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In the United States, urban public schools are attended primarily by students from various racial minority groups. Statistically, teachers in these schools are often White and becoming more so annually. Issues of race and culture are critical in today's educational contexts at every level-including pedagogy, curriculum, and teachers. Considering the severity of what these statistics mean for educational quality and teacher quality, research efforts to understand this situation are essential. This article presents the findings of a study about what a group of teacher education graduates learned about race as they prepared to teach in multiracial classrooms. The findings of this study are then used to discuss what the university curriculum may actually produce and what future considerations would be beneficial to enable teachers to teach in a context where their race and culture differ dramatically from their students.

Journal Information

Published since 1962, Theory Into Practice (TIP) is a nationally recognized, peer reviewed journal featuring multiple perspectives and scholarly, yet accessible, discussions of important issues in education. TIP publishes articles covering all levels and areas of education, including learning and teaching; counseling; assessment; teacher education and professional development; classroom management; administration and supervision; curriculum; policy; and technology. Each issue of TIP is devoted to a timely theme developed by a Guest Editor who has expertise in the theme area.

Publisher Information

Building on two centuries' experience, Taylor & Francis has grown rapidlyover the last two decades to become a leading international academic publisher.The Group publishes over 800 journals and over 1,800 new books each year, coveringa wide variety of subject areas and incorporating the journal imprints of Routledge,Carfax, Spon Press, Psychology Press, Martin Dunitz, and Taylor & Francis.Taylor & Francis is fully committed to the publication and dissemination of scholarly information of the highest quality, and today this remains the primary goal.

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Learning or Unlearning Racism: Transferring Teacher Education Curriculum to Classroom Practices on JSTOR

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In the United States, urban public schools are attended primarily by students from various racial minority groups. Statistically, teachers in these schools are often White and becoming more so annually. Issues of race and culture are critical in today's educational contexts at every level-including pedagogy, curriculum, and teachers.

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JISCMail - LIS-DECOLONISE List at WWW.JISCMAIL.AC.UK

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Email discussion lists for the UK Education and Research communities

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Discussion group of the Decolonizing Alliance, an international community committed to intellectual and practical collaboration, translation, active solidarity, and resistance to tackle intersectional inequalities and neo-colonial power relations.

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JISCMail - DECOLONIZING-ALLIANCE List at WWW.JISCMAIL.AC.UK

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Discussion group of the Decolonizing Alliance, an international community committed to intellectual and practical collaboration, translation, active solidarity, and resistance to tackle intersectional inequalities and neo-colonial power relations.

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A working document attempting to identify and understand the different ways and places in which decolonising work is taking place. Not exhaustive and still learning.

Last updated: 18 August 2021
Previously updated: 21 January 2021.

Please contact us to suggest amendments or additions.

We also find the Anti-Racist Educator's Glossary very useful.

How people most affected by legacies of colonialism are described

AAME.African, Asian and Minority Ethnic.

BAME. Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (UK only) sometimes BME Black AND Minority Ethnic. Common in media and policy making. Contested usefulness as promotes binary with 'White' or those not routinely radicalised. Often used as a word without expansion or detail.

BIPOC. Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (North America).

Culturally diverse/ethnically diverse. Gaining popularity as a short-hand for people with non-European ancestry/self-identity. See Inc Arts for others.

Ethnic minority/minority ethnic. Related to acronym BAME.

Indigenous people. Those who lived and live in lands that were later colonised, in North America also known as First Nations.

Immigrants and migrants (black and brown) vs. colonial settlers and ex-pats (white).

Intersectional. Intersectionality. The combination of disadvantage experienced by a person because of multiple forms of prejudice e.g. race and gender, or race and disability, or geographic origin/accent and class. May also describe complex of multiple identities.

Marginalised. Describing people who lack decision-making powers and representation in public spaces and roles, including collections. Also underserved.

POC. People of colour.

Racialised. People who experience or are disadvantaged by systemic racism. Also those whose ethnicity is usually highlighted in descriptions and policy, in comparison to those whose ethnicity is ignored.

Refugees and asylum seekers.

Source communities. People whose direct cultural and ancestral heritage resides in institutions outside their country and those in diaspora communities with a connection to that heritage.

Underserved. Those who disproportionately do not benefit from services because of unfair practices.

Other ways in which decolonising practice is talked about

Afriphobia. Anti-African hate and racism. Explained by TAOBQ (The African or Black Question).

Anti-Blackness. Specific racial prejudice against Black people. Including anti-black sentiment in non-white cultural groups.

Anti-colonial. Actively against colonial actions, structures and institutions, often calling for their dismantling.

Antisemitism/ anti-Semitic. Hatred and distrust of Jews and Jewishness.

Black Lives Matter. #BlackLivesMatter.Sometimes shortened to BLM. Decentralised social and political movement originating in the USA but spreading globally in 2020 to campaign for systemic societal change and the dismantling of white supremacy.

Christonormativity. Prevailing Western starting point based in culturally Christian dogma (not an attack on Christianity as religious belief and practice).

Colonial, colonialism. Subjugation of one people by another particularly used to denote the period of British and European empires of colonies from 17th to 20th centuries. Political and economic control of a state over remote colonies. Also imperialism.

Colonial loot. Short-hand for objects and collections violently or otherwise taken/confiscated/'acquired' from former colonies of European empires of the 17th-20th centuries. Sometimes it is erroneously assumed that all museums were created to house stolen and taken art and artefacts from colonies.

Contested heritage. Historical narratives, often embodied in an artefact, collection, building or monument, that are the focus of competing or conflicting ideas and interpretation, e.g. statues and other depictions of slavers, and items looted/spoliated/confiscated during conflict, including colonial-era conflict now held in museums.

, diverse. Most commonly used to refer to representation in a group or workforce based on expanding from the dominance of people with a narrow range of identities and lived experiences, e.g. racial or ethnic diversity, disability and neurodiversity, class and wealth. Also used to describe the progressive attitude/behaviour of an organisation in relation to its people, or 'undiverse' being the opposite. Frequently used in conjunction with equality, equity and inclusion.

Do the work. Slogan in response to requests from those in privileged positions for others to explain or help or represent on their behalf.

Equity [viz. equality]. Fairness. Giving people who are marginalised or disadvantaged what they need to access things or be represented fairly. Sometimes also described as equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity.

Ethnocentrism. Making assumptions about another culture or group based on preconceptions originating in one's own culture or cultural understanding; or assuming your race or nationality is superior to those of other cultures.

Eurocentrism. Assuming the preeminence or importance of people and things originating in European countries e.g. Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy.

Exceptionalism, supremacy. Belief in the superiority of one cultural group or race over another e.g. White supremacy, English exceptionalism.

Exclusion and inequality.

Global South. Countries previously described as 'third-world' or 'developing'. A shifting meaning, used in economics and post-colonial studies.

Historical ignorance. Selective telling, remembering of partial histories that suppress stories of wrong-doing, oppression of and violence against other people.

Identity politics. Employing the discourse of marginalisation and oppression to further the cause of raising awareness of your people, a community, or those who hold similar beliefs to you or have a similar socio-cultural background and experience.

Inclusion, inclusivity. Creating new ways of doing that are centred on removing barriers to access and participation, be they physical, psychological, social or financial.

Intersectionality. How identities combine. How racism is experienced when combined with other prejudices e.g. those based on disability, class culture, age, gender, sexuality, migration, language.

Islamophobia. Hatred and distrust of Muslims and Islam. Also Anti-Muslim racism.

Offensive language. Hateful and derogatory words, vocabulary and terms that are experienced as psychological violence. Also referred to as outdated language such as that found in historical records and archives.

Post-colonial. Work on regions of the world and their people after the end of empire.

Minority rights.

Museums are not neutral. Slogan from long-standing movement to highlight the political nature of museums in terms of how they were founded, funded and how they selectively represent history.

Institutional, structural and systemic racism = racist policy and practice in terms of outcomes e.g. recruitment, decision-making, interpretation, collections development and management.

Anti-racism is a proactive stance against racism in all forms seen in actions and work rather than statements and policy.

Reindigenisation. Loose concept to denote the need to re-establish or establish ways of thinking and doing that are not based in Western (colonial) thought, ideology or habit. This can extend to dress-codes and the use of multiple languages rather than English.

Restitution. Often used interchangeably with repatriation, specifically to a clearly identified owner, but may also refer to restorative practices such as compensation.

Repatriation. Of cultural artefacts taken, looted (spoliated) during war or colonial occupation.

Slavery and enslaved peoples.

Trigger warning. Courtesy to warn readers, listeners or viewers of content they may find distressing because of its violence or humiliating and offensive language and/or representations.

Whiteness, white gaze, white fragility, conditional whiteness. Facets of cultural and historic attitudes to and by people of white British and European heritage as espoused in critical race theory.

Expression of colonial and and other power relations

Being 'colour-blind'. Proclamation of not seeing or not choosing to notice dimensions of race in another, also called 'oppression blindness'.

Dismantle, dismantling. To deconstruct or displace colonial or dominant social, cultural and political structures that are based on the dominance of one group of people over another. Includes addressing concepts like white supremacy, and even the very idea of a museum and hierarchically organised collections.

Free speech vs hate speech and abuse.

Gaslighting. Manipulation of other people's reality. Trying to get someone else (or a group of people) to question their own reality, memory or perceptions.

Microaggressions. Less obvious racism in everyday life, e.g. "where are you from? No, where are you really from?"

Othering. Being pejorative about people different to you, or viewing all people who are different, e.g. those with a different appearance or voice as one homogeneous group e.g. migrants

Performative allyship. Statements not backed up by actions and core practice.

Positionality. Being self-aware of your power and privilege in relation to another.

Power (wealth, funding, networks, decision-making). Speaking truth to power, a way of expressing the challenges inherent in decolonial work.

Prejudice and discrimination. Words commonly associated with oppressive power play.

Privilege. Usually, not always, associated with white privilege. Systemic and institutional racism can benefit those with privilege, as well as disadvantage those without privilege.

Re-writing history. Accusation commonly made against those who campaign for tangible decolonial acts, e.g. taking down statues of slave owners and proponents of Colonial and post-colonial racist policy; changing the names of galleries, rooms and museums; changing the school curriculum to more truthfully reflect Colonial racism, violence and oppression.

Reverse racism. Accusation made by those from privileged groups (e.g. people of White European heritage) who experience prejudice from others based on their looks, colour of their skin or perceived life advantage.

Silence. On racism and racist practices, on prejudices, on policies that will exclude.

Trust and trustworthy. Particularly important in museums as, in general, society believes museums to be trustworthy.

Virtue signalling. Associating yourself or organisation with a cause to make yourself look good by aligning yourself with others e.g. anti-racism or decolonisation, for example, by making statements, but not living by them or actioning them in practice.

Woke. Having sensitivity towards injustice, particularly racism, homophobia and ableism. Also used under the guise of culture wars as a derogatory term towards those raising awareness of injustice, especially racial injustice.

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Decolonising glossary - Curatorial Research Centre

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A working document attempting to identify and understand the different ways and places in which decolonising work is taking place. Not exhaustive and still learning. Last updated: 18 August 2021Previously updated: 21 January 2021. Please contact us to suggest amendments or additions. We also find the Anti-Racist Educator's Glossary very useful.

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What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn

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Psychologist John Amaechi talks about white privilege.

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What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn https://t.co/mQrYX6Y0N1

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What is white privilege?

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn pic.twitter.com/mQrYX6Y0N1
— BBC Bitesize (@bbcbitesize) August 5, 2020

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Psychologist John Amaechi talks about white privilege.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn https://t.co/mQrYX6Y0N1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn https://t.co/mQrYX6Y0N1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn

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Psychologist John Amaechi talks about white privilege.

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Garuda platform-  Indonesia’s government OA platform 

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Garuda platform-  Indonesia’s government OA platform 

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kementrian riset, teknologi dan pendidikan tinggi

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Economics, Econometrics & Finance Veterinary Chemical Engineering, Chemistry & Bioengineering Biochemistry, Genetics & Molecular Biology Transportation Arts Astronomy Mechanical Engineering Religion Dentistry Social Sciences Aerospace Engineering Environmental Science Chemistry Nursing Materials Science & Nanotechnology Other Civil Engineering, Building, Construction & Architecture Education Earth & Planetary Sciences Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering

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Access full-text academic articles: J-STAGE is an online platform for Japanese academic journals.

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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About the directory

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DOAJ is committed to keeping its services free of charge, including being indexed, and its data freely available.

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Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing, Data Management
Fei Yu

Brisbane, Australia (Chinese, English)

Lut Tamam

Adana, Türkiye (Turkish, English)

Humanities, Social Sciences
Natalia Pamuła-Cieślak

Toruń, Poland (Polish, English)

Research Evaluation
Paola Galimberti

Milan, Italy (Italian, German, English)

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Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ

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DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.

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Decolonising through critical librarianship 

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Decolonising through critical librarianship 

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Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: an Anti-Racist Approach

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Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: an Anti-Racist Approach

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When college students challenge divisive rhetoric, a library cataloging term becomes a flashpoint in the national immigration debate.

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Diversity and LIS Education: Inclusion and the Age of Information

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Diversity and LIS Education: Inclusion and the Age of Information

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The official publication of the Association for Library and Information Science Education, JELIS is a scholarly journal that serves as a forum for discussion an...

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Language, Power, and Oppression in the LIS Diversity Void 

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Language, Power, and Oppression in the LIS Diversity Void 

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[Skip to Content]

Purchase/rental options available:

Abstract:

This article explores the underinterrogated role of language and its relationship to power and oppression in the proliferation of discussion and dearth of action with regard to diversity in library and information science. Using critical discourse analysis as a framework, the article considers the institutional language practices that, without critical interrogation, establish and perpetuate hegemonic power structures and naturalize systems of oppression, creating a significant barrier to the goals of equity and meaningful diversity within the library and information science field.

Purchase/rental options available:

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Project MUSE - Language, Power, and Oppression in the LIS Diversity Void

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Skip to Content] Purchase/rental options available: Abstract: This article explores the underinterrogated role of language and its relationship to power and oppression in the proliferation of discussion and dearth of action with regard to diversity in library and information science.

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Why is my curriculum white? - UCL - Dismantling the Master's House

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In the NUS Black Students Campaign National Students Survey, it was found that, '42 per cent did not believe their curriculum reflected issues of diversity, equality and discrimination.' In addition, it found that, '34 per cent stated they felt unable to bring their perspective as a Black [BME] student to lectures and tutor meetings.

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Rhodes House - Home of The Rhodes Scholarships

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The Rhodes Scholarships

The Rhodes Scholarships are postgraduate awards to support study at the University of Oxford. Established in 1903, they are the oldest international graduate scholarship programme in the world.

We now award 102 Scholarships a year. The Scholarship covers all fees and a stipend for two to three years, with nearly 300 Scholars in residence in Oxford at one time.

Students from anywhere in the world can apply.

20 percent of Scholars in residence are Black, and over half are Black, Indigenous, or People of Colour. The Trust makes an important contribution to Oxford's aim to increase the diversity of its postgraduate population, particularly in relation to Black students, and we are committed to continuing to partner with the University to pursue this goal.

Since 1977, women have been eligible to apply and a majority of Rhodes Scholars in Residence today are women.

Rhodes Scholars may study any full-time subject at Oxford and are distributed across 35 of Oxford's 38 colleges.

Nearly 8,000 Rhodes Scholars have gone on to serve at the forefront of government, education, the arts, NGOs, commerce, research, journalism, and other sectors. They include well known advocates for social justice and individuals who have advanced the frontiers of science and medicine. Our alumni include Nobel, PEN/Faulkner, and Pulitzer Prize winners, heads of state, university presidents and vice chancellors, high court judges, leaders of major organisations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and Oxfam, and much more.

As of 2020, nineteen Scholarships are awarded annually to students from Africa through six constituencies: East Africa, Kenya, Southern Africa (including South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia and eSwatini), West Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

African students outside of these constituencies are eligible through our new Global Scholarship, established in 2018. An Ethiopian Scholar was selected in the first Global cohort and a Scholar from Cameroon will join us in 2021.

Our goal is to expand the number of fully endowed Scholarships across the African continent to 32, with an initial focus on raising endowment to support more Scholarships in West and East Africa, funded in perpetuity. In recent months we have raised over £5M to fully endow a second West African Rhodes Scholarship and secure initial funding toward a third. We are also working to raise the funds to launch more Scholarships across the Global South, including Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The Rhodes Trust and Our Core Partnerships
In its second century the Rhodes Trust has partnered with several remarkable individuals and organisations to create:

The Mandela Rhodes Foundation,an independent South African-based charity launched through a partnership between Nelson Mandela and the Rhodes Trust on the occasion of the Trust's centenary in 2003. The Foundation, which is one of President Mandela's three official legacy organisations, was established through an initial £10m gift from the Rhodes Trust. It is dedicated to developing exceptional leaders for Africa through a focus on education, leadership, entrepreneurship and reconciliation. Since its founding 17 years ago, it has provided scholarships to over 500 Mandela Rhodes Scholars from 28 African countries. Eighteen Mandela Rhodes Scholars have also gone on to win Rhodes Scholarships.

In 2016, the Trust partnered with The Atlantic Philanthropies to establish the The Atlantic Institute, which works with seven fellowship programmes around the world, including the Atlantic Fellows Program for Racial Equity. The Institute's mission is to eradicate inequities and to promote fairer, healthier and more just societies. It is committed to the radical inclusion of global leaders who are agents of change in communities most impacted by injustice and inequities. More than 50% of Atlantic Fellows are from the Global South.

In 2017, the Trust partnered with Schmidt Futures to launch the Schmidt Science Fellows, which is developing the next generation of science leaders to transcend disciplines, advance discovery, and solve the world's most pressing problems.

In 2019, we launched Rise, a new partnership with Schmidt Futures and the Rhodes Trust. This talent program is designed to create a global network of exceptional young people, starting from the ages of 15-17, who have the potential for significant positive impact. The first cohort will be announced in July 2021.

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The Rhodes Scholarships The Rhodes Scholarships are postgraduate awards to support study at the University of Oxford. Established in 1903, they are the oldest international graduate scholarship programme in the world. We now award 102 Scholarships a year. The Scholarship covers all fees and a stipend for two to three years, with nearly 300 Scholars in residence in Oxford at one time.

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By ucyow3c, on 21 March 2014
Written By Jamilah Jahi (UCL Medical Student)
After three years of studying at UCL, I can count the number of black lecturers who have taught me on one hand: zero.

Perhaps this is not alarming, after all, black people are a minority ethnic group in the UK. Surely we should expect low numbers amongst our teaching staff too. Is it, therefore, acceptable that only 0.4% of professors in the UK are black? At least six black academics disagree.

On 10 March 2014, UCL hosted the live panel discussion, 'Why isn't my Professor Black?' It was clear that many were longing for an answer to this "interesting but depressing" question. Due to popular demand, the event had to be relocated to the Cruciform lecture theatre, which holds just under 350 people.

Professor Michael Arthur, UCL's President & Provost, chaired the event. Sitting on the panel were black academics from across the UK, including UCL's Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias who organised the event.

The evening began with a video. BME (Black and Ethnic Minority) students from UCL were asked if they would pursue a career in academia. At least three of the students who said they would not felt that there are not enough BME staff members teaching at UCL. It is unfortunate the students feel this way given that UCL tries to promote racial equality.

The panel discussion
Each panel member had 10 minutes to discuss the question, why isn't my professor black? They all engaged in a unique way by drawing on their personal experiences. Here are some of the highlights.

First to speak was Dr Nathan Richards from Goldsmiths University. As a black student he saw no black scholars on his reading lists. He wants to see a shift from black students being the recipient of academic knowledge to being recognised as being part of its creation.

Deborah Gabriel is the founder and CEO of Black British Academics, a company that specialises in tackling racial inequality in higher education. She revealed the results of a BME staff and student survey about race equality in their institutions:

race equality was rated as either poor or very poor by 2/3 of participants

58% of participants had experienced racism

some participants felt they had a lack of opportunity to progress

Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman's speech swept away the audience and his contribution was striking. There are only five black philosophers, including Dr Coleman, teaching in higher education in the UK, none of whom are professors yet. He pointed out that, historically, there has been a failure to recognise black scholars as philosophers and this still continues. He also said that the achievements of black academics are usually attributed to "outside help" rather than hard work.

Dr Lisa Palmer from Newman University said that for BME students and staff "campuses often resemble colonies" and that this "coloniality reveals structural and institutional racism." It could be argued that this is downplayed in our day-to-day interactions.

Dr William Ackah from Birkbeck, University of London, finds it curious that institutional racism exists in academia, a field that is supposed to have high standards. He sees this as a barrier for black academics in the UK. Ackah said that having more black professors would benefit all students, not just BME students.

Dr Shirley Tate, from the University of Leeds, concluded the panel discussion by asking "under what conditions could my professor be black?" In her contribution, Tate identified areas in academia that need to be modified in order to tackle racial inequality.

Contributions from the audience
Following the panel discussion, the audience was invited to supplement the discussion with their own thoughts on the subject. Some built on points made by the panel whilst others picked up on issues that had not been discussed.

One audience member identified that a lack of support from society was another barrier to the progression of aspiring black academics. Another attendee wanted to know why UCL celebrates "racists like [Francis] Galton" (a scientist who contributed to a wide range of subjects, including the infamous eugenics) but does not appear to celebrate BME academics and students in the same way.

'Why isn't my professor black?' was an insightful event that exposed racial issues in the academic system which may not have otherwise been approached at UCL. The audience and panel hoped to be involved in similar events in the future.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

#blackprofessor
The UCL Equiano Centre
Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies: Friday Forum on 'Race'
UCL's Race Equality Group
Watch the discussion below:

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By ucyow3c, on 21 March 2014 Written By Jamilah Jahi (UCL Medical Student) After three years of studying at UCL, I can count the number of black lecturers who have taught me on one hand: zero. Perhaps this is not alarming, after all, black people are a minority ethnic group in the UK.

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he movement known as Rhodes Must Fall, which began with a protest action at the University of Cape Town on 9 March 2015 and quickly spread to other campuses in South Africa, and then to Oxford University, is barely more than a year old. Yet it feels like it has existed for longer, perhaps because of the enormous public attention it has attracted - or because its battles have resonated far beyond the universities where they have been staged. The first of these battles led swiftly to victory, with the removal of the large statue of Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town a month after the campaign began; the latest, to frustration, given Oxford University's resistance to doing the same with the statue of Rhodes at Oriel College, where it still stands, on the facade of a building bearing his name, as an acknowledgement of the £100,000 he left the college in his will.

But another reason one might think this movement has a longer history is the nature of its ambitions beyond the removal of these statues, though it is the issue of the statues, and allegations that the students involved wish to rewrite history to suit their sensitivities, that have attracted controversy, particularly in the British media. These larger ambitions of the movement - that is, to bring out into the open institutional racism in university life in South Africa and Britain, and to decolonise education - speak to concerns that many have had for a while. These concerns, by now, have a long itinerary, but they have been awaiting a forum for articulation.

Most of the controversy generated by the movement has revolved around the figure of Cecil Rhodes - but Rhodes himself is not really central to its aims. What is at issue is an ethos that gives space and even preeminence to such a figure, and hesitates to interrogate Rhodes's legacy. That legacy does not merely include Rhodes's financial bequests and their educational offshoots, like the Rhodes scholarships, but the vision embodied in his will, which called for:

"the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan ..."

For the movement's vocal critics, it has been commonplace to observe, euphemistically, that Rhodes was "a man of his time", by way of suggesting that his time has nothing in common with our own. But if you replace the word "British" with "western" and "United Kingdom" with "the west", you find this statement in his will encapsulates not only Rhodes's vision but a vision of the world today, one that has had a fresh lease on life in the last two decades - in which unequal access to opportunity and mobility is structurally embedded as the norm; in which the west should still have free passage to, and control of, the rest of the world, whether via business, expatriation, or military intervention - while those travelling to the west must be viewed as potential refugees or people posing as asylum seekers.

From its start in South Africa, Rhodes Must Fall announced that it intended to address this unequal vision of the world as it manifests itself within universities - declaring itself "a collective movement of students and staff members mobilising for direct action against the reality of institutional racism at the University of Cape Town. The chief focus of this movement is to create avenues for REAL transformation that students and staff alike have been calling for."

The well-worn but enigmatic term "institutional racism" is important here. It is worth recalling that its history is more British than South African. It came into play in Britain in the 1990s and its full import was felt by many when it was used to expose the failures of the Stephen Lawrence case. Lawrence was a young black student who was murdered while waiting for a bus in south-east London on 22 April 1993. Five suspects were arrested but not convicted, and there was a general downplaying by the Metropolitan police of racism as a motive. A public inquiry took place in 1998, and Sir William Macpherson, who was in charge of it, used the term "institutionally racist" in his report to account for the grave shortcomings of the police investigation. He defined it as "the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."

The word "unwitting" is key. It points to a moral economy in which it is possible to plausibly claim, and believe, that one is not a racist, while benefiting from a system that consigns many to invisibility. In this, "institutional racism" is a resurrection of the colonial order, which was by no means managed exclusively by racist individuals, but by people who believed that a skewed system was normal.

Those who are bewildered by the movement should place it in the context of the historic reversals that define our age. The first has to do with apartheid. Not that apartheid has been reinstated in South Africa. But it can hardly be claimed that it led to the opening up that was expected in 1994, given that, 21 years later, a black professor at the University of Cape Town, Xolela Mangcu, could tell the Cape Times newspaper that only five of the university's 200 senior professors were black. Without creating an equivalence between South Africa and Britain, one must note the gradual extinction, in the latter, of the ideals of multiculturalism. These have largely died without a requiem. Given this context, the emergence of Rhodes Must Fall is at once unsurprising and overdue.

In June last year, I was asked to address students involved in Rhodes Must Fall at Oxford. In Cape Town, the statue of Rhodes on the university campus had clearly been unmissable - an immense likeness, seated in a posture reminiscent of Rodin's Thinker. The night watchman-like Rhodes in Oxford, by contrast, occupies a crevasse in an Oriel building overlooking High Street, unobtrusively, and insidiously, guarding an always-shut door below him. Neither I nor my wife, who was once a graduate student at Oriel, could recall the existence of a Rhodes statue at Oxford(though she vividly remembered a large portrait of Rhodes glowering down on students inside the college) - a reminder that imperial legacies are not necessarily less pernicious because they may be less obviously visible.

The audience that I spoke to included students of all races, including Ntokozo Qwabe, a South African who had brought the movement from Cape Town to Oxford. At the end of my talk, the students were keen not only to ask questions, but to discuss their experiences of racism - in the university; on the street, where it can be both intangible and palpable: a glance; a name or a chicken bone thrown at you. Humiliation is always difficult to own up to, and the effort it required to make these statements was evident. Rhodes hardly came up, except when some students asked me what I thought of the movement's name - presumably because they were not certain that it accurately represented their concerns. I said I liked it for its conceptual cheekiness - there can be no politics without quixotic energy and levity.

Yet levity has receded in the last two months as the movement has escalated and its immediate aim - the statue's removal - has been halted. It is as if the movement must stand or fall by the success or failure of this ambition. But the students have persisted, which suggests, again, that their campaign transcends a battle over Rhodes's legacy. So we might consider why has it erupted at this time, in this place.

I should admit that one of the reasons I was happy to give that talk at Oriel was that I was revisiting it after 25 years. I met my wife in 1990, and she was the main reason for my daily excursions to the college. It was through her that I became aware of its slightly retrograde status in Oxford at the time, its old-fogey students with monarchist enthusiasms, its conservatism. We both found this ethos uncharming but weirdly funny.

As if to confirm its courtship of the anachronistic, I discovered, one evening, that Enoch Powell was giving a talk there, about - what else - some aspect of a classical text; I forget which one. I recall peering in through a window with a mixture of amusement and horror to catch a glimpse of a learned man whose 1968 speech, in anticipation of a debate on the Labour government's race relations bill, became synonymous with a dark moment in British history - and is perhaps more striking today because its prediction was so wide of the mark. "The River Tiber will flow with much blood," Powell had said, quoting Virgil, moved to prophecy because of an annual influx of 50,000 migrants, and because one of his constituents had told him: "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." For a moment, I observed, agog, the students listening, rapt. I could have walked in, but didn't. The scene was so unrepresentative of Oxford that I paused to take it in and then moved on.

Why did Powell seem so irrelevant when I saw him at Oriel more than a quarter-century ago? Why, for that matter, were we unaware of Rhodes above the gate to Oriel? When is it possible to ignore or laugh at statues or symbols, and when does it become hard to do so? Let me widen the scope of the question by applying it to the city in which I live much of the year, Kolkata - a city with a turbulent political history and an extraordinary cultural one, once the capital of India under the British, demoted from that status in 1911 because of its confrontational nationalism.

I go sometimes to the Bengal Club, which once had a plaque saying "Dogs and Indians Not Allowed", and still has one attesting to the fact that Thomas Macaulay - a man famous for his dismissive remarks about Indian civilisation, including the claim that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia" - once lived in the building that stood formerly on the site. Today we can view this history with detached irony, as evidence of the antediluvian, a museum-piece that does not require to be confronted since it no longer has the power to threaten. I feel the same wonder as I did when looking upon Powell in 1990: once these figures, symbols, and words were central, and it is incredible that they should have been so, and equally incredible how they have lost their potency.

What, on the other hand, has made the Rhodes statue suddenly intolerable? For an answer to this, we must look beyond the students, the statue, and the colonial past, towards the contemporary historical moment and to Britain today. It is a Britain in which, in the last 25 years there has been an extraordinary narrowing down, a closing of ranks, in favour of class and colour. This retrenchment has been accompanied by an atmosphere of denial. It has given rise to a mentality in which there is so much elision of the past and subtle prevarication about race that the bogus breast-beating about the necessity of accommodating historical complexity by leaving the statue in place frankly sounds insulting to many.

In 1990, I could afford to report my fleeting encounter with Powell to my wife with a smile because, at the time, the multicultural experiment seemed to have worked astonishingly well in Britain. This was a country that, barely a decade earlier, under Thatcher, had seriously considered subjecting South Asian women who arrived as spouses to "virginity tests" in order to prove they were genuinely married. (Real South Asian brides in an arranged marriage must be virgins, it was argued.) Now there was a new acknowledgement that respecting ethnic diversity within Britain - mosques, temples, non-European languages - would not lead to a collapse of British life. In this, Britain was singular, and was able to create a cultural context - a context of regard and equality - that, whatever its failings, had no parallel in continental Europe. A striking contrast was presented by France, which would not budge from an astringent and classic definition of what comprised the secular: a strict separation of religion from the state, or, for that matter, from the public domain.

Britain's redefinition of the secular - multiculturalism - was partly achieved through ordinary battles that were not so different from the one ensuing now over Rhodes in Oriel: for instance, Muslim women employees at shops such as Boots being permitted to retain the hijab, a measure of tolerance that would not have been admissible in France. The secular was redefined as soon as people realised that hijab-wearing employees did not transform Boots into an Islamic colony or a place of worship. You could still buy perfumes and condoms there. British multiculturalism resembled another remarkable experiment - post-independence "secularism" in India - which attempted to fashion the nation as a space that did not proscribe religion, and, while not being religious itself, allowed a multiplicity of worldviews, communities, and religions to cohabit within it.

The nature of democracy in India and the country's large Muslim minority left political parties open to the charge of constant and cynical electoral calculation based on appeals to religion and caste. By the late 1980s, it led to the coinage of a rightwing term, "pseudo-secular", to describe liberal pandering to minorities - meaning Muslims - for electoral gain, an accusation that included the suggestion of tolerance towards Muslim religiosity, but not Hindu expressions of faith, in the name of secularism. This was, in other words, the now familiar sentiment of a majority that believes it has been oppressed by excessive accommodation of the minority.

In comparison, it would seem that British multiculturalism was, in its earlier career, possibly more idealistic than its Indian counterpart. It had no substantial ethnic constituency to keep in mind for electoral gain. Asians and black people traditionally voted Labour, but, under the free market, neither working-class nor minority votes seemed to do very much for Labour's fortunes. The fight for multiculturalism was begun by deeply committed and fearless people, white, black, and brown, in organisations that 21st-century Britain should be proud of - like the Anti-Nazi League - and was, ironically, consolidated under the Tories. However implausible it might sound, humanitarianism appears to have played a greater part in sustaining the project than an awareness of the ethnic vote. By 1990, it was, therefore, possible for me to look dispassionately into the window at Powell - as I would upon a relic.

My admiration for multiculturalism as an intellectual project and a political solution is a qualified one: like Indian "secularism", its view of what constitutes the cross-cultural encounter can be superficial (chicken tikka masala). And yet some version of it is always going to be politically fundamental to a multi-ethnic country: and can one deny Britain, like India, is a culturally hybrid nation? The reason for this in both cases is simple: history. Can you suddenly extricate yourself from your history, and start from scratch? Britain, around 1990, seemed to have adjusted to its multicultural past and present; today, it is in denial.

Here one must wonder if some of the less high-minded aspects of democracy - what in India is derisorily called "vote-bank" politics, or electoral calculations based on ethnic constituencies - could have played some role in slowing the retreat from multiculturalism. A political system attuned to the votes of minority constituencies would never have entertained a plan as scandalous as the one Theresa May came up with in 2013, to send vans into ethnically diverse neighbourhoods warning people with no legal status to depart the country at once. ("Go home or face arrest," was the warning painted on their sides.)

Why does the political significance of the non-white minority in Britain seem so negligible today, in a way that they can be repeatedly ignored, by May and other politicians who make pronouncements on immigration, Britishness, and race, as if it did not matter how minorities perceived the issue? How is it in a country that prides itself on its party political debate having a powerful bureaucratic component - that is, a fulsome reliance on facts, figures, and policies - that politicians get away with providing very little real data about immigration and its effects?

About 10 years ago, it began to be apparent that the affirmation of multiculturalism that was noticeable in Britain from the 1970s through the 1990s had failed to evolve in the way one would have predicted. I first visited London as an 11-year-old in 1973, returned a few times that decade as a visitor, and then came here as a student in the early 1980s. I experienced threats that were both verbal and physical. I also saw the country emerge from the depredations of the National Front into one in which a greater variety of voices was heard. The print media had, for the first time, a small handful of journalists from immigrant backgrounds. Television emphasised multicultural programming: some of these shows were superb. Popular entertainment had a few nationally known minority figures.

From that vantage-point, one would have thought that diversity would become entrenched and even substantially extended by 2015. This did not happen. For instance, the print media still has only a small handful of journalists from immigrant backgrounds. The number of MPs, national treasures, entertainment icons, QCs, journalists and commentators, and top academics (to make a random selection) from ethnic backgrounds has either not gone up noticeably since 1990, or has decreased. We have not witnessed a growing intimacy in the last four decades with minority cultures; instead, the old cliches have proved astonishingly tenacious.

As Britain distanced itself, over the course of the 1990s, from its historic ties with its former colonies in favour of a new and eager cultural subservience to the United States, there emerged a new fantasy of Britishness that was meant to echo an American's romantic notion of "England". This utopian ideal could be found in films such as Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, in which London was almost entirely white; it was supplemented by heritage recreations of the essence of an older England in films such as Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. These films were a blithe rebuttal of the critic Edward Said's insight that, in a novel like Mansfield Park, the "English" story necessarily concealed the story, located elsewhere but inextricable from the main narrative, of a West Indian sugar plantation. In these films, however, what was being concealed by the soft-focus romance (very distant from Jane Austen's shrewd knowingness) was not the workings of empire, but the first stirrings of its recuperation, as a remnant of very distant history that would be tacitly acknowledged but never regretted.

When change happens and things close down for the ethnically peripheral or the less powerful, those who are being excluded - especially if they are fairly successful in their own field - will find it difficult to pinpoint the airbrushing or whitewashing. When I spoke with two British friends of Indian origin - a young, well-known journalist and an award-winning scientist - about this development a few years ago, they recognised a closing of ranks by the rich in Britain, but were not wholly sure how it affected diversity. People in Britain prefer to keep their heads down about the question of race: not just those in the majority, but minorities too, who do not, for various reasons, want to think of themselves in racial terms.In a context of persistent institutional racism, this is part of what allows one-sided declarations about immigration and integration to go unchallenged; it allows the unsettling official pronouncements of Theresa May and Ukip alike.

At least two factors have contributed powerfully to the closing of ranks I refer to. The first is free-market globalisation. Not only does it further empower the rich, it - by privileging the right to be seen to be rich as much as the right to be rich - legitimises retrograde desire. Moral judgment about a product that satisfies the customer is seen to be bad form, an attempt to constrain a market - or an inheritance - that should ideally be, in every sense, unregulated. In Britain, beneficiaries of the legacy of empire began to resurrect that legacy as a powerful and legitimate form of capital. At the forefront of this recuperation was a new kind of aspirational history-writing - not a history written by and for rulers, but by a new kind of revisionist historian, such as Niall Ferguson or Andrew Roberts, who sought to legitimise the previously unmentionable, and in so doing to transform their approval of the imperial past into a form of present-day cultural capital, and forge their own careers in the process.

The forces of globalisation have also enabled a new international elite to take shape, as a kind of family cocooned from the rest of the world. Dynastic privileges - in the seat of the empire but also in its former colonies - begin once more to be celebrated over the modernist narratives of individual achievement that characterisedthe last century. Lineages - who knows whom, who's related to whom, who went to school with whom - are busily fashioned and recovered. It is also in the context of such recovery that we must place the protectiveness towards the Rhodes statue: as a family heirloom that, in spite of its provenance, has immense cultural and sentimental value to certain present-day networks.

When there is a threat of damage - such as the body-blow of the world financial crash in 2008 -the family of elites is, oddly, most insulated from it: though the privileged should have lost greatly with the crash, given their moral and financial investment in the market, they actually, as we now know, lost the least. In this claustrophobic atmosphere of self-perpetuation and self-interested and hugely productive friendships, the Rhodes Must Fall movement seems like the breath of fresh air that a place such as Oxford University has been waiting for.

When I spoke to the students involved in Rhodes Must Fall at Oxford last June, I suggested that their project presented an opportunity to go beyond Rhodes to address the inequalities of global privilege and the networks that sustain it - networks in which institutions such as Oxford play an essential role. I realised with alarm when I went to Oxford in 1987 that the vast majority of Indian students there came from a very tiny number of colleges and universities in New Delhi. What had been a featureless capital, insignificant in terms of its organic cultural life, was then being primed to become the centre of India's new intellectual and academic ruling class. The formation of this class - members of which returned to India in the late 1980s and early 1990s from places such as Oxford and took charge of the new national media emerging from Delhi, and centres of higher education there - was linked directly to political access, and to a continuous give-and-take with historic western educational institutions. Meanwhile, within Britain, the fact that Oxbridge dominates so utterly points surely to the failure of higher education here, and its absorption into those networks. Why do so many prime ministers, chancellors, and ministers in this country still come from Eton and Oxford? It is a huge embarrassment for Britain.

The Rhodes Must Fall movement's ambition to decolonise education and to get Oxford to widen its curriculum is salutary. Yet decolonisation has to be a complex business when global privilege has so many platforms, including nations that comprised the erstwhile empire. The project of decolonisation in the humanities was taken up vigorously in the 1990s by postcolonial theory. Its principal text was Edward Said's polemic, Orientalism, whose central insight - that the west exercised power over the east in the time of colonisation by studying it to take ownership of it, and then misrepresenting it - is still pertinent and illuminating today. But there is a critique of postcolonial theory that cannot be wholly discounted: that it held sway in elite western institutions and was itself embedded in privileged networks. It makes Rhodes Must Fall's message about decolonisation, especially at a place like Oxford, at once particularly difficult and urgent.

One must, today, take on the legacies of empire; one must also take on the legacies of global privilege. There is also the problematic fact that postcolonial theory has, in its account of the colonial encounter, focused almost exclusively on the matter of imperial misrepresentation: it largely ignores what non-western cultures were up to in the last two centuries, unless they were seen to be actively engaged in rebutting the coloniser. Postcolonial theory, then, implicitly frames a question - "Did the empire do any good?" - to which it answers in the negative. It is a question that has now been appropriated by revisionist historians including Roberts and Ferguson. Their answer is a resounding "yes".

What enabled this turn? This brings me to the second reason for the closing down I referred to earlier: 9/11 and, in Britain, the bombings on 7 July 2005. These events gave the green light to a certain kind of reactionary opinion and self-justification, in the guise of being a much-needed riposte to political correctness. Donald Trump's remarks about refusing Muslims entry into the US have been greeted with a mix of outrage and laughter; but they were anticipated in Britain in 2007 by none other than Martin Amis, who pointed out that the "Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order", and spoke of the necessity of "not letting them travel" - words he now regrets.

Regret, though, is not the defining tone of those who make such observations, or, for that matter, of those who defend the Rhodes statue. Regret for empire was never expressed by the descendants of those who undertook the colonial project. It is precisely this lack of regret, this ignoring and skewing of history, that might be termed "institutional racism" - or, as David Cameron put it in an uncharacteristic article about racial inequality in Britain earlier this year, "something ... ingrained, institutional and insidious".

Institutional racism, however, is not specific to certain nations or institutions, but characterises the parameters of the world in which we live, work, and travel. It is another name for a present-day colonial order that is weighted against the non-European, and seldom owns up to regret. In fact, 9/11 has permitted western commentators' triumphal reconfiguration of human values as western values, constantly under threat from the non-west and from Islam. It allows journalists in Paris, New York, and London to mourn attacks upon the "way of life" in their cities, as if Beirut and Baghdad had no way of life. This persistent asymmetry is what it means to live in a colonial order.

The question of whether or not imperialism had a benign side is besides the point. The question is framed misleadingly. Colonial projects do not set out to do "good"; their primary intention is to exploit the ruled on behalf of the coloniser. This does not mean that an unprecedented creative period might not emerge as a consequence of the cultural encounter that colonialism involves. For instance, the history of India in the last 200 years is an extraordinarily rich one, in science, the arts, and in politics. What kind of understanding would we have of a city like, say, Kolkata, if its history described only its colonial institutions and colonial officers, and knew nothing of the transformation that made artists like Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray possible, or of a scientist such as Satyendra Nath Bose, whose pioneering statistical method enabled quantum mechanics, or of the intellectual changes that led to social reform and the freedom struggle? What does it mean, in the context of such ignorance of what was truly exciting and unprecedented in that period, to claim that empire was "good"?

The decolonisation of British education is not just necessary: it is long overdue. Decolonisation has to do with not only openly discussing the various transgressions, and shameful moments and ambitions, that comprise colonial history. It asks for a remedy that will cure us from viewing western history as a history of culture, science, and modernity, and non-western history solely as a history of conflict and race. It would make us hesitate before we situated western politics in a history of constant evolution and redefinition and non-western politics in a history of constant borrowing and reaction. For example, the Indian parliamentary system is not a gift made by Britain to India. Not only did it have to be wrested from the British by Indians, it had to be subjected to its most radical and experimental transformation: giving the vote to everyone, including the illiterate and poor. These facts, and others, are already out there. It is just that there is no adequate framework within which to incorporate them. Decolonisation is about imagining such a framework.

In a context that points to the need for new ways of thinking about the history that we are products of, it is particularly unfortunate that those in Oxford who would have students embrace its traditions of free speech and unfettered thinking should have found, by a peculiar twist in events, an emblem in Cecil Rhodes. But it would be equally sad if Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford became identified with the statue in Oriel College alone, because it has long-term work to do.
Main photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images

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The real meaning of Rhodes Must Fall | Amit Chaudhuri

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he movement known as Rhodes Must Fall, which began with a protest action at the University of Cape Town on 9 March 2015 and quickly spread to other campuses in South Africa, and then to Oxford University, is barely more than a year old.

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ne of Chumani Maxwele's stronger childhood memories is of an aeroplane. Not one he rode, but one he heard flying over his dusty village in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, not far from Nelson Mandela's birthplace. Maxwele, the son of a poor miner, used to play football with his friends in a field behind his house. One morning in 1994, when he was not yet 10 years old, he was startled in the middle of a game by an unfamiliar noise from above - somewhere between a rumble and a drone. He let the ball dribble away and tilted his head to the sky. Maxwele had heard rumours that the African National Congress (ANC) was flying planes around the country: in a few months, South Africa would have its first elections in which black people could vote, and the planes were dropping campaign leaflets decorated in the ANC's black, yellow and gold, urging people to vote for Mandela.

The sound of the plane transmitted an impression Maxwele never forgot - one of motion and power. The Eastern Cape legend had it that planes, a rare sighting, were flown by influential people, even people to be feared. Power was something Maxwele had only glimpsed at a distance, wielded by South Africa's apartheid state. On the TV in the village nurse's house, he had watched tanks manned by angry-eyed white boys in battle gear, rolling into crowds of black protesters. But now the liberation movement had its own planes. That implied a promise: the promise of transformation, of the freedom to change your circumstances and be something different from what history had prescribed for your kind.

Several years after the historic election that brought Mandela to power, Maxwele moved from the Eastern Cape to an area outside Cape Town called Delft, where people said there were better schools and more jobs. But Delft turned out to be a bitter place. Almost half its residents were unemployed. The black township next door, Khayelitsha, where he went to volunteer for an HIV awareness campaign, was even worse. "In a 1km stretch of road, you'd pass a thousand people," Maxwele told me. "For me, that was shocking." He discovered that people loitered on the streets because there was hardly room to stand up in their dark, claustrophobic shacks. Families defecated in plastic boxes collected once a week by the municipality. While the boxes sat by the kerb, children played around them. In the winter, a bluster of whipping wind and sideways-slanting rain, Khayelitsha flooded, and sometimes the makeshift shacks dissolved wholesale, their tarp roofs and cardboard-box sidings disintegrating like sandcastles in a heavy wave.

Maxwele got a job in 2006 working at Woolworths, an upscale supermarket in another Cape Town neighbourhood named Claremont. On their first day, he and his mostly black colleagues were given uniforms: a pressed shirt, a tie, and shiny patent leather shoes. His colleagues felt proud - they were real businesspeople now, office worker types! But Maxwele could see he was not in an office. He just looked the part. The vast majority of the Woolworths customers were white, and he was standing on his feet, attending to the needs of white people. It was not really so different from what his father had done in the mines, or what the mothers of his friends had done when they toiled in white people's homes as maids.

It was a bitter reminder of the plane that had soared over his village in 1994. He had heard that plane, but he had never flown on one. Freedom, it seemed to him, was an illusion, a promise heard but not truly experienced - fresh new clothes that concealed the dogged persistence of humiliations from the past.

"It's not a coincidence that if you go to Claremont, it's full of white people owning the entire suburbia, and there are black people in Delft," he told me. In his years in Cape Town, at the Delft community library, Maxwele had been reading more and more about the history of South Africa. Khayelitsha was prone to flooding because it had been a black-only settlement, built on sand; under apartheid, black people were consigned to the worst land. The customers at Woolworths were mostly white because Claremont was historically a whites-only neighbourhood, and white people with capital were usually still the only people who could afford to live there.

The apartheid past, Maxwele realised, was still shaping his life. The realisation made him feel more and more angry, because it had not been what he had been taught growing up. His generation had been told they were the "born frees": an exceptional generation in South African history, the first one raised with almost no direct memory of apartheid's terrors. "They're like nothing that's ever been!" bleated a promo segment for Bornfrees, a reality TV show that began airing in South Africa in 2004. In school and at home, their elders often reminded them how different life was for them and how much they had to be grateful for.

The apartheid past, Maxwele realised, was still shaping his life. The realisation made him feel more and more angry

On the morning of 9 March, Maxwele travelled by minibus taxi out to Khayelitsha, picked up one of the buckets of shit that sat reeking on the kerbside, and brought it back to the campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT), where, in 2011, he had gained a scholarship to study political science. He took it to a bronze statue of the 19th-century British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes that held pride of place on campus, just downhill from the convocation hall. Rhodes had been one of the main architects of South Africa's segregation. "Where are our heroes and ancestors?" Maxwele shouted to a gathering, curious crowd.

Then he opened the bucket and hurled its contents into Rhodes's face.

What happened next shattered South Africa's sense of where it sits on the wheel of history. The country knew UCT as a quiet, happy place, both intellectually rigorous - the Times Higher Education Supplement ranks it the top university in Africa - and unimaginably gorgeous, its campus tumbling down the side of Cape Town's iconic Table Mountain in a cascade of Georgian buildings and lush gardens. Formerly whites-only, in recent decades it has been considered a Jerusalem for young black students, the height of post-apartheid opportunity.

Maxwele's "poo protest", as it came to be known, revealed that behind this scenic facade, a great number of the black students were very, very angry. Three days later, on a Thursday afternoon, more than a thousand students gathered on the quad to debate Rhodes's role in colonising Africa. They ended by demanding that UCT remove the statue from campus. For five weeks, hundreds of students massed around the statue, tagging it with graffiti, covering it in black bin bags, and singing songs from the anti-apartheid struggle such as Senzeni Na? (What have we done?). Saying the statue represented much about the university that still celebrates white culture - its curriculum is eurocentric, its governing council is mostly white, and its financial and mental-health support for black students is weak - they named themselves the Rhodes Must Fall Movement and occupied the university's administration buildings, holding lectures on apartheid history and beating drums. Max Price, UCT's vice-chancellor, had to tell his staff to go home.

In the weeks after Maxwele's demonstration, students began protesting at several other universities - one called Rhodes, where students demanded the university change its name, and at Stellenbosch, where students protested the continued use of Afrikaans, the language developed by the Dutch-descended settlers who used to rule South Africa.

And then, in October, seven months after Maxwele lit the fuse, student uprisings exploded across the entire country. Citing the falling South African currency, universities had announced they would raise tuition fees by up to 20%; for many poor, mainly black students, yearly tuition at a South African university is already unattainable.

Suddenly, daily life in South Africa began to resemble a reel from a documentary of its own past. In 1985, an ANC leader vowed to make South Africa "ungovernable", and at times it seemed that the students' goal was the same, as were the tactics with which they pursued it. "We are going to shut down this university up until our demands are met," a student activist told a crowd at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand. Students boycotted classes, as black youth had done in the famous Soweto student uprisings of 1976. Some campuses shut down for weeks; Cape Town's University of the Western Cape is still closed.

They marched in tens of thousands on parliament and on President Jacob Zuma's offices in Pretoria. Heading to the parliament protest, a score of young people, mostly black, swayed together on a public bus, chanting anti-apartheid songs as they clutched the ceiling rail on their way from the outskirts of town. Once there, anguished, they flung stones at steely-eyed policemen in riot gear. As used to happen in South Africa's anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s, a tyre was set alight, its black smoke blocking out the light of the sun. A young black man was arrested and violently handcuffed; a woman injured by a stun grenade, her face streaming tears, was held up by the arms by two men and borne away. Another woman, her face set, her hair wrapped tightly in a colourful cloth, paced out in front of the enormous crowd, raised her fist, and yelled the freedom cry that black-liberation protesters used to shout when they faced down the apartheid state's tanks: "Amandla! Awulethu! " ("Power! To us!")

These student protests are far, far bigger than the last major demonstration against the immense structural injustices that linger in South Africa. That was the tragic strike by mineworkers in a town called Marikana in August 2012, where government police mowed down 34 miners who had spent weeks protesting against their low wages. Marikana set off a national soul-searching, an outpouring of outraged op-eds and TV and radio debates. How could it be, 20 years after the end of apartheid, that black people still worked for such loose change, in conditions little better than their fathers endured, and then met their deaths at the hands of a weaponised state?

But the national reaction to the student protests has been more hesitant, muted. Many of the people who expressed heavy outrage about Marikana said nothing. Several older friends of mine told me they felt the students' demands were completely justified, and yet they found something about the protests disorientating, and thus remained quiet; they were like the residents of a house feeling the tremors of something rumbling underground, but reluctant to explore what it was.

For the miners on strike in Marikana were mostly middle-aged. They had a right to expect something better from the second, liberated half of their lives. The "born frees" were not supposed to feel that degree of historical pain. As well as protesting the legacy of history, the young South Africans were trying on a historical identity, inhabiting the anger their parents had expressed decades earlier. My older friends found it eerie to watch.

And some of the most prominent people expressing that anger are children who really weren't supposed to feel it. Many of the most active youth protesters hail from South Africa's new black middle class and black elite. The young man who was handcuffed and arrested in front of Parliament was Kgotsi Chikane, the son of the Reverend Frank Chikane, the former chief of staff to the country's second black president, Thabo Mbeki.

More and more, the anger of the young has pointed towards their parents and their black elders. Over the course of the year, the young South Africans moved from throwing stones at statues of dead white men to throwing them at live black ones - President Zuma and South Africa's education minister Blade Nzimande, who rose to fame as an anti-apartheid activist. At the protest in front of Zuma's office, young people raised hand-lettered signs that mocked Zuma as well as placards connecting their demonstration with the struggles of South Africa's past. The story of why these generations are now at odds has deep implications for how a freed people, generation by generation, continues to relate to its history - implications that are relevant everywhere else in the world where the children of the oppressed are coming of age in what are supposed to be better circumstances.

On 10 May 1994, the day of his inauguration, Nelson Mandela descended from the shaded veranda of the presidential offices in Pretoria to give an address to a crowd of tens of thousands that had gathered on the lawn. He began by seizing the hand of a startled FW de Klerk, South Africa's last white president, and shouting in Afrikaans, the language of his white former jailers: " Wat is verby is verby! " (What is past is past!)

On the face of it, Kgotsi Chikane, one of the student uprising's main leaders, could be a poster boy for that promise. A 24-year-old with close-cropped hair, a patchy moustache, and a quiet demeanor, Chikane's upbringing could not have been more different from Maxwele's. I met him on the UCT quad in May. "I come from a privileged black background," he said with a smile as we sat down on the main steps. In his teens, Chikane's family moved from the black township of Soweto to the "leafy suburbs" - South African slang for the posh, formerly whites-only neighbourhoods that are often shaded by stately jacaranda trees. The young Chikane attended a private Catholic high school that costs £3,650 a year, 30% more than the average black South African household income.

He showed up to our meeting wearing a T-shirt that said "Mandela Rhodes", the name of the foundation - partially funded by Rhodes's estate - that gave him a precious university scholarship. "This is my inherent contradiction in life," he said, pointing to his chest. "I enjoy mocking Rhodes and yet he pays my university fees."

It was at UCT that Chikane began to feel aware of race. In the canteen of his 360-person all-male hall of residence, the students sorted themselves within a week into white tables and black tables. His white friends celebrated the fact that he was their "black friend", saying he "grounded" them. In his macroeconomics class, his white teacher seemed to baby him. He would ask Chikane a simple question and then bore his eyes into him, "like, 'Mmm, I don't think you'll understand.' When I actually got a good mark, he was shocked. He said, 'I wasn't expecting that!'" That made Chikane angry. "I thought, 'You don't know me from a bar of soap.'"

Chikane's first reaction to Maxwele's poo protest was ambivalent. "I thought it was kind of disgusting," he laughed. He had not grown up, like Maxwele, in a place where people defecated in buckets and left them on the streets. But within a day he became embroiled in a Twitter battle with a white student. The student claimed Maxwele's protest "was actually disrespectful to the black poor because a black janitor would have to clean up the poo", Chikane remembered. "I said, 'Why are you suddenly so exercised about the plight of the black poor, only now, when your symbol is attacked?'" He realised that there was still an "us" - black - and "them" - white - and that black people like himself, however empowered they might appear, still had to endure being lectured by white people about what constitutes moral behaviour.

Three days after Maxwele's poo protest, Chikane found himself leading a huge demonstration against the Rhodes statue. Beforehand, he chained his wrists together, his hands pressed awkwardly into a gesture of supplication. Paradoxically, assuming this pose of entrapment felt like the true liberation. It freed him to inhabit physically the sense of oppression he had only been feeling emotionally. "People started taking pictures," he recalled. "And then I realised ... black students weren't taking pictures. The white students were taking pictures," as white people have stared at the entrapped black body for centuries.

It was a common feature of the stories I heard from black student protesters: there had been a series of small experiences that made them aware they were not tabulae rasae, but black people enmeshed in a long history of black deprivation. Another UCT student, Ramabina Mahapa, 22, told me that, growing up poor in a semi-rural village, he had been almost unaware he was black. He excelled in science - "My heroes were Isaac Newton and Einstein," he said. But when he got to UCT, he told me, he could no longer forget his race. In the car park of his 108-person hall, "there were 25 cars. All were owned by white people, except for one". On Thursdays, the white boys went out to drink. He had little spending money, and so was left behind.

Mase Ramaru, a 22-year-old senior studying gender, remembered sitting in a class with a black lecturer and hearing white students complain that he was not a good teacher because his "black accent" was too heavy. "It becomes less about his ability and more about the colour of his skin, and that he's not articulating himself the way people want him to articulate himself," she said.

In her senior year of high school, Ramaru told me, she had begun "my own education" in the work of black thinkers such as the anti-colonial philosopher Frantz Fanon and the South African black consciousness activist Steve Biko - writers who traced the way the modern world had been set up to make black people feel fundamentally out of place. She noted that this history was not what she had learned in school. "I did the cold war for six years; I studied the American revolution in detail," she recalled. "But the first specifically South African history came only when I was 12 and began with the democratic era." The omissions had mystified her. Was there something that somebody did not want her to know?

A few hours after I met Chikane at UCT, a group of 40 students gathered on the quad to demonstrate against the suspension of some of their fellow protesters. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon, and all of us were sweating. The heat only seemed to make the students sing louder. They held up their fists in the same gesture made by the African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. " Nithi sixole kanjani amabhulu," they sang, " abulala uChris Hani?"

I didn't understand the words. So I asked one of the students, a boy in red Converse sneakers, what they meant. "It means, 'How can we forgive the Boers [white Afrikaners] who killed Chris Hani?'", he said, referring to the ANC leader assassinated in 1993. He broke into a sheepish smile, as if to acknowledge the incompatibility of the lyrics with the conciliatory feelings his generation was supposed to hold. "The Boers who killed Chris Hani are scared."

Though this year's student protests have harkened back to a time when white and black people in South Africa were at dire odds, in many instances, white people have been more curious about - and sympathetic towards - the protests than the young people's black elders have been. Many white youth joined the marches at UCT and, last month, at parliament and Zuma's offices. UCT's vice-chancellor Max Price, a white former doctor, flew back from an education summit in Dakar a few days after Maxwele's poo protest and released a statement supporting the protesting students and calling for the statue's removal.

Over the phone, Price told me he was "so moved by the arguments of students that they found [Rhodes's] presence offensive to the degree people would find [a statue of] Stalin or Hitler evil." The born frees' deep anger seemed to him legitimate, he said. He acknowledged that their protest "wasn't about the statue. It spoke to a much broader feeling of alienation in the institution which could be named colonial hegemony. Everything held up the culture of the west as best."

Many older leaders of colour, on the other hand, seemed to dismiss the students' emotions. UCT's few black administrators, including Barney Pityana, a founder of South Africa's black-consciousness movement in the 1960s, refused to lend the protests their public support. Jonathan Jansen, the black head of another campus - the University of the Free State, in Bloemfontein - told me that he felt the Rhodes Must Fall protest was "crude" and "not in fact a movement. It was a moment". Zuma delivered a disdainful radio address reminding students that "defacing statues is illegal", as if they were unruly children requiring a time-out.

Chikane said the apparent unwillingness of black leaders to support the students' awakening baffled him - and greatly amplified his anger. In mid-April, some 50 students broke into a UCT council meeting that Price had called to discuss the prospect of removing the Rhodes statue. The students climbed through a window that had been left open and surrounded the conference table, singing struggle songs.

Most of the members of the largely white council just sat there. But the head of the council, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, a former anti-apartheid activist who was imprisoned with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, stood up and flapped his hands, gesturing for the students to leave. They climbed up on the table and moved towards him. "Who made you the policeman of black rage? As a black man?" one student spat, his eyes filling with tears. "You are disgusting! You are disgusting! Don't you have your own children?"

After the incident, Chikane wrote a pleading letter to Ndugane, begging him to publicly express that he understood and supported the students' anger. The young man comparedthe "obvious, obscene and repugnant acts of racism" in the past to the kind black students currently experienced at UCT. "Ours is worse," he wrote. "Ours is subliminal. It is the form of racism that makes you ignorant about your subjugation."

Our experience of racism is worse. It's subliminal. The form of racism that makes you ignorant about your subjugation

Kgotsi Chikane

The archbishop sent Chikane a one-line note that he had received his letter, but said nothing more.

Forgetting was a central part of the deal the ANC made when it took power from whites after apartheid. "The ANC denied issues of identity," Xolela Mangcu, a sociologist who has written penetratingly on the new student protests, told me. There were few public conversations about race or rectifying past injustices. Leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu stressed the forging of a new "rainbow nation" over a narrative of black liberation. The statues depicting white heroes of the colonial age - some 97% of the country's public memorials - were left standing.

In general, this will to move on from the past has been interpreted as a cynical strategy on the part of the ANC. The ANC, the theory goes, could not afford to scare white people, who held the vast majority of the nation's capital, by discussing the history of black suffering in South Africa.

But there was also a powerful emotional component to the denial. What else had blacks fought for over so many years, if not their children's release from a suffering black identity? When I flew into Cape Town to visit UCT, the Uber driver who picked me up from the airport, a black man from a township called Langa, spontaneously told me a potent story. His son was 14, he said; he was 50. Recently, his son had come to him to ask him what apartheid had done to him, his father. The question had made the older man feel angry. "I don't want you to know about the past," he had told his son. "You are free of all that!"

My son asked what apartheid had done to me, which made me angry. 'I don't want you to know about the past,' I told him

Langa, the Uber driver

The state school curriculum that many students describe as infuriatingly "blank" on their country's past was created that way deliberately. In the mid-1990s, the government's curriculum-redesign committees eliminated history as a standalone subject, folding it into "human and social sciences". "Everybody wanted to turn their faces away from the past," Rob Siebörger, an education professor who participated in the redesign, told me. The most major episodes of black suffering in South Africa, such as the "Great Trek" of the 19th century, in which Afrikaner pioneers occupied formerly black-held land, were simply never addressed.

Mangcu told me that even he feels the instinct to shield young people from history. He is a believer in black consciousness, the philosophy that suggests that black people stagger under an incredible weight of psychological domination by white people. He supports the student protests. But he also has a young daughter who attends a "posh", predominantly white school - the dream of many black parents. "All of her friends are white children. So I try to avoid a conversation about black history with her. I'm afraid of how she'll process it. How she'll relate to her friends. So I haven't had the courage to do it."

This helps explain the curious silence among many older black South Africans towards the student protests; why Max Price, UCT's white vice-chancellor, conducted a cautious engagement with the angry youth while black elder statesmen at UCT remained silent.

Jonathan Jansen, the first black vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State, described to me the fear that the protests had engendered among older black South Africans - a fear that their hard-won progress over a bitter past was sliding backwards, or that it had never really succeeded to begin with. The student movements, Jansen told me, looked to him like a dangerous return to the very same racial discourses his generation had battled to defeat. "People were dead set against the apartheid narrative of race essentialism," he said. "We fought very, very hard not to have the state name us [black].But that is exactly what [the students] are trying to reinforce."

But Mangcu reckoned that the historylessness that black parents believed would be a blessing for their offspring was backfiring.

Students such as Maxwele, Chikane and Ramaru had little context for the persistence of race in their daily experience. Initially, they would interpret the experiences personally. Why is my family poor? Why did somebody ask me to be her "black friend"? When they finally discovered black history and identity, the lateness of the discovery made them angry.

"We think we're trying to protect our kids," Mangcu said. "But our children are starting to deal with what we haven't dealt with." He gave me an example from his own family. "My nephew went to all these posh schools. He started to see, over time, how differently his white friends were treated. He became very, very angry. This happens a lot. Sometimes people even drop out of society." At the age of 29, his nephew committed suicide. Mangcu couldn't help blaming a society that hadn't given him a sense of who he was.

In mid-April, after a unanimous vote by UCT's council, the Rhodes statue was trussed up in green twine and hoisted away by crane, leaving its bare plinth behind. The whole night before, thousands of students gathered to sing struggle songs and snap pictures of the crane manoeuvring around the historical bronze on their smartphones. When the statue finally rose off of its base, a huge, sustained cry went up from the crowd. "It was a joy, because something you envisaged happening did happen," Maxwele remembered.

Counter to the university administration's expectations, though, the plinth continued to be a touchstone. Months later, when I visited UCT, students were still massing around it. It was as if they did not want to let go of their relationship with the statue, with history. They sang: " Senzeni na, senzeni na? Sono sethu, ubumnyama ..." ("What have we done? Our sin is that we are black ...")

When I spoke to Malaika wa Afrika, a 22-year-old writer and student active in the year's protest, she remarked to me that she felt the protests had tapped into an "incredible amount of nostalgia" for a particular kind of black dignity and resilience, forged under oppression. For centuries, as in many other parts of the world, whites in South Africa denied blacks a positive history. They were accorded no cultural achievements remotely commensurate with those of the west; they were considered primitive beings in need of tutelage. It took enormous courage to remain human against that attempt at erasure, and that courage - the courage of resistance - became a foundation of the black South African character. The struggle songs that the students now sing did not merely capture the longings of a particular moment in time. They formed the basis for a culture. Like the spirituals sung by black slaves in the southern states of America, many of these songs pair tormented lyrics with a mysterious harmonic serenity, capturing the capacity of black South Africans to retain some normality and honour in the face of brutality. This itself was a massive achievement, perhaps even as great as liberation. And it established a powerful identity that cannot, it turns out, so happily be abandoned for a tabula rasa.

It is an intriguing question: as, very slowly, black people gain power in a society such as South Africa's, what will happen to this identity of resistance? Implicit in the criticism made by some elders is that it remains a trap, a negative, oppressor-oriented culture that has to be outgrown. "I always use the quote, 'The master's tools can't take down the master's house,'" Jonathan Jansen told me. He worried that the re-emergence of an older black identity had dangerous practical implications for contemporary South Africa, a fragile multiracial society in which black and white people must interact every day.

But Wa Afrika thought that a much fuller public conversation about the past would help South Africa both face the unfinished business of rooting out racism and help loosen the psychological hold of the past on its children. "When we go on the street, we sing songs from apartheid," she reflected. "Our language in protest is still reminiscent of apartheid language. Why would we be singing this if this had nothing to do with an identity struggle? If we weren't still learning about our identity and history, wouldn't we have composed new songs?"

Human beings have a basic need to integrate their presents with their pasts. This is why we fixate on the stories of our childhoods as the keys to who we are, and why adopted children go in search of the stories of their parents and their parents' parents. Researchers have even begun to think this longing works at DNA level: that we are driven to understand the history our very cells remember.

When I met Chumani Maxwele at the plinth, on my second UCT visit in June, nobody was there. In the few weeks since I had last seen it, the administration had covered the plinth with plywood, in the hope that hiding it from view would, finally, put an end to the students' preoccupation with it. The panels were painted an anodyne blue, like the colour of the blank midday sky. It reminded me of the blankness South Africa's leaders suggested the country could start from after 1994: an empty slate.

Maxwele seemed agitated. It was a school break, and "people are wandering around going to conferences like nothing happened", he murmured. The nationwide student protests were still five months away. We ordered a taxi and got inside. He stared at the UCT gardens, with their gently waving flowers and twittering birds. The quiet was uncomfortable. It made for such an unreal contrast with South Africa's bitter past, and a kind of denial of the way the past is still at work in the present. "This place will blow up again," Maxwele said. "You'll see."

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ne of Chumani Maxwele's stronger childhood memories is of an aeroplane. Not one he rode, but one he heard flying over his dusty village in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, not far from Nelson Mandela's birthplace. Maxwele, the son of a poor miner, used to play football with his friends in a field behind his house.

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Decolonization: A brief history of the word

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Decolonization: A brief history of the word

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Decolonization: A brief history of the word RAYMOND F. BETTS pp. 23-38 (16 pages)

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Decolonization A brief history of the word from Beyond Empire and Nation: The Decolonization of African and Asian societies, 1930s-1970s on JSTOR

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'They shot up like volcanic lava', dramatically wrote the former French colonial administrator, Robert Delavignette (1977:137), of the independence movements th...

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“Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.”

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Eric Ritskes, “What is Decolonization and Why Does  It Matter?,” Intercontinentalcry, September 21, 2012.

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Eric Ritskes, “What is Decolonization and Why Does  It Matter?,” Intercontinentalcry, September 21, 2012.

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Eric Ritskes is a Managing Editor at Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, a newly established Open Access journal committed to the vital work of decolonization.
The much-anticipated first issue of Decolonization Journal is now available at Decolonization.org

Decolonization is a goal but it is not an endpoint. I like this open-ended beginning because it speaks to two things: that the struggle for decolonization is a journey that is never finished and that, on this journey, uncertainty is not to be feared; Mariolga Reyes Cruz ( in our first issue) describes it as: "moving towards a different and tangible place, somewhere out there, where no one has really ever been." I don't mean that decolonization is elusive and constantly deferred - an unattainable 'pipe dream' - but that it is a series of what Jeff Corntassel calls " everyday acts of resurgence" which regenerate Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, and ways of life. These Indigenous knowledges are always adapting, always creating, always moving forward - there is no stopping them, no finality. Decolonization is a tangible unknown.

As an editor at Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, I see the space we are working to create as one of these everyday acts of decolonization. Decolonization engages with imperialism and colonialism at every level. This entails an on the ground resistance to the corporate and national take overs of land, as well as the slow 'CO ₂ lonialism' of toxic waste, oil spills, carbon markets, and pollution that threaten the land. This means 'writing back' against the ongoing colonialism and colonial mentalities that permeates education, media, government policies, and 'common sense'. For us, it also means challenging how higher education, research and publishing are complicit in and, in fact, vital to the colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples around the globe.

Disturbing Trends

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in their article in our first issue, state: " Decolonization doesn't have a synonym"; it is not a substitute for 'human rights' or 'social justice', though undoubtedly they are connected in various ways. Decolonization demands an Indigenous framework and a centering of Indigenous land, Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous ways of thinking. Too often, decolonization becomes bastardized, sidelined, or simply misunderstood - in creating a space such as Decolonization, there is the chance to 'write back' against these trends, to engage and oppose colonialism, as well as to connect and support Indigeneity globally.

One of these trends is the appropriation of Indigeneity, of non-Indigenous activists in North America playing Indian in critical movements (especially in regards to Indigenous spirituality). In a letter to the Occupy Wall Street movement John Paul Montano wrote an open letter on his blog demanding that protestors recognize the ongoing colonialism and occupation of the land they were protesting on. One commenter replied in classic fashion, checking all the 'appropriation boxes': claiming similar experiences as a 'displaced Irish person', claiming experience with Indigenous peoples as a grounds for validation, as well as appropriating Indigenous spirituality to argue "I stole no land" and that we should "focus on the future". Indigeneity is taken up as a cloak to hide further exploitation of Indigenous peoples.

Beyond the sort of 'White Shamanism' and 'We are all Indigenous' discourses, playing Indian runs even deeper. In Northern Canada, many white eco-activists and Canadians have joined with Indigenous communities to protest a proposed Enbridge oil pipeline. What is overlooked for many, who see their involvement as an important environmental cause or even as anti-capitalist, is that Indigenous communities have life and livelihood at stake. This is not an adventure, another cause, or even just about the environment - in fact, due to their struggle the Canadian government has branded Indigenous groups as eco-terrorists. There is no 'going home' when this is done because it is never done and communities will always be seen as a threat. There is no thrill of taking on a mega corporation, just a continued fight for survival - one that white Canadians cannot fully understand. Communities are asked for the 'Native perspective' within a conservation framework that is premised on the settler state - 'Canadian land', saving the pristine, virgin "home and native land" - while ignoring that their homes are indeed on Native land. Indigenous peoples are further sidelined and displaced in these struggles, despite the centrality of their claims.

This is not to say that all Indigenous peoples are engaged in decolonization or that they are above using the terms and identities of Indigeneity for exploitation. In a recent move to privatize Indigenous land on reservations in Canada, there have been Indigenous 'sell-outs' such as Manny Jules and Senator Patrick Brazeau who have championed the move alongside Conservative leaders and right-wing 'shock jockeys'. As Pam Palmater, a professor of Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University - who is on our Editorial Review Board - argued in a powerful response: "Make no mistake, this bill is a modern form of land war that will be waged on our Nations." History is littered with Indigenous peoples who have been co-opted, sold out for private gain, or wasted their breath appealing to a colonial state to liberate them.

Moving Forward

Colonialism, and subsequently decolonization, has very real and material effects - we cannot forget this. These actions are held up by ways of thinking that disenfranchise, exploit, and marginalize Indigenous peoples around the globe. In the first issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, we have scholars/activists who are thinking about what decolonization means in Australia, Puerto Rico, Palestine, Canada, and the United States - and what the connections might be. We hope to have a space where we can explore decolonization as local and connected to specific land bases, but also to explore relationships and connections to further decolonization.

In moving forward, we know the power of Indigenous knowledges. In the Akan culture of western Africa there is the symbol of the sankofa, a bird reaching back to retrieve the past to use in the way forward - this is the sort of progress that is demanded by decolonization. A regenerative resurgence of Indigenous thought, development, sovereignty, life, communities, peoples, and land. Decolonization demands this sort of totality of resistance and revival. One of our Review Board members, Leanne Simpson, summed this up beautifully in saying: Indigenous sovereignty must be asserted with your body, mind, home, community, and every piece of your territory.

There are many views of decolonization, often contrasting and competing, but one thing is common: the belief that through action, change can occur. We're all implicated in and through colonialism and how we decolonize is connected to how exactly we are implicated. I had originally wanted to write somewhere in this article that "how we choose to decolonize is up to us" and, while I believe that we all have choices as to if we participate or not, decolonization demands recognizing Indigenous land, Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous sovereignty - including sovereignty over the decolonization process. Decolonization is needed and it is up to each of us to take up the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and what the risks and responsibilities of this recognition mean.

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What is decolonization and why does it matter?

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Eric Ritskes is a Managing Editor at Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, a newly established Open Access journal committed to the vital work of decolonization. The much-anticipated first issue of Decolonization Journal is now available at Decolonization.org Story continues below Get Rid of Ads Decolonization is a goal but it is not an endpoint.