch on to violence reinforces existing stereotypes of the angry black man in Fanon… I think I think it is just a racist reading tbh because even though Fanon starts with “On Violence”, he ends with case notes “Colonial War and Mental Disorders”. Read that… and also read “The North African Syndrome“, a short essay that has an ending that is my reaction when people insist that Fanon was only about physical violence (without love or direction) shared below.

  

  There is a violence in recognizing that there is a person that is oppressed, but they are not THE OPPRESSED. We are human. All of us. To acknowledge that when so much is wrapped up in that not being true, or people being less than, or, in this political moment in the country where I live, “animals”, is an act of violence toward the man who defines himself based on dehumanizing others. Fanon was not wrong. His reply to those who question if this is violence, who do not see that this requires a certain type of suffering and anguish, might be this beautiful ending.

  Jade

  May 24, 2018

  decolonization, random thoughts, reading, Uncategorized

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