I really appreciate this article. Thank you for posting it.
This framework helps me also to articulate the place of the Irish and other now considered “white” peoples who were the first subjects of European colonization.
The process of colonization is a process of dehumanizing colonized peoples in order to appropriate their land, resources, labor and treasures.
This process has been practiced at least since Roman times but only the more recent victims have deconstructed it and protested not just the theft but the process itself.
What may not be apparent to most is that the colonizers are themselves the product of this process.
While those currently enjoying privilege based on the construct of whiteness, or the unjust inheritance of wealth from ancestors who were not subject to dehumanizing in recent times, are still living with the psychological scarring, cultural loss and ancestral trauma of colonization.
They have lost something deeply important. Not knowing what it might be since the loss is now ancient they are forever seeking the mysterious missing piece of their lives.
Just as the trauma of the Holocaust can lead very directly to the current suffering of the Palestinian people, so too can the Roman conquest of Gaul lead quite naturally to the original colonization of Africa and the Americas.
Of course, stealing from someone else can never restore what was taken from you so the hungry ghosts keep consuming more and more of the Earth in the futile attempt to fill the emptiness where their ancient ancestors cultures, languages, lands and mythology should be.
As radical and likely to be attacked as this idea may be, I feel that for our Earth to heal, wars to end for good and humanity to evolve past this stage of endless competition, greed and violence; Everyone needs to decolonize and recognize how the legacy of colonization haunts and destroys long after the initial dehumanizing and theft occurs.
The only thing that truly separates a Gaulish slave in Rome from a Zulu slave in Charleston is a few thousand years not race, or country of origin because both are human beings who have been dehumanized and whose descendants bear those scars invisibly until healing is achieved.
by Andrea Smith
While both Black and Native studies scholars have rightfully argued that it is important to look at the distinctness of both anti-Blackness and Indigenous genocide, sometimes this focus on the distinctness obscures how, in fact, they are mutually reinforcing. There is much to be said about these interconnections, and this work has been explored by many in this blog series, in the #decolonizesaam Twitter discussion on anti-Blackness, and elsewhere. Here, I want to focus on how anti-Blackness and Indigenous genocide are connected through colonialism, and further expand on how colonialism constructs both the labor of Indigenous and Black peoples, in particular and different ways, in order to secure the settler state. In this article I want to focus on how settler colonialism is enabled through the erasure of colonialism against Black peoples as well as the erasure of Indigenous labor, with a particular emphasis on some of…
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