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It is a moral quandary

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Gosh, I have no idea where to start. I’m well aware that most of what we’ve read this week will resonate more strongly with some people than with others simply through personal experiences of racism and such. At this point I’m truly speechless. Fanon and Cesaire leave me feeling so sad, so disheartened, so…incapable. Not simply as a victim of colonialism as part of a group colonized, because as Cesaire explains, we have all fallen victim to its venomous injection of a not-so-bright future, but more importantly how every single one of us is stuck with the current problems left by our predecessors. And even still we support, even when we do not intend to, the very same structures that continue to oppress other human beings.

After reading these works I feel it is important to revisit our earlier class discussion where Saqib and Christine introduced the dichotomous tensions between selfishness and selflessness. I’m beginning to think there is more substance to this concept than the class might have wanted to consider. At one point Cesaire states, “I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics.” I see this statement as clearly the central dilemma that allowed colonialism to thrive and its structures to continue to this day. To establish certain rights of all men would require a moral establishment of selflessness. Why was it that many classmates denied or rejected this idea earlier in the semester. I wonder if those who opposed approaching the oppression of the proletariat as a moral quandary would still venture to say that is it not…

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