What Does Colonization “Look” Like? || BlackInAsia

BlackInAsia:

… quote from Chimamanda Adichie which encapsulates these ideas so well, as it’s so important that we all understand what colonization “looks” like and the tremendous damages and losses which are incurred under any and all colonial regimes:

"[He] was dangerously wrong to quantify the effects of colonialism and to reduce it to land. This does not diminish the enormous practical and emotional significance of the loss of ancestral lands. But the truth is that the losses associated with any unjust government— and colonialism was an unjust dictatorship—cannot be limited to those things that we can measure. The losses are more nuanced: the loss of language and stories, the loss of a way of being and a way thinking, the loss of dignity, and the loss that comes when succeeding generations inherit those losses."

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Commonwealth Lecture 2012
Those more nuanced losses are arguably the most damaging and lasting legacy of colonization, and those were the same scars which my dream self found on my former student hidden right beneath the surface.
And that is what colonization looks like.