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“Questions like “Is this normal?” or “Am I weird?” reveal how deeply the concept of being “normal” is embedded in the subconscious of the ordinary majority. They don’t mean “Is this ordinary?” or “Am I a product of a photocopy?” when they ask these things, of course. In fact, they are not even consciously trying to conform to norms, even if their words might suggest otherwise. It is simply that they have internalized the association of the word “normal” with the idea of “good.”

GoodnessNormalGoodConformityNormAssimilationNormalityColonizationNormativityNormativeness
Author:Sov8840
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“One doesn't even inherently need to possess dreams, desires, passions, or hobbies. But these are made obligatory; that's how society "operates." It is clearly visible that many people are full of dreams, desires, passions, and hobbies, not because they are independent artists or real geniuses, but solely because the system forces them to be and they unconsciously absorb it into themselves. If that system didn't exist, they would be like barren wastelands.”

ArtPhilosophyValuesSocietyAmbitionDependenceDetachmentSystemColonizationAbsorbtion
Author:Sov8840
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“I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they'd spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don't think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like anarchy, I don't even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation-not better, different. I don't like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it.”

HistoryStudySocietyHuman NatureCivilizationCrowdsNoisePrivacyAnarchyIdealismWildColonizationCommune
Book:Angle of Repose
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“Among the Founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote about race at greatest length. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites and biologically distinct: “[They] secrete less by the kidnies [sic], and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor.” He hoped slavery would be abolished, but he did not want free blacks to remain in America: “When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture.” Jefferson was one of the first and most influential advocates of “colonization,” or returning blacks to Africa. He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially distinct people. In 1786 he wrote, “Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.” In 1801 he looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.”

RaceEvolutionDiversitySlaveryBiologyGeneticsColonizationFounding Fathers
Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
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“Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.”

GovernmentRaceDiversitySlaveryBiologyGeneticsColonizationFounding FathersExpatriation
Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
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“After Lincoln became president he campaigned for colonization, and even in the midst of war with the Confederacy found time to work on the project, appointing Rev. James Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration, in charge of finding a place to which blacks could be sent. On August 14th, 1862, he invited a group of black leaders to the White House to try to persuade them to leave the country, telling them that “there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us.” He urged them to lead their people to a colonization site in Central America. Lincoln was therefore the first president to invite a delegation of blacks to the White House—and did so to ask them to leave the country. Later that year, in a message to Congress, he argued not just for voluntary colonization but for the forcible removal of free blacks. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, shared these anti-black sentiments: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear destiny: “This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race—the governing and self-governing race.” Before he became president, James Garfield wrote, “[I have] a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way . . . .” Theodore Roosevelt blamed Southerners for bringing blacks to America. In 1901 he wrote: “I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent . . . .” As for Indians, he once said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the health of the tenth.” William Howard Taft once told a group of black college students, “Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last, and for all times.” Woodrow Wilson was a confirmed segregationist, and as president of Princeton he refused to admit blacks. He enforced segregation in government offices and was supported in this by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, who argued that “civilized white men” could not be expected to work with “barbarous black men.” During the presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson took a strong position in favor of excluding Asians: “I stand for the national policy of exclusion. . . . We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. . . . Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson.” Warren Harding also wanted the races kept separate: “Men of both races [black and white] may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. This is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference. Racial amalgamation there cannot be.”

RaceLearningDiversityEqualityBiologyGeneticsColonization
Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
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“As Richard Slotkin has argued, frontier cultural forms that stressed regeneration through violence excused all kinds of nasty behavior. The myth freed colonists to chop heads, fire villages, and torture animals. This was wholesome, conservative brutality; atrocities committed in the name of order, authority, and decorum. Travelers’ tales and circle hunts made wildlife abuse socially acceptable. Regeneration through violence rested on the assumption (many times the delusion) of powerlessness. Wolves never threatened humans physically, but they devoured livestock, and colonists identified with their animal property.”

MythologyEnvironmentalismFolkloreAnimal CrueltyWolvesColonizationViolence Against AnimalsLovestockRegeneration Through Violence
Book:Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
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“Colonizers write about flowers. I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies. I want to be like those poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons. It’s so beautiful, the moon. They’re so beautiful, the flowers. I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad. He watches Al Jazeera all day. I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan. I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies. Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound. When I die, I promise to haunt you forever. One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.”

WarDeathPoetryBeautyPoemTraumaGenocidePoetsColonization
Author:Noor Hindi
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“When next this [Gaza war] happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.”

WarHistoryOccupationJustificationPalestineGazaColonizationGaza War
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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“When they left for South Africa to work on a farm, she thought they were escaping. She thought, as many of them did, that it was a way out. The new land showed promise: Indian indentured labor had been abolished, opportunities were arising in the growing Indian settlements in Natal and Transvaal, neighbors and friends were all leaving. They said it was better in Africa for them. But her family realized too late, the British were the same whether they were in South Africa or India; their brown skin would always hold the same currency. Her family still lived in poverty, they were punished for their skin color, and they were still answerable to the white man for everything they did. It was still slavery, just in different packaging.”

FreedomSlaverySouth AfricaBritish EmpireColonizationIndentured Servant
Book:The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years
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“Indigenous survival in the face of erasure speaks to our resilience, adaptability, and—when necessary—an obstinance that has survived three centuries of oppression. So the next time you read or hear in a land acknowledgment that "these are the ancestral lands of..." remember that we never left.”

Us HistoryColonizationNorth CarolinaNative AmericansAmerican South
Book:On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice
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“But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable. What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.”

HistoryMetaphorColonialismConquestSocial CommentaryColonization
Book:Moby-Dick or, The Whale
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“I am glad we have not yet been able to reach the stars or inhabitable planets that dance about them. For they would in all probability be owned and divided by corporations and framed by industrial interests. Better they rest in distant tranquility, apart from our manufactured chaos. Let generations to come that learn to embrace one another, with their scientists, artists and poets, be the ones that immerse in that abundance and future. For now it is best it remains out of humanity's childlike hands in that big jar, light years away, marked "cookies." There for that coming time when the only thing we need feed off of, is the endless discovery and beauty.”

UniverseSpacePlanetsHumanity And SocietySpace ExplorationColonizationHorizonsHumanity And Reality
Book:The Frowny Face Cow
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“Black people are expected by the white world to be strong but not angry. Pain must be hidden. Daily slights are to be borne with grace, humility, even gratitude. Weakness is intolerable. Vulnerability must wait until the day is done and the mask can come off in the privacy of our won homes. And by then we are too tired or too stiff to feel it. This is not just true for black people living in Europe or America. It is also true, in a different form in Africa and the Caribbean, where black people are the majority. People in former European colonies must see their lives in relation to the lives of white people. As communities, as individuals, we have been told we are inferior. Our economies, our livelihoods, are reliant on Western economies, white people's livelihoods.”

EmotionsWhite SupremacyColonizationBlack In America
Book:Aftershocks
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“How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d'Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity. Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought be could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking. Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we've been given? ... His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so much, that we will watch but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.”

FeminismPossibilitiesFablesColonization
Book:Men Explain Things to Me
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“In one of my early works I once wrote, "America is a great country, built by great people". And it took me some time to look through the fallacy of this statement. I could still justify it by saying, it depends on the context - which would be technically true. But my dignity, my conscience, my morality - everything that is civilized in me, has been eating me alive for some time now over this one statement. Because if we throw away all technicality and look from a simple, everyday human perspective - nothing about the the birth of America is great - America is a terrorist nation, built by terrorists who invaded other people's land, stripped them of their homes, and built a spin-off of the ruthless British empire over their blood and bones. You think America's homeless problem is something new! It's not - America has been making people homeless ever since the pilgrims set foot in Plymouth Rock. The pilgrims were not pioneers, they were terrorists.”

SlaveryAmerican DreamColonialismAmerican HistoryImperialismWhite SupremacyAmerican CultureColonizationNative AmericansColonial History
Book:Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth
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“Nothing about the the birth of America is great - America is a terrorist nation, built by terrorists who invaded other people's land, stripped them of their homes, and built a spin-off of the ruthless British empire over their blood and bones. You think America's homeless problem is something new! It's not - America has been making people homeless ever since the pilgrims set foot in Plymouth Rock. The pilgrims were not pioneers, they were terrorists.”

SlaveryAmerican DreamColonialismAmerican HistoryImperialismWhite SupremacyAmerican CultureColonizationNative AmericansColonial History
Book:Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth
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“Why has the idea of Māori privilege been so durable? In the first hundred years of colonisation, the idea of Māori privilege aided and abetted the taking of Māori lands and resources. This loss was framed as a ‘privilege’, a necessary step towards amalgamation and the innumerable benefits it would bring to Māori. In the latter half of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first century, Māori privilege has again been put to use. Notions of privilege, first used to dispossess Māori, are now being redeployed to consolidate the ill-gotten gains of the previous centuries.”

HypocrisyColonizationIndigenous RightsAotearoa
Book:Privilege in Perpetuity: Exploding a Pākehā Myth
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“The Colonial Office maintained that land speculators such as the New Zealand Company were a threat to Māori, hence the need for the Crown pre-emption clause of article two. However, rather than protecting Māori, Crown policy based on pre-emption became an effective means of divesting Māori of their lands. Indeed, during Crown colony rule and under the Liberal government, millions of acres were acquired for Pākehā settlement. The privilege of protection was not just about protecting Māori land rights, it was also about amalgamating Māori into settler colonial society. It was envisaged that English law would eventually supplant Māori custom. At first the Crown sought to do this gradually through ‘official’ privileges such as the Protectorate of Aborigines (to ensure Māori interests were taken into account in land transactions) and the Native Exemption Ordinance (to utilise the authority of chiefs in disseminating British law). Pre-emption, the Protectorate of Aborigines and the Native Exemption Ordinance were in essence tools of amalgamation.”

ColonizationIndigenous RightsAotearoa
Book:Privilege in Perpetuity: Exploding a Pākehā Myth
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“Since 1840 native policy had swung from ‘the privilege of protection’ to ‘the privilege of free trade’. Proponents of either position based their arguments on article three of the Treaty of Waitangi, or at least their interpretation of it. Yet time and time again, no matter the policy, Māori were invariably dispossessed of their lands.”

ColonizationIndigenous RightsAotearoa
Book:Privilege in Perpetuity: Exploding a Pākehā Myth
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“Eurocentrism - The First Global Catastrophe (Sonnet 2626) Climate change is nothing, the first humanly caused global catastrophe was eurocentrism - before colonials, science was rooted in society, and philosophy was rooted in community, not snobbery, medicine was centered on people, not profit, religion was lived experience, not salesmanship - farmland was family, not property, innovation empowered life, not luxury - psychology prioritized understanding and healing, not analysis and isolation, poetry was the everyday way of life, not aristocratic escapism. Sure, there was superstition back then as well, but no superstition of the pre-colonial world comes close in atrocity to the fancy superstitions of the imperials marketed as progress. Eurocentrism is the biggest impediment to education - stand and burn the colonial syllabus, that's enlightenment!”

EducationWorld HistoryGeopoliticsDecolonizationColonizationScientific DiscoveryCultural AppropriationEurocentrismEurocentric EducationPhilososophy
Book:With Love From A Blue Rock
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“Before colonials, science was rooted in society, and philosophy was rooted in community, not snobbery, medicine was centered on people, not profit, religion was lived experience, not salesmanship. Sure, there was superstition back then as well, but no superstition of the pre-colonial world comes close in atrocity to the fancy superstitions of the imperials marketed as progress. Eurocentrism is the biggest impediment to education - stand and burn the colonial syllabus, that's enlightenment!”

EducationWorld HistoryGeopoliticsDecolonizationColonizationScientific DiscoveryCultural AppropriationEurocentrismEurocentric EducationPhilososophy
Book:With Love From A Blue Rock
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“Constitutional government, especially in a small country, takes a great deal of time, and causes sight to be lost of the questions, which lone can secure to the country a political future. I have many a time that I saw you feeling more and more interest therein, and I am very anxious that it should be so, for it is time to be seriously occupied with those questions; otherwise Belgium will find herself at the tail of all other countries. I have heard that an association of German princes is actively occupied in an attempt at colonization in Texas…”

United StatesGermanyTexasColonialismBelgiumColonizationLeopold ILeopold I Of Belgium
Author:Leopold I
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“The church wanted souls; the government wanted subjects and taxes; the conquistadors wanted gold. In each case, they needed people, and they needed people identified as Indian. But they each sought to remake Indigenous peoples to fit their own desires. The church claimed rights to evangelize Indigenous peoples, the Crown to tax them, and the conquistadors to enslave them. As they jostled for control, they subjected Indigenous forms of religion, governance, and labor to their sometimes-competing objectives.”

HistoryIndigenousColonizationCentral America
Book:Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration
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