Anti-Climacus

If there's a stereotypical conservative reaction to colonialism and its legacies, I think it is to deny the importance of either. Problems can be admitted--no one will go out of their way to defend Apartheid these days--but they are generally assumed to be local and particular rather than general. The legacies, it is said, of colonialism are beneficial to the formerly colonized peoples--occasionally said with a touch of bias for English, 'dignified' colonialism as opposed to the more brutal realities of, say, Belgium or France. Anti-colonialism is, by contrast, nonsense: part egregious incitement to justified violence (always quoting Sartre: "to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man"), and on the other hand a prop for the sort of "race, class and gender" thinking, the "orientalism" and theory-heavy approaches that have been slowly destroying the serious liberal arts basis of the academy.

I wonder how many people who have this reaction have ever made it out to one of those places in the world that went through colonization, in its racially-loaded sense. At Undisclosed Tropical Island, it was hard to miss. The driver we hired for the week was black; so were all the waitstaff at the hotel, and almost all the staff at various restaurants and other places around the island. If you happened to be unclear on how such a large number of African-descended individuals landed in the middle of the Caribbean, one had only to venture into town and visit Independence Square, formerly one of the largest slave auction sites in the West Indies. If one happened to be curious as to who the natives were prior to colonialism, and why none seem to still live there, the answer is: the British and the French teamed up sometime in the 18th century to hunt them down and massacre them all.* Add to this the tendency of visitors to the island to be rich white people looking for an 'exotic' and 'authentic' experience (or just to get drunk and have other people do all their manual labor, up to and including moving their suitcases around), and, well, it's like that quote (incorrectly) attributed to Trotsky: you may not be interested in colonialism, but colonialism is interested in you.

As was fairly pointed out to me on several occasions after making this observation, it's not any different in the United States. The difference is one of degree and attenuation: the interaction with people marginalized by racial or ethnic identity is limited; it's pretty easy to avoid driving through neighborhoods that might bring these differences to light; and the history of race is diffused over space and time (there were slaves in North Carolina, but to the best of my knowledge there's no one place one can go with the history of Independence Square) so that one can squint and miss it, if desired. But it's probably worth sustained reflection.

There is, however, a flip side to this, which I'll address tomorrow.


*Impressively callous and surprising that the British and French, who hated each other in this period and were constantly fighting for control over various islands, would decide to put that off for a bit to wipe out the natives.