What does "decolonize" mean?
“Decolonization is not a metaphor, it’s an active practice.”
The first time I heard the term “decolonize,” I was perplexed.
“Decolonize?” I thought. “Does that mean all the white people just go back to Europe? How would that work?”
Well, that’s not exactly what it means. And even though I’ve learned a lot over the last few years about what it means to “decolonize,” I’ve learned even more about how much I don’t know. In this series of blogs, I will attempt to answer some of the questions I have asked myself along the way, as a way to organize my thoughts and prompt additional questions (because life is just an opportunity to learn more, right?). In part 2 of this blog series, I also intend to apply some of these new concepts and theories to my motherhood studies as a way to look at motherhood through a different lens.
While there are many lands and populations that were colonized by European settlers, I will primarily focus on what happened on the land that is currently the United States of America. Also, please know that I am by no means an expert in this topic, and in fact, my own personal background and history offers the first entry point and question into this conversation. Am I, as the descendent of colonizers, able to separate myself from my ancestry to look at this topic with the appropriate level of sensitivity, empathy, and understanding? Spoiler alert: I don’t know, probably not, but I’m going to do my best.
White European Settler Ancestry
Many of my ancestors came to this land as early as the 1600s. My mom recently came to visit, and we took a sojourn to Long Island, New York, which is where most of them settled. I was able to visit the graves of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather and grandmother, who were both born in the early 1700s and died before the Revolutionary War.
This was a really meaningful experience for me; growing up as the only non-Mormon on my street in Utah, I never felt like I belonged. Standing on land that my own personal ancestors walked on for hundreds of years was deeply healing. But I cannot ignore the fact that if my ancestors were living on Long Island in the 1600s, they were part of the colonizing settlers from Europe.
Let’s take a step back and define some terms first. If we are to understand what it means to “decolonize,” we need to truly understand what it means to “colonize.”
To colonize means to take control of a people or area especially as an extension of state power.
It means that people from a different land have come to settle among and establish political control over the land, resources, and the indigenous people of an area. It also means to bring beliefs, value systems, and knowledge and impose them upon the new area. My ancestors were from England, and they set out to help colonize the land that is currently known as the United States. They left their families and a troubled land in order to start a new life.
Who were the original colonists?
Anti-racist educator Resmaa Menakem describes an important legacy left by the original settlers of the land. The people who were willing to travel across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1600s were not doing it just for fun. They were doing it to escape violence, trauma, and a horrifying and oppressive existence for many people. Menakem writes about the history of violence that spurred many people to start a new life across the world:
The 1500s and 1600s in England and Europe were anything but gentle times. People were routinely burned at the stake for religious heresy, a practice that began in the twelfth century and continued through 1612. Torture was an official instrument of the English government until 1640.
It is not hard to understand why so many people from England fled to the American colonies. Indeed, many of the English subjects who were colonized and in turn colonized America had been brutalized, or had witnessed great brutality first-hand. Others were the children and grandchildren of people who had experienced such savagery in Europe. (How Racism Began as White-on-White Violence)
But instead of leaving this brutality behind, these settlers brought the inherited trauma and violent past of Europe with them. Punishments in the original colonies still included branding, whipping, or hanging from gallows. People accused of witchcraft (usually women) were drowned, stoned, or burned alive.
Slavery, Indigenous, and Gendered Violence
As an elementary student, I dutifully learned that America’s history began in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. We re-enacted the first Thanksgiving, where the friendly Indians gave the poor, starving Pilgrims corn, turkey, potatoes, and pumpkin pie. We celebrated our Founding Fathers, who were heroes that fought for liberty and justice for all. It was sad to learn that there used to be slaves who picked cotton, but luckily slavery was over and now the African-Americans that lived here were happy to have been granted equal rights with white people. We also felt lucky that women had the right to vote too, and surely there would be a woman president one day.
It’s quite the rosy picture isn’t it?
Although most of us know better now, these misconceptions persist. The truth is, the United States has some pretty awful foundations. The horrific genocide of the Indigenous people, and the tremendous loss of over 90% of the Indigenous population. The truly barbaric practice of slavery, and that many of the men who professed to value liberty and justice for all were slaveowners who didn’t believe in the actual humanity of anyone who wasn’t a white male landowner. Women and Black people were property to be owned, traded, and disposed of as needed.
Violence, cruelty, a hard fight for survival, and an assumption that some people deserve more power than others all formed a part of the groundwork of this country. As a descendent of colonizers, it’s hard to learn this and recognize that my own ancestors undoubtedly played a part in some of these atrocities.
But it’s also important to recognize that although profound injustice is part of our country’s history and legacy, it does not mean that it needs to be a part of our future. The 1619 Project from The New York Times Magazine aims to address that legacy through re-educating the public about our history. We need to look deeply at the roots to truly understand the impact that colonization had on our country’s values and principles. And this is the first step in what it means to “decolonize.”
Decolonize
The official definition of decolonize is to free a people or an area from colonial status. But more broadly, it means a return to one’s original state of being, before the effects of colonization. The 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. It means questioning nearly everything we were taught and assumed to be true, even things like space and time. It is a combination of education and practice, and it will be a lifelong journey.
I started this blog post with a quote, “Decolonization is not a metaphor, it’s an active practice,” from Gogo uMkhanyakude Wase Manzini in an interview she did for a podcast episode called “Decolonizing Motherhood” on the show Super Power Experts.
In the next installment, I’ll discuss how to undertake this active practice and what it means to decolonize your mind.
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