Looking back over my decolonial journey brings intense sorrow. How could this have happened to this beautiful land and people?
And, as a Quaker, how could we have not only participated in, but significantly contributed to the colonization, to the settler-colonial project? Been leaders in the forced assimilation of Native children?
But the real question is how long will we continue to engage in such injustice? Settler colonialism is ongoing. We settlers continue to profit and oppress.
Incommensurability
Incommensurability in a decolonial context means that the worldviews, goals, and logics of Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonialism cannot be compromised or reconciled. They are mutually exclusive. There is no middle ground. We either continue our colonialism, or we must conscientiously object, and reject the Christian, colonial, capitalist violent systems that continue to enforce it. To turn, instead, to LANDBACK, Mutual Aid, and the abolition of police and prisons. “We ask ourselves whether we should attempt to transform higher education or burn it down and start anew. We argue that we do need to burn it down.” (See below).
Burn It Down
As former students and a professor in, but not of, a U.S. liberal arts college, we ask whether our current institutions of higher education are compatible with a project of decolonization. Grounded in our own testimonios and drawing on a genealogy of Western knowledge, we argue that U.S. higher education authorizes and perpetrates settler colonial violence. As such, we find that higher education is not only incompatible, but irredeemably incommensurable with decolonization. Furthermore, based on our experiences surviving this violence, we conclude that the university adapts to inhibit and neutralize institutional reform that might challenge its coloniality. Based on this conclusion, we ask ourselves whether we should attempt to transform higher education or burn it down and start anew. We argue that we do need to burn it down, and we look to how individuals within the institution already work towards the development of a new social structure, one that will outlast and supplant higher education. We identify three constructive and transformative techniques currently used for this purpose: survival, empowerment, and (theft by) conversion. These techniques are a combination of stances towards, relationships to, and practices within, the institution that build collective futurities no longer dependent upon higher education.
Burn it Down: The Incommensurability of the University and Decolonization by Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College Lekey Leidecker, Daniel Orr de Gutiérrez, University of San Francisco, Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 2019, Vol 8, No 1, 87-106
NOTE: I created the graphics with Google’s Gemini
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