What Decolonization Really Means

Frantz Fanon and the roots of decolonial thought

This post originally contained a story about my family. I will publish an extended version of that story at a later date. What remains works better as a standalone piece anyway.

When I saw progressives in the West celebrating Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, I thought to myself, how could intelligent and well-meaning people convince themselves they were fighting oppression by justifying the rape and murder of 1,400 innocent Jews?

One answer comes from my fellow West Indian the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth argued that decolonization requires violence not just for physical liberation but for psychological catharsis.

Fanon understood the poisonous nature of victim mentality and believed that any true emancipation must include the liberation of the mind. It is not enough to break free. You must reassert your dignity by killing your oppressors. Or as Fanon wrote:

Decolonization … cannot come as a result of … a friendly understanding … Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together—that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler—was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons … Decolonization is always a violent event … it reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.

In other words, colonialism is violent from the ground up and the inside out, from start to finish and from skin to bone, thus the problem is not violent revolution but the violent status quo that requires it. After all, one does not blame a rape victim for clawing her aggressor’s eyes out if that is what it takes to make him stop.

Lately, when sharing videos of pro-Hamas university professors and students celebrating the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, many critics have commented, “when they talk about decolonization, this is what they mean.”

But the problem is not that decolonial theorists support violent resistance, since violent resistance is justified when the status quo is oppressive. The problem is that they confuse the rapist for the victim, and this problem can be traced back to the very roots of decolonialism itself.

Decolonial studies owes much to the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, who coined the term “coloniality of power,” and to the Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo as well as the Argentine liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel. But if there is a father of decolonial studies, it is Fanon.

Fanon’s support for violent revolution, as well as a vanguard class of educated elites to cultivate class consciousness, is classic Leninist thinking. But his expertise as a psychiatrist and the realities of colonialism in his home country of French-ruled Martinique forced him down a different path.

For one, he focused more on psychological rather than economic harms. But also, Martinique’s colonial economy was based on sugar and bananas and therefore lacked industrial proletariats, so Fanon had to seek revolutionary potential among rural peasants.

This focus on the peasantry echoes Maoism, but the big difference here is that the Maoist revolution is a class struggle, and whereas Mao would set up the chess board with peasants on one side and rich folks on the other, Fanon would set it up with colonized people of all classes on one side and colonizers on the other.

That said, Fanon was suspicious of the revolutionary potential of the colonized rich and criticized them for adopting the culture of their colonizers in order to climb the socioeconomic ladder. In his deeply personal 1952 work Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon described the colonial bourgeoisie’s assimilation as a process of psychological alienation from their own culture, something that was brutally crushing both for the individual and the colonized culture at large.

Growing up in the Bahamas, I witnessed this myself. Even within my own family, I saw the tension between Bahamian culture and the culture of our former colonial ruler Britain. I saw how Bahamian elites tend to assimilate more to the latter, will often go to school in Britain—or, increasingly, the US—marry into British families and give birth to their children in Britain even if they plan to raise them back home.

Of course, British schools are superior and having a British passport opens more doors of opportunity than having a Bahamian one, but Fanon was right. Bahamian culture takes a hit in the process. But again, decolonial studies is flawed in its inception. To understand this, we must understand the source of Fanon’s thoughts on colonialism.

Fanon’s great mentor was his teacher, the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, who helped found the négritude movement of black consciousness in francophone literature and who wrote the 1950 essay “Discourse on Colonialism,” in which Césaire argued that colonialism was never beneficial for the colonized, that all colonial civilizations are “morally diseased,” that colonization results from European racism against blacks, and that Hitler is considered the most evil man in history because he did to Europeans what colonizers had until then only done to Algerians, Indians, and Africans. Césaire said, “they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them.”

Before moving on, it is important to note that every one of these claims is false.

Despite its many egregious harms, colonialism can be beneficial. Not only does it bring benefits such as improved infrastructure and medical technology, but in some cases life overall is actually better under colonialism than during pre- or postcolonial periods. One example is Hong Kong.

Also, the colonial civilizations of Portugal, Spain, and France are flawed but it is absurd to therefore conclude that they are “morally diseased” when in fact, these societies are free, open, diverse, and in many ways morally admirable.

Also, colonialism did not in fact result from European racism against blacks. European colonialism began with the Portuguese, specifically Prince Henry the Navigator, who captured the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415 because Muslim pirates from the Barbary states had long used the port as a base to raid the coasts of Portugal and kidnap villagers to be sold into slavery. If we were inclined to trace European colonialism to a single cause involving its relationship with Africa, it would be the Muslim enslavement of over 1 million white Europeans.

By the way, the first Spanish colonies were also the result of Muslim aggression, specifically Christopher Columbus seeking a new route to India because when the Ottoman Empire rose in 1453, it immediately severed the Silk Road.

Finally, as for Hitler, it is not that we do not care about non-European genocides. Rather, we focus more on the Holocaust because is the single largest genocide in history. Frankly, I find it embarrassing that Césaire did not consider this explanation. If his argument were sound, then why do so few people know about the next-largest genocide in history, or the one after that? Both were also perpetrated against Europeans, namely Holodomor and the Nazi plan to kill all Slavs and Jews in Eastern Europe, known as Generalplan Ost.

Putting aside the flaws in Césaire’s philosophy, what’s striking is his black-and-white thinking. For him, colonialism is always bad, anyone who practices it is wholly bad, it all traces back to Europeans hating black Africans, and people only thought Hitler was evil because he hurt white folks. This grossly simplistic approach to decolonial studies was inherited not just by Fanon but, through him, by woke progressives more broadly today. Therefore quite often progressives do not trace systemic exploitation back to wealth, but back to whiteness.

Interestingly, what made colonization evil in Césaire’s view was that it denied the humanity of the colonized, so it’s interesting to wonder what he might have to say about the dehumanizing violence of Hamas. But of course, we’ll never know.

The American philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has argued that decolonial studies is analytically unsound because it often conflates colonialism with modernity. In other words, decolonization is a great project if it means literal decolonization, but too often it follows in the steps of Césaire by falsely equating colonialism with Western Europe, whiteness, modernity, what have you.

This helps explain why pro-Hamas activists are seemingly so craven and stupid. They view themselves as being on the side of the oppressed. They view Hamas’s violence as a necessary response to a violent status quo. They view decolonialism in simplistic Césairean terms of Europe versus non-Europe and white versus black. The nuance of the true nature the conflict is as useful to their analysis as the nuance of the fact that those 1,400 Jews were innocent and that they were tortured and killed in ways that have nothing to do with liberation. They are in this fight to win, not to question their orders.

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but that the structures and norms of society can save us. Saint Augustine proposed the idea of original sin, arguing that the fall of Adam and Even meant all humans are born innately corrupted, but that the structures and norms of religion can save us. Immanuel Kant believed we are naturally inclined to do selfish and wicked things, but that reason and moral analysis can save us.

I am not convinced that society, religion, or philosophy hold all the answers, but I do agree that left to their own devices, humans can be pretty nasty creatures.

On the other hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed people are naturally good and that they are only corrupted over time by the influence of society. John Locke argued that we are all born with a mental tabula rasa, or blank slate, and that whatever evil we do is imprinted upon us by our experiences in life. The psychologist Albert Bandura seemed to agree, and his social learning theory suggests that people pick up behaviors through observation. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, the psychologist Erich Fromm argued that each person’s character is shaped by their social environment.

This is closer to the truth than what Hobbes or Augustine had to offer. Yes, we can be nasty creatures, and yes, we do perhaps need the guidance of certain structured norms given by society, religion, or philosophy, but humans do not commit evil acts simply when these things are found absent. Nothing comes from nothing. As any parent can tell you, the behavior you get is the behavior you model.

The horrors of the Holocaust were not limited to genocide, but included the revelation that ordinary folks, friends, and neighbors had willingly participated in or supported the most profound acts of evil. What’s more, they hardly needed any nudging.

In writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt tried to explain how ordinary people come to do evil things. The result was her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she coined the now famous phrase “banality of evil.” Before this, many people had sided with Hobbes and Augustine in believing that evil was innate. You were born evil or you were not.

Arendt argued that evil is not exclusively the realm of the psychopath, but that it can be cultivated in the hearts of ordinary citizens, in our natural biases and prejudices, and manipulated to make us do unspeakable things. We all have a capacity for evil.

For instance, Arendt noted how Eichmann seemed unable to think for himself and instead consistently parroted “stock phrases” and euphemistic conventions of speech that made Hitler’s policies “somehow palatable.”

Compare this to progressives in the West today who talk about Hamas’s atrocities in terms of “liberation” and “resistance” and parrot phrases such as “from the River to the Sea” or “Free Palestine” without thinking too deeply about what they’re saying or who they are supporting.

The thing to take away from Arendt is that we are all capable of evil, and that evil does not spread by convincing people to do evil, but by convincing them that evil is good. Even Hitler himself believed he was fighting in the name of good and, like Western progressives, that the true oppressors are Jews.

In his 1974 work “Obedience to Authority,” the psychologist Stanley Milgram later remarked that Arendt was unfairly attacked simply because she correctly noted that Eichmann did not have evil motives nor did he identify as a monster. Rather, he believed Jews were harmful to society and that he was actually doing Germany a favor.

The public discourse hasn’t gotten any smarter since. In fact, people accused me of defending Hitler for making the same argument.

I stand with Locke, Bandura, and Fromm in believing that with the rare exception of literal psychopaths such as Vladimir Lenin, most people, even those who commit or support the most unspeakable horrors, are not born evil but become evil through socialization. This is why, although it important to discern Gazans from Hamas, we must also eventually confront the problem of rampant antisemitism and support for terrorist violence within the Gazan community.

To repeat, one of the horrors of the Holocaust was the revelation of its normalcy, of the level of complicity of so many Germans, of how rampant antisemitism was and how easily or even willingly good people harmed others. We find ourselves rediscovering these same horrors today as we look around at a world erupting in antisemitic hatred and joyous support for genocidal violence. We are shocked now, as we were then, to learn there are so many Nazis among us.

But as I have argued, this is not a distinct event but a continuation of the same violence by the same people for the same reason—literally an ongoing Holocaust.

This banality of which Arendt spoke was the impetus behind the Milgram experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, the Third Wave experiment, and more. Much of our understanding of moral psychology, in fact, evolved out of postwar attempts to answer the question, why do good people do evil things?

One reason is ignorance. Socrates believed it was a lack of knowledge and that if people were better informed, they would do the right thing. This is certainly true of some. But for Aristotle, Saint Augustine, and Immanuel Kant it was a matter of will or, as Kant put it, “bare reason.” I believe a better way to think of this is simply as intelligence. If someone believes a wicked thing, it could be that they need exposure to the facts, but it could also be that they won’t fully grasp the facts even if they are exposed.

The third explanation is evil, or psychopathy if you prefer, which describes someone who knows the facts and has the intellect to understand them but simply does not care. I call this the Three Causes theory of evil. Whenever anyone does a wicked thing, you can reliably trace it back to ignorance, stupidity, or evil. They either don’t have all the information, can’t understand the information, or don’t care.

That third cause does describe many pro-Hamas activists, but ignorance is a major factor we cannot ignore either. Many of them truly do see themselves as being “on the right side of history,” as they so often like to tell us. But it is important to keep in mind that where they go wrong, their gross oversimplification to the point of moral perversion, is not an accidental misstep of an otherwise noble theory but a foundational aspect of decolonial thinking. A feature, not a bug.

Decolonialism is not just a theory for understanding colonialism, otherwise it would be named colonial studies. Rather, it is inherently an instrument for undoing colonialism, and as its founding father famously said, this includes not just the cold justice of removing colonial power but also the emotional catharsis of defeating the colonizer—and in their own conceptualization, this means Western Europe and white people.