There's something hard for us, children of the colonised, to articulate because the world is upside down. Europe and its descendants, can't differentiate between principle and episode. This is why Germany (and much of Europe) is doomed to be genocidal. Here is what I mean. 🧵 The Holocaust was the culmination of European violence. On principle, its components: racial supremacy, concentration, biopolitics - happened before, ( the Nama and Herero genocide), and elements of it after (Kenya). Europe only feels guilt about the episode, not the principle.

1- One thing about the black middle class intelligentsia, is that at some point we all come to realise that insofar as this racial order continues to exist, we are always going be a prop. I find this kind of alienation, from Franklin Frazier's anxieties about the liminal space - 2 - that the black bourgeoisie occupy (to paraphrase him: being half a person in a white world) to the concern that black intellectuals often felt about the need for them all to divest from bourgeois society by (committing class suicide) there has always been an understanding