Root Causes Are Coloniser Kryptonite

Teaching us to view events in a vacuum is a powerful tool of white supremacy and colonialism.

My cousin was murdered when he was 23 years old, while he was serving in Iraq.

After being given this news, I experienced events unfolding through a haze of grief so deep I still fight for breath when I remember how it felt. I stopped feeling alive. I didn’t feel alive again for a long time. I am terrified of losing loved ones unexpectedly due to the PTSD that has lived in my mindbody since that day.

My last communication with him was on valentines day. I said he should run away. That we could run away together and open a bar called Pedro’s. I have no idea why I chose the name Pedro, I think I just liked it. He laughed and told me he loved me.

A month later, the UK invaded Iraq. Three months after that, Ben was dead.

In June 2003, in South Eastern Iraq, Paratroopers were carrying out raids of people’s houses to search for and confiscate weapons - weapons these civilians felt was their only protection. Who knows what else was being done to people during those raids, beyond the indignity and terror that must accompany having your home trashed by armed men with dogs. The day before Ben was killed, there was an agreement made to end the weapons searches, and an apparent mistranslation that led locals to believe the troops would leave the area, when in fact street patrols were set to continue. What is now described by western media as ‘The Battle of Majar al-Kabir’, started with confused and angry locals throwing stones at Paratroopers who they had been told would no longer be there. Paratroopers retaliated with rubber bullets and at some point real bullets were fired. Children were in the crowded market where this was taking place. At least 60 Iraqis were killed, none of whom were soldiers. While the Paratroopers escaped with their lives, Ben and the five other Military Policeman who were close by at a police station, were killed by the crowd.

Amidst my consuming grief, I felt rage. I felt rage at Tony Blair for taking us into an illegal war. I felt rage about weapons of mass destruction that never existed. I felt rage at George Bush for waging a ‘war on terror’ and using the pain and grief of 9/11 to stoke the fires of Islamophobia and appetites for ‘revenge’. I felt rage at Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan for financially supporting and encouraging the emergence of groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the 1980s because at the time it served their imperial agendas to do so. I felt rage at the arrogance, the greed and the inhumanity of British colonialism throughout the last five hundred years. I felt rage that somehow, we were still painting ourselves as the heroes and the liberators of people who didn’t need our ‘help’ until we had screwed up their countries in the first place.

I never, not for a single moment, felt anger towards the people who had physically killed Ben, because I didn’t view his death in a vacuum. My rage was not a reactionary, purely emotional feeling that disregarded information. It was placed firmly on the colonial powers and world leaders who were responsible. Not the desperate and righteously angry villagers who were fighting back against an oppressor who had done who knows what to them and their families. If I were to view the event of Ben’s death in a vacuum, my rage would be firmly on those villagers. Maybe I would describe them as animals, or savages.

When we don’t stop to ask why humans do the things they do, it is easy to dehumanise them. And in dehumanising them, we separate ourselves from them. It breaks the human connection we have to them, therefore it removes any need for us to inquire within ourselves about their suffering or their actions. It allows us to remain ‘good guys’, and to view everything ‘they’ do as driven by their monstrousness. The colonised mind, is such that the coloniser lives within us. We must start from this knowledge. The battle begins with overcoming the coloniser inside, as many decolonial and anti-racist scholars, including Audre Lorde, have written. Only once we have recognised them, confronted them, and made them accountable, can we begin to see coloniser/colonised relationships clearly outside of ourselves.

When we look beyond the most recent events, and we seek truth and understanding through as many sources as we can access, when we are committed to learning, we can connect and empathise with everyone involved in any situation through our shared humanity. For those with access to whiteness, we need to be able to recognise the parts of us that collude with and support colonial narratives and actions, in order to see coloniser tactics for what they are. We need to be able to recognise and give love to the parts of us that have been oppressed and shamed and hurt in order to see through the propaganda to the realities of oppression and the desperation that often violently accompanies liberation. The idea that the oppressor has a right to defend themselves, but the oppressed do not, is white supremacy, it is coloniser conditioning. I understand why oppressed people fight back, and you do too. Even if you have been taught to forget. It is an essential aspect of decolonisation that we seek to understand and be connected to the completely human desire for freedom, rather than buy into the narrative of condemnation without empathy.

I am brown. I also have access to whiteness through my white, English mother, and I am light skinned. My ancestors on one side, are largely responsible for the miseries of colonialism, and entirely responsible for the violence inflicted on my ancestors on the other side. Maybe this is one of the reasons I seek to hold nuance and difficult truths. They exist in my blood, in my cells, in my DNA.

We are witnessing the genocide of Palestinians unfolding. But it didn’t start in the last week, it began decades ago. We have been conditioned to believe that genocide is rare, this belief helps imperial powers to carry it out directly or to be responsible for the events that lead to it without any accountability. Everyone thinks they would recognise it and prevent it, but there are many genocides that have been going on for years. A world without genocide is a helpful resource on this, though it fails to include the genocide Black people are experiencing in the USA and other places touched by anti-Blackness over the last 500 years.

The pressure on Black activists, particularly Black women, to speak out on social media over the last week, is a wild display of colonised thinking and anti-Blackness. Firstly, they are speaking out, and they have been, for decades, for centuries. There is a long history of allyship between Black activists and the Free Palestine movement, and anti-Blackness is rarely addressed in this solidarity. Amidst the conflation of support for a free Palestine with antisemitism, there is the glaring issue that there are many Black Jewish people and a history of racism against Black Jews within Israel. True decolonisation and anti-racism is not reactionary. This does not mean you do not act when you need to or in times of crisis like now, it means the opposite. It means you are acting all the time, every day. Continuously carving out a path to freedom for everyone. Please consider this before you criticise Black and brown activists who are not showing up on social media the way you expect them to, particularly if you are only just getting involved or using your privilege to drive change. A social media post can be entirely performative, you don’t know what they are doing off social media, in their communities, within their local politics, with their money, with their time, with their love, with their support. All pressure to stop this catastrophe, should be firmly and loudly on imperial powers and those who benefit from white supremacy and colonialism.

To decolonise our minds means to challenge everything we have been taught.

To decolonise our reality means to use the knowledge we have gained from our critical analysis to act.

Understanding root causes enables us to act with purpose, wisdom and humanity.

Free Palestine.

—AJ

Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

• Are you viewing the events unfolding in Israel and Gaza through a vacuum? What is missing from your understanding of the truth?

• How many news sources have you sought out? What are their motivations for the narratives they are sharing? Are you listening to the stories being shared by people who are suffering right now?

• What action can you take to stop genocide? What ongoing genocides do you need to educate yourself on and take action against?

• What can you do to interrupt and shut down islamophobia and antisemitism?

• How can you show up with love and compassion for Jewish and Muslim colleagues and friends?