Love thyself

I've been never been too excited about sportsmen, but look at this:

https://youtu.be/ZAVXPfG_U5w


What do you see here?

We've repeatedly studied the psychological damage wrought by colonization. Fanon talked about it extensively in Black Skins White Masks. As a black person, you're made to feel inferior and it is inescapable. You're locked into your blackness. Memmi added that this inferiority is so heavily enforced that eventually you begin to internalize it and believe it. Dubois was cognizant of the effects of racism to the point where he felt a tangible sense of relief at the death of his infant son, since his son would now never have to face systematic oppression the way he did.

Hence, colonization, besides manifesting in a compartmentalized, Mannichean world that robbed colonized people of their place in history, also lived on in the heads of colonized people. Hence, one of our discussions on colonized defined it as a process that prevented the self affirmation of the colonized people. Decolonization, then simply seeks to affirm them. This is how negritude makes sense to me: all it does is does tell the black population that you are of worth.

I think that's pretty powerful. Self love has to be the height of self affirmation. I almost see it as the end goal of decolonization. It's something that's only possible once you've worked through all the complexes you've inherited from your oppressors, when you have the physical safety and freedom necessary to pay attention to your own self, and when you've been able to dig into your culture and ancestral history free from the narrative that it was irrelevant, backward, and non-consequential to the forward advancement of humanity, whatever that means.

Literally every character we've studied in this course points in this direction for me. The Wretched Of The Earth, for example, has Fanon's answer; violence heals you of the psychological complexes of colonization and eventually gets you to the point where you're able to affirm yourself. This is why Sartre's emphasis on the antagonistic nature of this violence of this violence is so misplaced - the emphasis is not on the visceral, antagonistic nature of the violence as directed against the colonizer! As far as I care, it's about the colonized, and the colonized only in herself/himself. It's about getting them to the point where they're capable of self affirmation, and eventually self love.

Man, self-love is so much more than just that selfish, narcissistic image that is so easy to attach to it. By the end of this course, it's pretty clear to me that it's political. I've seen this battle raging in Pakistan too. You see it in the way brown skin is degraded. You see it on how we insult people because of their accent, or schooling. It's pretty clear to me what the response to this is, and I think Muhammad Ali embodied it in the clip I attached: you must willfully choose to love yourself. In doing so, you're undoing the damage of centuries of systematic oppression. It's so important, and it resonates with me pretty deeply given that I think I struggle with self love quite a bit.

To me, the portrait of Muhammad Ali shouting "I'm pretty!" is what the end goal of decolonization looks like. If I were to define it, I'd say it's the creation of the possibilities for colonized people to love themselves.