How to decolonize your mind
This is the second post in a series about decolonizing your mind. You can read the first part in this series HERE.
“Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations.”
Why should we decolonize our thinking?
Aren’t we living in a post-colonial world? I mean…slavery is over, right? Women can vote and own property now. We’ve moved past barbaric punishments like the guillotine and hanging criminals. Isn’t this good enough?
No. We are hurting. The people of the United States, a nearly-250-year-old experiment in colonization, are not doing well. Depression and suicide are on the rise; we have people who are homeless and going hungry; over 1 million people (in our country) have died in the last two years from the COVID-19 pandemic; and the climate crisis is an ever-looming threat that is causing real problems for millions of people. Racism and sexism still undeniably exist, and as a country we are more deeply divided than ever.
I do believe that on the whole we are doing better than ever. AND I see that we still have a long way to go. Perhaps I’m being naive, but I’m not quite ready to give up on the experiment of the United States yet, and I fervently hope we can one day achieve the ideals of liberty and justice for all that our country was supposed to be founded upon.
Decolonize your mind
Before we get into the practical tips on how to decolonize your thinking, let’s recap and expand upon what it means to be a colonizer, and what it means to be colonized. Traditionally, colonizers are a centralized group of people who expand their territory and power into a new area, claim it for their own, and send their people (settlers) there to live on the land and enforce the authority of the centralized group. The easiest example is England, and Europe in general, colonizing the land that’s now known as North and South America, and Australia, among other territories. Much of the world has been colonized at this point.
Of course, there were people already living on these lands, and they are considered colonized. To be colonized means you are subject to the rule of the people who have settled on your land. The colonizers enforce not only their laws, but their ways of living, religions and belief systems, and social customs onto the colonized.
One definition of decolonization might mean the colonizers simply leave, and the land they settled reverts back to the original inhabitants. But this isn’t a realistic option for the majority of the United States.
The United Nations has said that the core to decolonization means a return to self-determination. Right now, in the United States, we are told that we live in a free country, which ostensibly means that as individuals, we have the right to self-determination.
But we don’t. Not really. We all live with the legacy of the colonizers and their ways of living, religions and belief systems, and social customs, and these absolutely affect our ability to self-determine.
Many of us who were born in the United States feel the effects of colonization. Even as individuals we have been colonized; through formal education and learned behaviors, our minds and bodies have been taken over by deeply unconscious belief systems that came and stayed without our consent. Our beliefs about religion, relationships, food, work, sex, money, leisure, even our understanding of time and space itself were all forced upon us from our very first moments on earth. These beliefs often serve to maintain control and enforce the authority of those who wield the most power…the colonizers.
Of course, there are communities that feel these effects more deeply than others. Slavey was a result of colonization, and as such, descendents of slaves continue to suffer from the harms inflicted upon their ancestors. Original Indigenous communities bore devastating losses when the settlers came; 90% of them were killed when the Europeans came, which has resulted in tremendous losses of culture, language, customs and more.
When I write about what it means to decolonize, I’m referring to the idea that it means a return to one’s original state of being, before the effects of colonization. This legacy of colonization includes patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, capitalism as an economic principle that gives advantages to some people over others, a belief that humans are the most important beings on earth who have the right to pillage and consume the earth’s natural resources without discretion, and other questionable values.
Decolonizing means first understanding how the effects of colonization have socialized us, and then taking steps to learn what it would mean to think, relate, speak, learn and simply exist without these effects. There are three early steps we can take to start our decolonization journey:
Land acknowledgements
Question everything
Examine relationships
With a combination of education and practice, and understanding it will be a lifelong journey, we can take strides toward healing ourselves from this painful legacy.
Decolonize your mind: Land Acknowledgement
One possible first step is to begin acknowledging the original Indeigenous inhabitants of the land upon which you live.
I live and work in upstate New York, on land that used to belong to the Seneca Nation, which was the largest of the six Native American nations which comprised the Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations, a democratic government that pre-dates the United States Constitution. Today the Seneca Nation is a democracy that was established in 1848.
A land acknowledgement statement like the one above honors the traditional Indigenous inhabitants of that land. The policy of land acknowledgement is commonplace in many colonized countries, but typically not the United States (although it is becoming more popular.) As the US Department of Arts and Culture explains, “acknowledgement is a simple, powerful way of showing respect and a step toward correcting the stories and practices that erase Indigenous people’s history and culture and toward inviting and honoring the truth.” This link will help you discover the native inhabitants of your land: https://native-land.ca
Beyond showing respect for the original inhabitants, a land acknowledgement reminds us all that, as Kelly Diels often says in the beginning of her training videos, none of us were born into a culture of justice. None of us were born truly knowing how to live in a culture of “freedom and justice for all.” We are all learning this new way of being, and since we don’t have an example of a decolonized society from which we can learn, we’re sort of making it up as we go. Learning a new way of being means sometimes making mistakes, getting it wrong, being corrected, and trying it again. Every time we do a land acknowledgment, we are reminded that colonization is an ongoing process, and it gives us the opportunity to reflect on how we are either perpetuating or disrupting this process.
Decolonize your mind: Question everything
As we continue decolonizing our mind, another early step in decolonizing your mind is to stop and question nearly everything about your very thoughts themselve. Your thoughts are not your own. If your mind has been colonized, even your private, most intimate thoughts have been influenced and shaped by the cultural systems we live in.
Most of our thinking is unconscious. And while being “woke” is sort of a joke today, it comes from a very real place of waking up and being aware of the reality of the world around you.
For decades, feminists have given us the tools to examine many of the oppressive legacies left by colonization, although they perhaps haven’t framed it in those terms. Of course, we need to move beyond the limited tools that white feminists gave us and look to scholars with intersecting identities. Some examples include the following:
Womanists and Black feminists taught us how to “check our privilege” and reflect on the unexamined privileges that come inherent with being a white-bodied person.
Marxist feminists analyze the way women and their unpaid labor are exploited through capitalism and encourage us to look at our consumption habits and scarcity vs abundence mindsets.
Queer feminists question not only gender stereotypes but the very concept of gender itself, allowing us to question our assumptions about what it means to be a man, a woman, or beyond this binary altogether.
Ecofeminists draw parallels between the exploitation of natural resources and the exploitation of women, and ask us to look beyond human oppression to see the harms that are inflicted on non-human animals and the planet itself.
Start to ask yourself: “Why do I think this? Where did that assumption come from? Why do I believe this to be true?” By reading feminist texts and learning from the various feminisms, we are better equipped to examine our own thoughts to see what might be a legacy of colonization.
Decolonize your mind: Values
And the last early step is to examine your values. (If it’s been awhile since you’ve done any kind of values assessment, here is my favorite one: https://www.motivationalinterviewing.org/sites/default/files/valuescardsort_0.pdf If that one is too intimidating, here’s a simple, one-page option: https://www.winona.edu/resilience/Media/Values-Activity-Worksheet.pdf Take a few minutes and pick 5-10 top values, it’s fun!)
Now take a good, hard look at these values and start to examine where they came from. Ask yourself:
Did you learn them from your parents or siblings?
Did you pick them up as a young adult?
WHY are these values the ones that are guiding your life?
Are some of these values you’ve adopted later in life or have they been there all along?
Are you living your life in alignment with these values?
Now that you’re on this decolonization journey, it’s a good exercise to really asses what you hold to be most important in your life and do the hard work of determining if these values still feel important to you, or if they’re starting to feel like they might have been forced upon you without your conscious knowledge or consent.
Part of the reason decolonizing your mind is lifelong work and a challenging journey is that when we start to feel like we’re not living our life in alignment with our values, OR that our values are changing, it can feel like the world is shifting beneath our feet. But we must learn to recognize the ways in which our mind has been colonized if we are to deconstruct hundreds of years of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism.
These are the first steps. Stay tuned for the next segment where I will write about decolonizing motherhood!