How My Mind Was Colonized
The words, in my head, are English. My education was American and Canadian. I write against white power like I always knew better, but I didn’t. I am a comprador. I am a collaborator. I am complict.
I am a brown man, easily passing for white, and for most of my life I thought everything was fine.
Capital Colonialism
We colonized ourselves. That’s what always gets me. We didn’t just kick the few dozen white men out, we negotiated with them, tried to play them against our court rivals, and got massively played out ourselves.
We administered the colonies. We loaded our own resources onto their ships. We carried the truncheons. We put each other in chains. We even fought in their damn wars. They left, but it never stopped. This is part of the violence of white power. Not just bodies, you have brutalized our minds. As Frantz Fanon said, you left us with an arsenal of complexes. I am only beginning to untangle this myself.
Today, we have capitalized ourselves. We run the factories. We reject our own visas. We go to their schools, work in their colonial IMF and World Bank, we continue to administer their empire.
For petty rivalries we sold out our people. For petty privileges we lost away our rights. It never ended. Capital Colonialism is still here.
Colonialism is capitalism. That’s what people don’t understand. We weren’t colonized by states, we were colonized by private companies. Look at the most valuable companies in the history of the world. They were all colonial. The Dutch East India Company (VoC) was the first IPO. The VoC was worth more than Apple, Microsoft and Google combined.
1. Dutch East India Company: $8.28 trillion
2. Mississippi Company: $6.8 trillion
3. South Sea Company: $4.5 trillion
4. Saudi Aramco: $1.89 trillion
5. Apple: $1.3 trillionSelling people’s data is child’s play. Capital colonialism sold people. And it’s still here. It never stopped.
Modern capitalism is to colonialism as Uber is to cabs. Same function, just asset-light. We’re ‘independent-contractors’ now. Just let our elites buy iPhones and take…
