This is perhaps your most penetrating blog to date: it reveals, cajoles, warns while also celebrating and inspiring. But what lessons can we learn from examples of significant return and emancipation: like South Africa at the turn of the century or Israel today? There are many other examples and works in progress, nationally and locally. It seems to me that education is the key. Otherwise either nothing changes, or changes are made in ignorance and the consequences of both are as tragic. By contrast, understanding sheds light so we can see where we are going...
Powerful framing of how understanding one's own experience of dispossession creates actual empathy rather than performative allyship. Rankin's poem especially captures that uncomfortable recognition that seeking land security through the very legal machinerybthat displaced us becomes complicity. I've seen similar dynamics in tech communities where folks from marginalized regions replicate exclusionary patterns once they gain institutional access, less about malice and more about trauma responses seeking safety through assimilation.
White people do not merit scare quotes, unless you're nitpicking the chromatics (as Morgan Freeman pointed out, Blacks aren't actually black, nor are Whites paint-white). European people(s) are very much a thing, as are East Asians, South Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, and other groups-of-related-groups.
Objectively speaking, decolonisation was a huge setback for a lot of African countries. They all pretty much suck at self-rule - even if that's more in line with our own political ideals, at some point some dogs will hunt and others won't. So my attitude is fuck decolonisation. The people with the tools and the power should keep it and wield it as justly as they may. It can be good to be colour-blind on an individual basis, but there should be no mistaking the relative pallor of the founders.
This is perhaps your most penetrating blog to date: it reveals, cajoles, warns while also celebrating and inspiring. But what lessons can we learn from examples of significant return and emancipation: like South Africa at the turn of the century or Israel today? There are many other examples and works in progress, nationally and locally. It seems to me that education is the key. Otherwise either nothing changes, or changes are made in ignorance and the consequences of both are as tragic. By contrast, understanding sheds light so we can see where we are going...
Powerful framing of how understanding one's own experience of dispossession creates actual empathy rather than performative allyship. Rankin's poem especially captures that uncomfortable recognition that seeking land security through the very legal machinerybthat displaced us becomes complicity. I've seen similar dynamics in tech communities where folks from marginalized regions replicate exclusionary patterns once they gain institutional access, less about malice and more about trauma responses seeking safety through assimilation.
White people do not merit scare quotes, unless you're nitpicking the chromatics (as Morgan Freeman pointed out, Blacks aren't actually black, nor are Whites paint-white). European people(s) are very much a thing, as are East Asians, South Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, and other groups-of-related-groups.
Objectively speaking, decolonisation was a huge setback for a lot of African countries. They all pretty much suck at self-rule - even if that's more in line with our own political ideals, at some point some dogs will hunt and others won't. So my attitude is fuck decolonisation. The people with the tools and the power should keep it and wield it as justly as they may. It can be good to be colour-blind on an individual basis, but there should be no mistaking the relative pallor of the founders.