anti-colonial?
What is all this anti-colonial stuff I've been hearing people mention lately? What's the idea? The goal? The problem?
What do the people mean by colonial?
re: anti-colonial?
@relee It's a complicated mess of stuff, but the gist of anti-colonialism is that we, as people with privilege, should stop thinking of things as wrong when they're counter to how our society does them, and learn to understand how other societies do them
the colonial mindset is "it's our duty to civilize these uncivilized people" and there are remnants of it in every bit of western civilization today, even if it's not usually that *explicit* about it
one case that comes to mind of shaking off some colonialism is this Mississippian archaeological site we visited once (Moundville, in Alabama), where one of the explanatory plaques said something to the effect that they'd recently realized they can learn a lot about the stuff they don't know by... talking to people from the various cultures that descended from the Mississippians. They're still around. But for over a hundred years white people had been saying "no one knows what this was for" when they could have just asked
-F
re: anti-colonial?
@Felthry There's a certain amount of "We're a strong, stable society, and should help people in less-deveoped nations." where it's not exactly clear if that's a good attitude. It's nice that we want to help, but are they asking? Will our help bring them where they want to go, or just where we want them to be?
I do wonder when it's okay to violate someone's self-determinism, though. Like, it's okay to prevent someone from doing a suicide, but where's the line of okay or not?