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Through these three readings, we have determined that mental colonization was the key to a societal breakdown--one that emphasized whiteness and white supremacy. In fact, this unfortunate reality has led to the redefinition of morality. By making morality an instrument of colonization, white people were able to justify slavery, heinous acts of violence, and currently, the over-policing of black people. Yet, we must understand that all of these atrocities are upheld by racial capitalism.

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"So the Aztec's "flow of life" imperative would become for Columbus and the Spaniards... a "flow of gold." In an inextricable tangled web of motives, for him this flow would serve not only to secure the good of the state and his own personal enrichment, but also to finance the reconquest of Jerusalem from its Islamic occupiers, in order to prepare the world for the imminent Second Coming of Christ." - Wynter pg.16

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"Lieberman further argues that, although "the development of human cultures of which moral sense is arguably the highest form, has obviously progressed in the last 100,000 years, was slavery, for example, although once universally common to all peoples, having now come to be the universally outlawed" and although "we have populated and changed continents, harnessed the forces of nature, and subjugated every other form of life," we ourselves have not yet attained those behavioral attitudes of altruism, empathy, and moral sense of in our dealings with each other that he calls the "makers of fully modern human beings."" - Wynter pg 7-8

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"The role of our religious traditions is to 'condition' the subjects of their order, so as to inculcate in them tendencies that are in direct opposition to the temptations representing for the most part the directly 'oppositional tendencies' produced by our instinctual animal-type mode of altruism. Such, indeed, is the role of all our modes of discourse and symbolic representation systems, religious and nonreligious, with the exception of the natural sciences that arose precisely on the basis of their rupture from this role" Wynter, pg. 31

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"As 'stereotyped images,' their primary function was to induce the specific mode of perception needed by a culture-specific order, and to thereby orient the prescribed behaviors needed by that order"
(Wynter, pg. 20)

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“1492 was a prelude to a mode of exchange in which ecocide and genocide were traded off for the benefits of horses, cut glass beads, pickup trucks and microwave ovens.”

I chose this quote because it challenges the reasons for colonization. Is civilization better because we can make muffins in less than 3 minutes? The answer relies on how the innovations from colonization affect you and your peers. If you're Black or a person of color, the answer may be: No.

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"Racial capitalism's extensive and intensive animating force, it's contradictory consciousness, it's means to turn objects and desires into money is people in the prime of their life or younger, people who make, move, grow, and care for things and other people." - Ruth Wilson Gilmore pg 226

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“Human sacrifice rather than innocence is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison industrial complex. Indeed, for abolition, to insist on innocence is to surrender politically because "innocence” evades a problem abolition is compelled to confront: how to diminish and remedy harm as against finding better forms of punishment.” Gilmore pg. 236

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If we think about this dynamic through the politics of scale, understanding bodies as places, then criminalization transforms individuals into tiny territories primed for extractive activity to unfold. (Gilmore, pg. 227)

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"The relationship between Africa and Europe is well represented by the fate of these figures. A colonial act—indeed, any act in the context of conquest and domination—is both a practice of power, intended to pacify a populace, and a symbolic act, a performance of power intended to produce docile minds." - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Pg. 4

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Today's prisons are extractive. What does that mean? It means
prisons enable money to move because of the enforced inactivity of people
locked in them. It means people extracted from communities, and people
returned to communities but not entitled to be of them, enable the circulation
of money on rapid cycles. What's extracted from the extracted is the resource
of life-time. (Gilmore, pg. 227)

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"....Lord Macaulay, would recommend the same Spenserian dispensation to bring up, through English language and literature, “a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” to act as the middlemen between the English and the millions of Indians they governed. Get a few of the natives, empty their hard disk of previous memory, and download into them a software of European memory." -Thiong'o pg. 21

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"Slaves, before they left the African shore, were branded with
marks of their owners. Theirs, literally, was a baptism by fire.
Later, holy water would replace the hot iron: A successful
Christian conversion, by force or guile, meant marking the reformed African body with a European name. Thus, in the
nineteenth century, the writing of European names on the
bodies of the African convert became the Christian norm...The
African body became a walking commercial for European
memory." -Thiong'o pg. 15

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“You hear that the civil rights resistance was nonviolent, you hear that the south african anti-apartheid struggle was nonviolent. But what’s missing in that equation, is that if you look at the whole history, there were black people being butchered and murdered all over the place… so you begin to realize how racism functions in the logic of violence. Violence is if and only if white people are harmed.” - Lewis Gordon "What Fanon Said" 36:35

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"we cannot escape the irony that the very needs of that Industrial Revolution—markets for finished goods, sources of raw materials, and strategic re-quirements in the defense of trade routes—led inexorably to the second stage of the dismemberment of the continent." chapter 1, page two. Thiong'o

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By analyzing all of these readings in relation to the idea: mental colonization, supported by capitalism, is to blame for the atrocities committed against Africa and a multitude of others--we can begin to understand that our world is not built by things like ethics or communitarianism. Surely, there are communitarian societies but the consequences of capitalism and mental colonization just look differently in those communities. For example, a lot of academics praise Japan for their community-focused society. But, those same academics seem to forget that imperialism created that pseudo-utopia.