From ancient times to the beginning of the 20th century, powerful countries openly scrambled to expand their influence through colonialism. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, European powers had colonized countries on virtually every continent. While colonialism is no longer so aggressively practiced, there is evidence that it remains a force.
Long before steel met soil and flags claimed lands that were not theirs, colonization was born from an insatiable hunger...greedy, calculated, and cloaked in righteousness. It did not begin with ships but with the forging of a mindset that viewed difference as justification for domination. The colonizer was not merely a man with a map and a musket, but an architect of erasure, a figure who believed divinely sanctioned theft could pass for civilization. As Du Bois once warned, the world has long been ruled not by ideals, but by those who mistake conquest for progress.
In the Americas, colonization took root in the blood-soaked soil of Native lands and flowered in the chattel chains of African bodies. The theft was not just of land and labor but of language, spirit, and legacy. Africa (ripped, wounded, and stripped) was not only carved by foreign blades but also renamed, repackaged, and resold for foreign profit. As Medgar Evers fought to unveil in the courts of Mississippi, truth itself became the battleground, as colonizers spun genocide into gospel and oppression into ordained order.
Across centuries, the wake of colonization deepened: a trail of broken nations, fractured cultures, and lives turned commodity. From the Congo to the Caribbean, from the slave forts of Ghana to the plantations of the Deep South, the destruction moved with mechanical precision, always one step ahead of justice, always two steps behind truth. The timeline is not ancient...it is now, it is alive in the wealth gap, in the destabilized economies, in the children forced to read textbooks that lie.
Economically, colonization is the greatest robbery in the annals of humanity, dwarfing every embezzler and bank heist combined. Generations of unpaid labor fueled empires...built their cities, financed their wars, clothed their kings. Reparations are not a request; they are a receipt, and the bill is long past due.
As Fannie Lou Hamer cried from the guts of a movement, "we are sick and tired of being sick and tired," because we are still paying a debt that was never ours to begin with.
And what of the colonizers? Their demeanor masked the rot beneath...arrogant, aloof, always claiming moral high ground while standing on the backs of the broken. Their character was not courageous, but cowardly...refusing to face the humanity of those they conquered, fearing the truth of justice, fearing accountability. They taught the world to worship their image while hiding the bones buried beneath their cathedrals.
Colonization is not over...it merely evolved. Its children walk among us, wear suits instead of armor, write laws instead of chains. But memory cannot be colonized, and justice, though long delayed, is not dead. Our fight is not only to remember but to reclaim, and in that reclamation, we become the architects of liberation.
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