Colonial Mentality Quotes

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Holly frowned at her. "Glad to see you've forgiven yourself so quickly." "Harboring feelings of guilt can have a negative affect on mental health." "Child geniuses," growled Holly. "Genii," said Minerva.
Eoin Colfer (The Lost Colony (Artemis Fowl, #5))
The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters. What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.
Hal Herzog (Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals)
Being colonized automatically makes you bipolar.
Sherman Alexie
The ‘modern’, ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, Christian European coloniser could not get himself to acknowledge that the lived experience and traditional knowledge of native societies gathered over millennia could teach him more than a thing or two about living in harmony with nature as opposed to merely salvaging what remained of it in the name of ‘sustainable’ development.
J. Sai Deepak (India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution)
On various occasions, especially in trying to think of western American history in the context of the worldwide history of colonialism, it has struck me that much of the mental behavior that we sometimes denounce as ethnocentrism and cultural insensitivity actually derives less from our indifference or hostility than from our clumsiness and awkwardness when we leave the comfort of the English language behind... [V]enturing outside the bounds of the English language exercises and stretches our minds in ways that are essential for getting as close as we can to the act of seeing the world from what would otherwise remain unfamiliar and alien perspectives.
Patricia Nelson Limerick (Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History)
According to statistics compiled by the Washington Post, in 2015 a full quarter of those shot and killed by police were suffering from mental illness.
Chris Hayes (A Colony in a Nation)
The national bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission as intermediary. As we have seen, its vocation is not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism. The national bourgeoisie, with no misgivings and with great pride, revels in the role of agent in its dealings with the Western bourgeoisie. This lucrative role, this function as small-time racketeer, this narrow-mindedness and lack of ambition are symptomatic of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to fulfil its historic role as bourgeoisie. The dynamic, pioneering aspect, the inventive, discoverer-of-new-worlds aspect common to every national bourgeoisie is here lamentably absent. At the core of the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries a hedonistic mentality prevails—because on a psychological level it identifies with the Western bourgeoisie from which it has slurped every lesson. It mimics the Western bourgeoisie in its negative and decadent aspects without having accomplished the initial phases of exploration and invention that are the assets of this Western bourgeoisie whatever the circumstances. In its early days the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies with the last stages of the Western bourgeoisie. Don’t believe it is taking short cuts. In fact it starts at the end. It is already senile, having experienced neither the exuberance nor the brazen determination of youth and adolescence.
Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
During their colonial rule of India, the British government began to worry about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi. To reduce the numbers, they instituted a reward for every dead snake brought to officials. In response, Indian citizens dutifully complied and began breeding the snakes to slaughter and bring to officials. The snake problem was worse than when it started because the British officials didn’t think at the second level.
Shane Parrish (The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts)
He’s’ – the first speaker waved his hands vaguely, trying to get across the point that someone was a hamper of food, several folding chairs, a tablecloth, an assortment of cooking gear and an entire colony of ants short of a picnic – ‘mental.
Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20))
From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our ‘faculties’ by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are.1 It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations. It angers us when practices linked to the last century, and the centuries before that, are still employed to deny the validity of indigenous peoples’ claim to existence, to land and territories, to the right of self-determination, to the survival of our languages and forms of cultural knowledge, to our natural resources and systems for living within our environments.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples)
What colonial psychiatrists did not understand was that the symptoms of mental illnesses are inevitably local. Most societies view emotional and physical sicknesses as a problem of the community that therefore demands a social rather than an individual therapeutic response.
Roy Richard Grinker (Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness)
Imagine this: A world where the quality of your life is not determined by how much money you have. You do not have to sell your labour to survive. Labour is not tied to capitalism, profit or wage. Borders do not exist; we are free to move without consequence. The nuclear family does not exist; children are raised collectively; reproduction takes on new meanings. In this world, the way we carry out dull domestic labour is transformed and nobody is forced to rely on their partner economically to survive. The principles of transformative justice are used to rectify harm. Critical and comprehensive sex education exists for all from an early age. We are liberated from the gender binary’s strangling grip and the demands it places on our bodies. Sex work does not exist because work does not exist. Education and transport are free, from cradle to grave. We are forced to reckon with and rectify histories of imperialism, colonial exploitation, and warfare collectively. We have freedom to, not just freedom from. Specialist mental health services and community care are integral to our societies. There is no “state” as we know it; nobody dies in “suspicious circumstances” at its hands; no person has to navigate sexism, racism, ableism or homophobia to survive. Detention centres do not exist. Prisons do not exist, nor do the police. The military and their weapons are disbanded across nations. Resources are reorganised to adequately address climate catastrophe. No person is without a home or loving community. We love one another, without possession or exploitation or extraction. We all have enough to eat well due to redistribution of wealth and resource. We all have the means and the environment to make art, if we so wish. All cultural gatekeepers are destroyed. Now imagine this vision not as utopian, but as something well within our reach.
Lola Olufemi (Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power)
Feeblemindedness,” in 1924, came in three distinct flavors: idiot, moron, and imbecile. Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify—the US Bureau of the Census defined the term as a “mentally defective person with a mental age of not more than 35 months”—but imbecile and moron were more porous categories. On paper, the terms referred to less severe forms of cognitive disability, but in practice, the words were revolving semantic doors that swung inward all too easily to admit a diverse group of men and women, some with no mental illness at all—prostitutes, orphans, depressives, vagrants, petty criminals, schizophrenics, dyslexics, feminists, rebellious adolescents—anyone, in short, whose behavior, desires, choices, or appearance fell outside the accepted norm. Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding and thereby contaminate the population with further morons or idiots.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
It struck Hsing suddenly that Masada didn't even understand the nature of his own genius. To him the patterns of thought and motive that he sensed in the virus were self-explanatory, and those who could not see them were simply not looking hard enough. Yet he would readily admit to his own inability to analyze more human contact, even on the most basic level. That was part and parcel of being iru. What a strange combination of skills and flaws. What an utterly alien profile. Praise the founders of Guera for having taught them all to nurture such specialized talent, rather than seeking to "cure" it. It was little wonder that most innovations in technology now came from the Gueran colonies, and that Earth, who set such a strict standard of psychological "normalcy," now produced little that was truly exciting. Thank God their own ancestors had left that doomed planet before they, too, had lost the genes of wild genius. Thank God they had seen the creative holocaust coming, and escaped it.
C.S. Friedman (This Alien Shore (Alien Shores, #1))
At the same time, medical experts of every persuasion agree that African Americans share the most deplorable health profile in the nation by far, one that resembles that of Third World countries. When Dr. Harold Freedman observed that the health status of Harlem men resembles that of Bangladeshis more closely than that of their Manhattan neighbors, he did not exaggerate. Twice as many African American babies as babies of other ethnic groups die before their first birthday. One and half times as many African American adults as white adults die every year. Blacks have dramatically higher rates of nearly every cancer, of AIDS, of heart disease, of diabetes, of liver disease, of infectious diseases, and they even suffer from higher rates of accidental death, homicide, and mental illness. Before they die young in droves from eminently preventable diseases, African Americans also suffer far more devastating but equally preventable disease complications, such as blindness, confinement to wheelchairs, and limb loss.
Harriet A. Washington (Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present)
The drive to live in the master’s house is also symbolic of the desire to become like the master. Our colonized consciousness has convinced us that to be is to be like the master. To be Filipino is not good enough—or so we we have been taught (or coerced) to believe. It is a reflection of the internalization of the dark shadows projected by the colonizer onto the colonized. These are shadows from which there is no escape, shadows that will keep haunting until they are withdrawn, atoned for, and integrated within the colonizer’s self
Leny Strobel
Such are the incalculable effects of that negative passion of indifference, that hysterical and speculative resurrection of the other. Racism, for example. Logically, it should have declined with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy. Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows. But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, an artificial construct, based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, strangeness and the (possibly violent) dual relation -- as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and into the colonial phase -- there is no racism properly so-called. Once that `natural' relation is lost, we enter into a phobic relationship with an artificial other, idealized by hatred. And because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other. Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism. All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning, a mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference -- a logical product of our marvellous planet-wide conviviality. The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid. Idealization plays for better or for worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat. And it is still the same person.
Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
[Women] are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert, or Chas must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est à moi. And, of course, it may be a dog, I thought, remembering Parliament square, the Sieges Allee and other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.
Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)
A black man, Benjamin Banneker, who taught himself mathematics and astronomy, predicted accurately a solar eclipse, and was appointed to plan the new city of Washington, wrote to Thomas Jefferson: I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of beings, who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world; that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt; and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowments I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us; and that your sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are, that one universal Father hath given being to us all; and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also, without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same facilities. . . . Banneker asked Jefferson “to wean yourselves from those narrow prejudices which you have imbibed.” Jefferson tried his best, as an enlightened, thoughtful individual might. But the structure of American society, the power of the cotton plantation, the slave trade, the politics of unity between northern and southern elites, and the long culture of race prejudice in the colonies, as well as his own weaknesses—that combination of practical need and ideological fixation—kept Jefferson a slaveowner throughout his life.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
The traumas associated with colonization that lasted almost 400 years scarred us all, regardless of our nativity, language, class, or gender. Trauma fragments and fractures the essence of our being and self-knowledge; it disconnects us from each other.” Regardless of your nativity, your memories are colonized. You are born into trauma without an initial understanding of or hermeneutic for your fragmented self and you must work diligently just to explain your own life—to recognize and name your scars, to educate yourself about your specific cultural history and uncover its connections to your subjectivity. The ideologies of your family are colonized, and even your own thoughts and actions are colonized, despite your initial unawareness of the systematic forces at work in the simple procedures of your daily life.
Melinda L de Jesus (Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory)
4 THE NORTHERN NEWT Not many years after the first newt colonies had been settled in the North Sea and the Baltic a German scientist, Dr. Hans Thüring, found that the Baltic newt had certain distinctive physical features - clearly as a result of its environment; that it was somewhat lighter in colour, it walked on two legs, and its cranial index indicated a skull that was longer and narrower than other newts. This variety was given the name Northern Newt or Noble Newt (Andrias Scheuchzeri var. nobilis erecta Thüring). The German press took this Baltic newt as its own, and enthusiastically stressed that it was because of its German environment that this newt had developed into a different and superior sub-species, indisputably above the level of any other salamander. Journalists wrote with contempt of the degenerate newts of the Mediterranean, stunted both physically and mentally, of the savage newts of the tropics and of the inferior, barbaric and bestial newts of other nations. The slogan of the day was From the Great Newt to the German Übernewt.
Karel Čapek (War with the Newts)
Under these circumstances, revenue from the New World in the form of exports of gold and silver was critical. The Spanish government, however, imposed strict rules limiting economic exchange—a system known as mercantilism—under the mistaken belief that this would maximize its income from the colonies. Exports from the New World could go only to Spain, indeed, to a single port in Spain; they were required to travel in Spanish ships; and the colonies were not permitted to compete with Spanish producers of manufactured goods. Mercantilism, as Adam Smith was to demonstrate in The Wealth of Nations, created huge inefficiencies and was highly detrimental to economic growth. It also had very significant political consequences: access to markets and the right to make productive economic investments were limited to individuals or corporations favored by the state. This meant that the route to personal wealth lay through the state and through gaining political influence. This then led to a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial mentality, in which energy was spent seeking political favor rather than initiating new enterprises that would create wealth. The landowning and merchant classes that emerged under this system grew rich because of the political protection they received from the state.
Francis Fukuyama (Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy)
The central premise of racism, which distinguishes it from ethnic prejudice, is the notion of an ordered hierarchy of races in which some are superior to others. The superior race is assumed to enjoy the right to rule others because of its inherent qualities. Besides superiority, racism also connotes the idea of immutability, thought once to reside in the blood and now in the genes. Racists are concerned about intermarriage (“the purity of the blood”) lest it erode the basis of their race’s superiority. Since quality is seen as biologically inherent, the racist’s higher status can never be challenged, and inferior races can never redeem themselves. The notion of inherent superiority, which is generally absent from mere ethnic prejudice, is held to justify unlimited abuse of races held to be inferior, from social discrimination to annihilation. “The essence of racism is that it regards individuals as superior or inferior because they are imagined to share physical, mental and moral attributes with the group to which they are deemed to belong, and it is assumed that they cannot change these traits individually,” writes the historian Benjamin Isaac.2 It’s not surprising that the notion of racial superiority emerged in the 19th century, after European nations had established colonies in much of the world and sought a theoretical justification of their dominion over others.
Nicholas Wade (A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History)
In order to pressure the government to change its approach, however, Alinsky urged black activists to dress in African tribal costumes and greet government officials flying into Chicago from Washington, D.C. This action, he said, would dramatize the “colonial mentality” of the antipoverty establishment. I learned about this particular Alinsky caper from Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley College thesis.18 Alinsky
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
He'd be ripping them apart mentally and emotionally, pitting them against each other in extreme conflict situations. Emotional and romantic attachments would obstruct the purity of their actions and reactions; contaminating the results and outcomes was a risk he was not willing to take.
Jill Thrussell (Robot : Colony 25 (Colony #1))
SUBJECT 22 REBOOT// … =/MEMORIES =/PROFILE [COMPLETE] [PROGRAM INITIATED...] [SESSION 1] [NOV-2: 2079]   Good afternoon, I have been assigned to you in response to the recent traumatic incident that has occurred in the colony. I am here to observe your mental health and assess any restorative measures that may return you to psychological competency, as well as provide any emotional support if necessary. I must inform you
Nolan Oreno (Alluvium)
Pitt the Elder, had been prime minister a generation before (1766-68). He was a manic-depressive, had had a mental breakdown in 1751 while a Cabinet minister (Paymaster General) and had withdrawn from public office for three years. While serving in the highest office, clear signs of mental instability were evident. He spent most of his prime ministership sequestered away in a small room in his house at Hampstead, trying to avoid his ministers and the pressures of governing. During his time, his Chancellor was doing his own thing, unwisely levying the taxes on the North American colonies that would eventually ignite the War of Independence.
Phil Mason (Napoleon's Hemorrhoids: ... and Other Small Events That Changed History)
Finally, the phrase ‘first world problems’ is built on the misleading assumption that every single individual in the first world is living in better conditions than those in the other worlds. And if so, this totally ignores the fact that the first world, too, is filled with violence, suicide, mental issues, homelessness, death, and every other problem we see in the rest of world. In this sense, the phrase ‘first world problems’ does not even do justice to millions of people suffering in the first world itself. The phrase assumes that people in the second or the third worlds are miserable and incapable of having economic, social, or even political fulfilment.
Louis Yako
Mental ailments are destroying blacks, as well: Black women suffer the highest rates of stress and major depression in the nation and suicide rates soared 200 percent among young black men within just twenty years.
Harriet A. Washington (Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present)
street children and children from slum colonies, children of migrant laborers, and physically and mentally handicapped children”:
Alyssa Hadley Dunn (Teachers Without Borders? The Hidden Consequences of International Teachers in U.S. Schools (Multicultural Education))
I'm sometimes reminded of my Filipino American friends with Filipina mothers and white fathers. I tell myself not to project my own colonial mentality onto them; just because an Asian woman marries a white man doesn't mean she's the perfect submissive wife of his fantasies. But sometimes I wonder if her husband knows that.
Matt Ortile (The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance)
The firmament that is New York is greater than the sum of its constituent parts. It is a city and it is also a creature, a mentality, a disease, a threat, an electromagnet, a cheap stage set, an accident corridor. It is an implausible character, a monstrous vortex of contradictions, an attraction-repulsion mechanism so extreme no one could have made it up. New York, which has been called the capital of the twentieth century, as Paris was that of the nineteenth, would seem on the face of it to be founded on progress, on change, on the bulldozing of what has faded to make way for the next thing, the thing after that, the future. The lure of the new is built right into its name; it is the part of the name that actually registers, since the “York,” a commemoration of a colonial lineage, carries no resonance and exists only as a vestige. New York is incarnated by Manhattan (the other boroughs, noble, useful, and significant though they may be, are merely adjuncts), and Manhattan is a finite space that cannot be expanded but only continually resurfaced and reconfigured. Manhattan is a wonderland of real estate speculation, a hot center whose temperature cannot but increase as population increases and desirability remains several paces ahead of capacity. The myth of Manhattan, therefore, is cast in the future tense. It does not hark back to a heroic past, lacks its Romulus and Remus (except in the image of that transaction between Peter Minuit and the Canarsies, which is simply the first clever deal, the primordial ground-floor entry). New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.
Lucy Sante (Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York)
This colonisation of the North by the South appears as a soft colonialism, without legal permission, relying on appeals to pity, asylum and equality. It is the ‘fox’s strategy’ (as opposed to the lion’s) noted by Machiavelli.[230] In reality, however, the coloniser, who justifies himself with the ‘modern’ Western ideology of his victim, whose values he pretends to adopt, does not share those values at all. He is anti-egalitarian, domineering (while claiming to be oppressed and persecuted), aiming at revenge and conquest. This is the clever ruse of a way of thinking that has remained archaic. To counter it, will it not be necessary to become mentally archaic again and rid ourselves of the demoralising handicap of ‘modern’ humanism?
Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
Yes, you know damned well what you should have done if you sincerely desired their surrender. You could have dropped it [the atom bomb] on one of their mountains, even in the sea, anywhere they could see what would happen if they persisted in the war, but you chose instead to drop it on peopled cities. I know you, the white mentality: Japanese, Chinese, Africans, we are all subhuman. You would drop an atom bomb on Abeokuta or any of your colonies if it suited you!
Wole Soyinka (Aké: The Years of Childhood)
Until a decolonial approach is employed by experts and ‘intellectuals’, we will continue to see the entrenchment of colonialised identities and fissures, which began with an anti-Brahmin slant but whose rapid movement towards an anti-Dharmic/anti-Hindu position is less veiled with each passing day—thereby revealing the end goal of European coloniality.
J. Sai Deepak (India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution)
There are substantial issues that remain, however, related to direction, hierarchy, and paternalism in missional mentalities. The heart and the willingness behind going are to be applauded. Jesus modeled an incarnational gospel and contextual approaches are to be valued over attractional models like those found in the megachurch movement. Concerns abound, though, in the shadow of the colonial legacy. How does one reclaim or reform a concept that has been so thoroughly corrupted and has taken on so much baggage? Is repentance enough? Can the form actually be redeemed and repurposed?
Randy Woodley (Decolonizing Evangelicalism: An 11:59 p.m. Conversation)
The spiritual character of the relationship between indigeneity and nature is an emotion that the coloniser can at best exoticise but can never relate to.
J. Sai Deepak (India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution)
For many years Canadian writers could not function in their own country - that is, they could not be published in their own country because Canadian publishers wouldn't publish them, and the reason they wouldn't publish them was that they said, or they claimed, that the sales would be too low and it would be uneconomical. This, in fact, was true. Canadian readers weren't reading Canadian books. The reason they weren't reading Canadian books is that they were suffused with what we call 'the Colonial Mentality', which views the mother country or the centre of the Imperial Culture as superior. So Canadian readers were reading American and British books but not Canadian ones, so Canadian writers either had to write according to the dictates of one or other of the Imperial Cultures or not get published.
Margaret Atwood
As far as expressing the creative turmoil within my head was concerned, I took to the English language as a duck takes to water. I was therefore a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonisation . . . For a black writer the language is very racist; you have to have harrowing fights and hair-raising panga duels with the language before you can make it do all that you want it to do . . . This may mean discarding grammar, throwing syntax out, subverting images from within, beating the drum and cymbals of rhythm, developing torture chambers of irony and sarcasm, gas ovens of limitless black resonance.
Dambudzo Marechera (The House of Hunger)
How could the word Oriental—derogatory to East Asians in modern parlance—ever be expansive enough to contain the vast histories of Africa, Asia, the Middle East? Another perfumer in the discussion sent the Master Perfumer a copy of Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” to re-Orient why discontinuing his use of the word Oriental mattered. “Orientalism,” a revolutionary text, became a revelation to me as a young feminist, mind-blowing as a perfumer. As Orientalist scholars embarked on their translations of ancient texts, languages, civilizations, they helped colonial rulers make sense of Empire. Knowing their subjects made it easier to categorize, divide, and conquer them. Perfumers summoned these faraway lands into temporal sensory experiences. Perfume as little museums of the colonies, a fragrant addition to the social and scientific discourse, yet another generalization, an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type.
Tanaïs (In Sensorium: Notes for My People)
Helping my friends become better and not sad, will help me to become better and not sad
Loraine Masiya Mponela
He’s”—the first speaker waved his hands vaguely, trying to get across the point that someone was a hamper of food, several folding chairs, a tablecloth, an assortment of cooking gear and an entire colony of ants short of a picnic—“mental. And he’s got a funny eye.
Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20))
Hutton and the ESC advocated the elimination of ‘mental deficients,’ and of races other than ‘intelligent Anglo-Saxons.’”7 In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit, particularly when the mother was “feeble-minded” and “promiscuous.”8 Ten years later, US Public Law 136 legalized all sterilization in Puerto Rico, even for “non-medical” reasons.9 In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge himself wrote, “We found the people of Porto Rico poor and distressed, without hope for the future, ignorant, poverty-stricken and diseased, not knowing what constitutes a free and democratic government.”10
Nelson A. Denis (War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony)
Fanon examined how colonialism is internalized by the colonized and inculcates an inferiority complex through the mechanism of racism. In the same way, the tyrannical mechanism of patriarchy oppresses women not only physically or mentally but also colonizes their minds and shatters their souls through constant emotional, economic, and mental violence. This internalization of inferiority by women themselves in a male-dominated society forcibly compels them to stay in a repressive and a violent marriage. In such precarious situations, with no available critical internal or external support from the wider family network or the state, and no hope left, a woman’s self-esteem collapses, and her humanness is crushed to the extent that she ceases to be a self-motivated person. The calculative presumptions of patriarchy control and overwhelmingly dominate and subjugate women while normalizing and trivializing their brutal torture and murder in the garb of transferring wealth to the daughters in connection with marriage.
Shalu Nigam
Even though English is the universal language of earth, due to its primitive colonial escapades, and indeed the most convenient, it is neither the most beautiful nor the most soulful language on earth.
Abhijit Naskar (Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch)
But Patel, the Harvard professor of global health, believes that the WHO studies do not sufficiently account for the high mortality rates of people with mental illness in developing countries, as well as the abuse and discrimination they face. He worries that this omission promotes a naive and “extremely Northern perspective about the enlightened native”—a modern reprise of the colonial myth that those who haven’t been exposed to civilization are innocent and happy.
Rachel Aviv (Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us)
He’s”—the first speaker waved his hands vaguely, trying to get across the point that someone was a hamper of food, several folding chairs, a tablecloth, an assortment of cooking gear and an entire colony of ants short of a picnic—“mental.
Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20))
We need to stop thinking we can "rescue" the world from problems we helped create. Haiti has no money because the United States, France, and other colonial powers stole it. When we buy a twenty-dollar shirt that a Haitian was paid pennies to make, we are continuing to steal from them. When a U.S. aid worker in Haiti is paid a salary equivalent to that of fifty Haitians, we are continuing to steal from them. This is not aid. Aid is reparations. Relief is overthrowing a system of colonial domination, and eliminating debt. Support is standing in solidarity with Haitians ... [who] are organizing and fighting and leading their own struggles for an end to colonialism.
Jordan Flaherty (No More Heroes: Grassroots Challenges to the Savior Mentality)
Yet [Hoggart] could not help noticing that those unschooled slum dwellers were mentally independent in a way that his postwar students were not. His grandmother’s range of cultural reference was narrow and unimpressive, consisting mainly of homespun aphorisms and the Bible, but at least her mind had not been colonized by pulp novels and Hollywood movies. The difference between the old culture and mass culture was like the difference between preparing a meal and microwaving one, and Hoggart’s students had been rendered helpless in teh same way as someone who has never been taught how to cook. The colonial aspect of mass culture was easier for Hoggart to spot because he was British. Mass culture, for England and Europe, was a foreign takeover. But “Americanization” homogenized the home country as much as it did the rest of the globe, sapping the life out of regional subcultures. Before the 1950s, music, theater, magazines, and even radio were all local, to one degree or another. Hollywood movies were not.
Helen Andrews (Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster)
Casebooks are now rarely adopted in freshman English courses; age and infirmity have taken their toll on my mental agilities; and, to be candid, I have been no less mystified by "Post-Colonialism" and "De-struction" and "Queer Chicana Studies" than have other academics trained in the once innovative principles of the New Criticism. I might have been a likelier candidate for studying someone else's updated Perplex than for compiling one myself!
Frederick Crews
One of the biggest and most invisible – which in the long run becomes visible— wounds of coloniality is to make those at the receiving end of it question themselves; their physical, mental, and spiritual value and meaning; their ability to think, invent, innovate, and theorize. It happens so slowly, viciously, and unconsciously that many people suddenly see themselves at a point where the only expertise and knowledge they deem valuable come to them from the heart of Europe and North America. The colonized, slowly but surely, become at once the dagger and the wound to themselves. We come to such a place where we cooperate with the dagger against our own wounds. It takes a long time and reflection to realize that the wound (the colonized mind) will never stop bleeding so long as it is cooperating with the dagger (coloniality).
Louis Yako
One of the biggest and most invisible – which in the long run becomes visible— wounds of coloniality is to make those at the receiving end of it question themselves; their physical, mental, and spiritual value and meaning; their ability to think, invent, innovate, and theorize. It happens so slowly, viciously, and unconsciously that many people suddenly see themselves at a point where the only expertise and knowledge they deem valuable come to them from the heart of Europe and North America.
Louis Yako
26 Europeans, and especially poor Europeans, with mental or physical illnesses were usually hidden from African view as much as possible, a common colonial practice, to preserve the image of white people as elites with healthy bodies and superior mentalities.27
Roy Richard Grinker (Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness)
Kleptocracy, corruption, injustice, dirty politics, unscrupulous political movers, patronage politics, destructive and corrupt political dynasties, and impunity have found perpetual happiness in the Pearl of the Orient Seas. There are so many endless questions: What have you done? What are you going to do? Will silence, apathy, vindictiveness, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse and economic abuse go on? Will you just go with the flow of kleptocracy, corruption, injustice and impunity? When will you ever genuinely decolonise your mind from colonial mentality? Will you live and work upholding truth and honesty as you continue to help strengthen the country's collective memory of various factual incidents in history without being politically biased? Are you one of those who committed revisionism, cancelling out, discrediting others, peddled disinformation, calumny, gossip-mongering, fear-mongering, destructive lies, group political narcissist bullying, harassing, blaming, gloating, provoking, sabotaging, intimidating, threatening, abusing others as you are more loyal to a political party than the truth? Will there be honest public servants and honest lawmakers? Because with honesty as a top living value, you can find effective solutions to many issues in society. Are you willing to help minimise, stop and eliminate corruption, violence, injustice and impunity? Are you going to be one of those honest voices for the voiceless without breaking the law? Are you going to help hold accountable those thieves, perpetrators, scammers, and corrupt members of society without breaking the law? I have so many nagging questions, but I shall always end it with these: Will you be honest in every deal? How hard is it to be truthful? Will you uphold the truth and justice? Do the fact and truth whisper to your conscience? Then, are you willing to honestly listen to it and move toward the right, lawful and humane actions? ~ Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn writing as Angelica Hopes Onestopia Book 3, Solo la verità è bella Trilogy
Angelica Hopes
If we can stop undermining our self as Africans and start valuing who are and what we have. We must stop it ,with the mental of thinking that people who speaks their native tongue. Who following their tradition, practices their culture and value their heritage . Don’t know things, are lame, boring, retards, not interesting, not modern, not clued up and not Important enough. Thinking that they are behind, slow, old fashion and school, because they don’t know western or they don’t know the things we know or following up with trends ,fashion and western as we do. Invest In yourself by embracing who you are.
De philosopher DJ Kyos
disabilities. In colonial America, the settlement of a vast new rural society meant that early colonists put a premium on physical stamina. The early colonies tried to prevent the immigration of those who could not support themselves and would have to rely on state help. People with physical or mental disabilities who were potentially dependent could be deported, forced to return to England.
Joseph P. Shapiro (No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement)
All of the well-balanced inhabitants of the colony have made a pledge to avoid emitting evil thoughts. Thus, the mental efforts of the majority have become an almost continual prayer, and the result is the vibrations of peace we are sensing.
Francisco Cândido Xavier (Nosso Lar)
Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook, it was there. The white man found only too many people who looked different. That was all that outraged the receivers of his discrimination, that he applied the technique of the wild jiggling dance and the rattling tin cans to anyone who was not a white man.
Bessie Head (Maru)
Her depression finally lifted, observed friends and colleagues, soon after some scenes were filmed in a leper colony, and following a visit to a mental institution. So she was childless, she mused, but how could that compare to the misery that these people were enduring? ‘After looking inside an insane asylum, visiting a leper colony, talking to missionary workers, and watching operations, I felt very enriched,’ said Audrey. ‘I developed a new kind of inner peacefulness. A calmness. Things that once seemed so important weren’t important any longer.
Ian Woodward (Audrey Hepburn: Fair Lady of the Screen)
There came a moment in my discovery of the microbes that inhabit the human body when I stopped seeing myself as an individual, and began to consider myself instead as a vessel for my microbiota. Now, I see us - myself and my microbes - as a team. But, as in any relationship, I will only get what I give. I am their provider and their protector, and in return they sustain and nourish me. I find myself thinking about my meal choices in terms of what my microbes would be grateful for, and my mental and physical health as markers of my worthiness as a host to them. They are my own personal colony, and their preservation is worth as much to me as the well-being of the cells of my own body.
Alanna Collen (10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness)
He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging—accompanied by mental and spiritual identification—with Wilbur Mercer had reoccurred. As it did for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on Earth or on one of the colony planets. He experienced them, the others, incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of their many individual existences. They—and he—cared about one thing; this fusion of their mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the climb, the need to ascend.
Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
The close relationship between Arizona and Israel long proceeded Donald Trump’s presidency. One journalist called the area the “Palestine-Mexico border” due to both nations sharing the same surveillance companies and co-operation.64 Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, who left office in 2019 after spending years welcoming Israel’s high-tech companies to build a home in Arizona, once said, “If you go to Israel and you come to Southern Arizona and close your eyes and spin yourself a few times you might not be able to tell the difference.”65 The reasons behind the collaboration are tied to two geographic spaces defined by some as vast and unoccupied and therefore deserving of colonization and control. It’s the settler-colonial mentality. Israel is helped by the fact that it’s a bipartisan American political belief that backing the Jewish state is akin to necessary religious doctrine. Arizona, like Palestine, is thus a testing ground. “Arizona is meant to be a showcase for technology before it expands across the country,” Tucson-based journalist and author Todd Miller told me. “Before 9/11, there was Border Patrol presence on Native American territory, but now it’s hugely expanded with surveillance technology. Native Americans are being racially profiled at border patrol checkpoints.” For the border profiteers, Palestinians and Native Americans are both equally deserving of monitoring. It was therefore not surprising that autonomous surveillance robots started appearing on both the Israel/Gaza border and US–Mexico border in 2021 and 2022.
Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)