Today's Colonialist Narrative Is Racist—and Clueless | Opinion (2024)

When I was growing up in the United States in the 1970s, we viewed "colonization" as a thing of the past: Europeans (and others) grabbed and plundered faraway territories, spreading technology and expertise and also, inadvertently, diseases. The American colonies kicked out the British two centuries before, but for most of the developing world, from India to the Dominican Republic, emancipation was more recent.

"Indigeneity" was also not much of a concern, since in the modern era of the post-Enlightenment we were all to be recast as individuals, endowed with equal rights and judged exclusively by the content of our character.

How innocent we were! The bad old world­—with its heartless enforcement of the staying in one's own lane­—is back now with a vengeance, courtesy of a so-called progressive movement that is curiously reactionary (which the Oxford dictionary defines as opposition to new ideas). Loud voices from that quarter are dragging us back to obsessions with unchosen tribal identities that some might rather cast off.

This movement sees Western Civilization as a conspiracy by people who are "white" against those who are "of color" (whose designation as such would have been widely considered racist during the Civil Rights era). Argue all you want that skin color is a continuum (plus unimportant), for the true believers in this dogma, white people outside of Europe are seen as "colonizers" no matter what.

This issue is now front-and-center because of the global groundswell of antipathy toward Israel, especially among Western young people, as a result of its war to remove the Hamas group from power in Gaza.

Israel faced an unspeakably barbarous massacre on Oct. 7 from Hamas, which is among the most vicious organizations in the world, and the Gaza war has been devastating to civilians by the group's express design. But the issue is complicated, and many progressives see a binary schematic in which Israel is "colonizing" the land of "indigenous" Palestinians and so is automatically in the wrong. The latest was Pink Floyd icon Roger Waters, who on Piers Morgan's podcast advised Israeli Jews to "say they're sorry" and leave the country.

There are many reasons for this bizarreness, but it is largely driven by the idea that Jews are white and therefore do not belong in the Levant and should "go back" to their home countries.

There are dazzling misconceptions here­—from the fact that Jews mixed with peoples everywhere and are now quite diverse of skin color, to the Arabs' own origin in the Arabian peninsula from which Mohammed's armies invaded the Levant in the 7^th century, to the longstanding Jewish historical ties to the Holy Land, to the reality in which most Israeli Jews literally have nowhere to go and are totally jumbled in their "origin countries."

But the main misconception is the very idea of indigeneity, which can perhaps be deconstructed at some safe remove from the tender sensitivities that animate haters of Israel. Labelling not just Israel but countries like the United States, Australia or New Zealand as colonizers fails to account for the tapestry of human history, with its basically universal context of human migration, conquest, and the nature of nation-building.

Humanity's story begins in Africa. Between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago, hom*o sapiens began to migrate out of there in waves, spreading across the globe. This great diaspora led to the displacement of other species that eventually died out, such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the Denisovans in Asia. As groups of hom*o sapiens searched for food and comfort, there was constant conflict and displacement.

The Indo-European migrations around 4000-1000 BCE reshaped much of Eurasia, bringing technologies and social structures that supplanted or assimilated or mixed with those of local populations. The Bantu expansion across Africa itself (approximately 1000 BCE to 500 AD) spread agricultural practices, ironworking, and languages across vast regions.

It gets more complex­—and yet also strangely simple­—when nations became empires (the Byzantines, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans) that then broke up again into their constituent parts. Who belonged where after centuries of a centralized rule, now gone?

The Roman Empire, which began as a small city-state, expanded through a combination of military conquest and alliances, and in the 2nd century controlled vast territories across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. They subjugated quite a number of peoples, including the Jews (one of them quite prominent) in what is now Israel.

One Roman outpost, whose language today is very close to Latin, is modern Romania, whose culture is quite different from those of its mostly Slavic neighbors. Is Romania therefore a colony? Or does that not count because everyone is white, more or less?

If whiteness is the issue, can we ignore the rise of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century under Genghis Khan? They established the largest contiguous empire in history, stretching from Eastern Europe to East Asia, through brutal military campaigns and the incorporation of diverse peoples into the Mongol administrative and military system.

Looking at the map today and considering the Mongol business, where can it be safe to say that Asiatic peoples are indigenous? Surely not eastern Europe! Is it a question of how far back you go? Because the supposedly indigenous people of America who were treated so brutally by European colonizers are almost certainly from Asia, according to DNA evidence; they just came over long ago, when there was still a land bridge at Alaska. Does that count?

They weren't the only colonizers to be mistaken by well-meaning and self-flagellating white people as indigenous. The Maori of New Zealand arrived there around the 13th century, displacing or integrating with any pre-existing inhabitants. Similarly, the Aboriginal Australians, who are often cited as one of the world's oldest continuous cultures, also have a history of migration and territorial disputes among themselves before Europeans arrived.

The United States and other large countries from France and Germany to China and Japan all involve similar stories of conflict that often featured the submission of predecessor—colonizers. Each has spread cultural, economic, and military influence, and in some cases, it was quite voluntary and beneficial on the receiving end. And other times, not.

The 1948 war that accompanied the establishment of Israel displaced about 600,000 Arabs (who did not, at the time, generally refer to themselves as "Palestinians"­—and whose descendants are today the "Palestinian refugees"). Around the same time, many Jews left the Arab countries­—around 1 million, some voluntarily, many not, most of them leaving everything behind and arriving in Israel as refugees; progressives don't seem to care.

Around the same time, a far larger number of Hindus and Muslims­—up to 15 million­—were displaced during the partition of India; is this forgotten on U.S. campuses because neither side can be considered white? Millions of Germans were displaced after World War II; is this forgotten because all sides could be considered white? Is any of this right?

Yes, white (and other) colonizers did considerable damage all over the world. And yes, certain populations have long histories in specific regions (whatever "long" might mean) and that should count for something. But the simple-minded view that some states are colonizers while others are not fails to recognize the universality of conquest and migration in human history. No group is purely indigenous or uniquely colonial, and indigeneity is not a matter of principle but degree, also intimately tied to the progressive politics of race.

By the way, the migration angst in Europe and North America might also be revised through such a lens. You don't have to let everyone in, that's true­—but let's not pretend you have some natural right to any particular territory. You are enforcing borders, which fosters stability but is also a version of might making right­—not God giving it.

Let's then seek justice where we can reasonably find it and put aside childish nonsense about colonization because even when cloaked in righteous anger or masked by good intentions, ignorance is rarely helpful. I'd go back to the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., who like everybody else who ever lived was not indigenous to America. But he had some good ideas.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.