The story the colonizer tells is about themselves.
The mirror: what Fanon saw when he looked at the alibi. The colonizer is describing themselves. The violence, the irrationality, the inability to be fully human under these conditions — these are produced by colonialism itself, projected onto the colonized as proof that colonialism is justified. The colonizer builds the system. The system produces the symptoms. The symptoms are attributed to the colonized as nature. The colonizer looks in the mirror and sees the colonized. The mirror shows the colonizer back. Fanon's reading: the alibi reveals the one who told it.
Liberation, under these conditions, is not only a political project. It is a psychological one. The colonized person must break free of the need for the colonizer's recognition — must build new categories, new social relationships, new institutions in which different definitions of the human apply. Fanon believed this rupture required violence, and this is the most contested claim in his work. What is not contested is the diagnosis: the colony is inside the colonized person, and liberation requires not just removing the colonizer but dismantling the structure the colonizer has built in the colonized's self-understanding.
Sylvia Wynter spent years trying to write the Caribbean into literary existence — not as backdrop for European stories but as the center of its own history, its own ways of being human. That practice — telling a story about what it means to be human from a position the existing category of the human had excluded — is where the theoretical argument came from. You cannot write Caribbean history seriously without noticing that the people in it have been systematically classified as less than fully human. You cannot notice that without asking who made the classification, when, and for what purpose. When you follow that question far enough, you arrive at the claim: the category of the human itself was constructed to produce the outside.
Medieval Christian Europe understood what human beings were through a theological framework — to be fully human was to be made in the image of God. The Renaissance shifted this. The figure that emerged at the center of European humanism was Man — a rational, self-determining agent, capable of mastering nature through reason. But Man was not a description of the human species. He was a portrait of a specific kind of person — educated, propertied, European, male — whose particular attributes were elevated into the definition of what it means to be fully human. Everyone else was measured against this standard and found deficient.
Wynter calls this overrepresentation: one civilization's self-portrait became the definition of the Human itself. Everyone else was measured against a mirror they didn't make.
There is a version of this argument running through the present moment. The large language model produces the statistical average of human expression — the most probable next word, synthesized from everything that has been written down. It is extraordinarily useful for many things. What it cannot produce is singularity: the specific, irreducible thing that a particular person or community knows that no averaging process can recover. The most important thing about any person is precisely what averaging cannot hold. Wynter's overrepresentation is not a medieval error that modernity corrected — it is a structural tendency that keeps finding new forms, because the systems we build keep reaching for a universal human to optimize against, and the universal human is always someone's self-portrait pretending to be a mirror.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, writing in 1968, called this the system of objects. His insight was precise and unsettling: when you buy into a curated environment, you don't just consume the objects. The objects consume you. You become another element in the arrangement — the subject at the center whose identity must be coherent with the room. The room is not a backdrop. It is a claim about who you are. To inhabit it is to agree to the claim.
This is objectification working in both directions. The objects are stripped of history and specificity — the couch means modern, not the forest the wood came from, not the hands that shaped it. And the person is stripped of the same things: your history, your specificity, your irreducible weirdness — stripped in favor of the legible signal you emit. Not a person individuating in a field. An object completing an arrangement.
The filmmakers were Lana and Lilly Wachowski. They are trans women. The film is about the violence of being handed a representation of your own personhood and told it is more real than your actual experience of being alive — made by people who knew that violence from the inside. For twenty years, the dominant culture watched it as an action film.
Robinson. Wynter. Rodney. Turing. The Basmati farmers. The adivasi forest communities. The knowledge produced on the outside doesn't stay on the outside — and neither do the people. The ones who were handed a representation of themselves and knew it wasn't true are the ones who could see the simulation as a simulation.
Jean Baudrillard described four stages. First: the image reflects something real. Second: it distorts and optimizes what it depicts. Third: it masks the absence of the thing — behaving as though the original is still there when it isn't. Fourth: the image precedes and produces what we call real. You visit the place in order to get the photograph. The experience is the means. The representation is the point.
What those systems were trained on was already a representation of the commons. The part that had passed through every institutional filter, every commercial decision about what was worth preserving. The canopy, carefully photographed. The underground network, absent.
The commons went in. But it was already the image of the commons. What came out is a simulation of that image.