The Colony

Before I ask you to look at this argument, I want to tell you where I stand.

In 2019 I bought a house. It was built in 1916. It sits at the edge of Chelsea, a working neighborhood in Norfolk, Virginia. Most of the people you see there each day are Black. But most of them do not own homes or live there. The house is right next to the MHI shipyard on one side. It is right next to West Ghent on the other side. West Ghent is mostly white. The line between the two neighborhoods runs behind a 7-Eleven. I paid about $100,000 too much for the house. That pushed up home prices in a place where the middle income is under $45,000 a year. I bought it to open a restaurant. I gain from the very system this chapter is about. I did not see how much until I started reading Robinson. I am not saying this to protect myself from the argument. I am just telling you where I stand. The argument means different things to different people, based on where they stand. I am telling you my spot so you can weigh what I say.

Four readers. They stand in different spots. They look at the same field. They see the same demon. Robinson reads the inside of capitalism. He shows how race lives in the machine. Rodney reads the outside. He shows how the outside was made poor on purpose. Fanon reads the body and the mind. He shows how the colony gets inside the self. Mbembe reads what comes after. He shows how the same logic stays even after the flag comes down. One structure. Four readings. The chapter calls it the colony.

Cedric Robinson asked a question most others were not asking. He did not ask, what wrong is this? He asked, why does the pattern keep coming back? Why must each generation fight the same fight? What is the thing in the structure that keeps making it return, even after each generation wins?

His answer took twenty years to form. It came out in 1983 as a book called Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. For most of the first ten years after it came out, you could not buy it. It was out of print.

Here is the usual story about race and capitalism. Capitalism grew up in Europe. It was built around paid work, private property, and buying and selling. It did not care about skin color. It cared about money and labor, not the bodies doing the work. Then European powers spread out. They met people they wanted to use for work. Then they made up race ideas to excuse that use after the fact. In this story, race was just the excuse. The money system was the real engine. The two could be pulled apart. But that split is not real.

Robinson says this story starts too late. And it pretends things were clean when they never were.

Europeans built race ranks inside Europe first. This came before they built colonies far away. In the Middle Ages and the years after, they sorted their own people into ranks. Welsh, Irish, Slavic, and Jewish people were marked as different kinds of people. They had different ties to the law. They had different ties to land. They had different ties to the use of force. And they had a different place in who counted as fully human. These look a lot like early race ideas. The word slave comes from the word Slav. Many people from eastern Europe were made slaves. This came before African people became the main form of slaves. So this rank did not come from the colonies. It was here first. Capitalism grew out of it.

When capitalism grew out of feudalism in Europe, it kept these rankings. It did not throw them out. It built on them. Some bodies were marked as open for certain kinds of use. Some work got paid. Some work got taken for free. The race ranking did not just excuse this after the fact. It made the taking look like something other than taking. You cannot steal from someone if the system says they are not the kind of person who can own things. You cannot hurt someone if the law says their pain does not count as harm. Robinson called this racial capitalism. He did not mean capitalism plus racism. He meant that capitalism was a race project from the start. Race is not a stain on the machine. Race is part of the machine.

On the plantation, a person is treated as property. Every hour of work goes to the owner. There is no pay. There is no deal. There is no power the worker can use to push back that the law will accept. Making the next set of workers costs the system nothing. The enslaved person's body makes the next generation. That work is taken for free too. It is not paid, and it does not show up in the books. The system pushes all the risk onto others. This is capitalism taken to its far end. It takes the costs of making more workers and pushes them all away. And it crushes any power the workers could build.

This system needed race. Race did not come later as an excuse for how money was already being made. Race came first. It made those money arrangements possible. Race did not explain why the plantation was okay. Race is what made the plantation exist.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a book called Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. He took this idea further. He asked a hard question. White workers and Black workers needed many of the same things. So why did white workers keep siding with their race instead of their class? Du Bois said the system gave white workers something real. Not extra money. A kind of social pay. They got to count as fully human. They were protected by law. They could be seen in politics. They were spared the worst, cruelest treatment. They counted as people whose pain mattered. Du Bois called this the wages of whiteness. This pay was real. But taking it cost something. To get it, a white worker had to act like he was part of the class above him. He had to side with the bosses and the owners. But the bosses wanted very different things than he did. He had to treat Black workers not as people on his side but as the thing he was not. Taking this pay made the people who took it worse. Every day, they had to keep up a loyalty that hurt them in money terms. In return they got a status that kept them safe in social terms. The system offered this trade on purpose. It needed the working class split apart. The split is what it got. One action does both things at once. It pulls one group together by pushing the other group out of being human. This is not saying white people are sick. It is saying the system is built a certain way. The system is set up so that siding with your race pays off faster than siding with your class. That setup has never been taken apart.

I saw this happen in a room.

Norfolk has neighborhood meetings. I went to a few. I bought a home in a neighborhood called Chelsea. Chelsea is mixed up in a way that matters. Walk through it at three in the afternoon, and most people you see are Black. The MHI shipyard workers heading home after their shift. The people at the 7-Eleven. The people out on the streets. But look at who owns the homes, who lives there, and who is signed up to vote. That is a different picture. The people who fill Chelsea every day do not live there. They live spread out in the suburbs, where the cheaper housing is. And there is no bus stop in Chelsea. Not one. No buses or trains at all. This spreading out is not by chance. Workers who cannot settle in a neighborhood cannot become a voting group in that neighborhood. The people who are there every day, whose work built the place, whose being there makes it what it is, have no neighborhood meeting to go to. They are used up by the place but never part of it. So the people at the neighborhood meetings were mostly white. When they talked about the neighborhood, their neighborhood, the one they lived in, I saw fear on their faces. Not fear of one clear thing. Fear of the whole situation. Fear of the people they could see but could not explain. Fear of a past they felt but did not know. Fear of the 7-Eleven, which sold more than any small shop nearby, because the workers ending their shift knew not to walk into a wine bar. Fear of the thing they were, in a way, part of. Then I would see those same people at the dive bar across the street on a Friday night. Laughing. Relaxed. Fine.

The wages of whiteness do not need you to believe in them. They do not need you to think it through. They only need you to sense which spaces are yours, and which spaces make you watch yourself. The body knows before the mind does. The neighborhood meeting switched that watching on. The dive bar did not. It is a social pay, and the pay is ease. Other people pay the cost. They are the very people whose being at the meeting you were, deep down, afraid of.

Capitalism said some people did not count as human. Those people were more than just victims of racial capitalism. From where they stood, they could see how race ran the system. People inside the system could not see this. You cannot miss the race rules of capitalism if you are treated as property inside it. Being on the outside brings pain. It also brings understanding. The outside lets you see clearly how the system really works. The people inside are set up so they do not see it.

Robinson called this the Black radical tradition. It is the thinking, the politics, and the culture that grew up under slavery and under colonial rule. People built ideas from a spot where the system never meant ideas to come from. Du Bois was part of it. So were the thinkers who studied the Haitian Revolution and saw it as a class revolution — before left-wing thinkers in Europe had the words for it. So were the ones who named the three-way load of race, gender, and class, many years before the word intersectionality existed. The tradition kept going and kept growing. From the outside, it built the case. The case was that the system needed to keep them outside. Over many years, the line held. Each thinker's work was picked up by the next.

In 1694, Portuguese colonial forces destroyed Palmares. Palmares was a quilombo in northeast Brazil. It was a community of people who had escaped slavery. It stayed free for almost a hundred years. At its largest, about twenty thousand people lived there. A king led it. He ruled together with a council. Each settlement chose people to sit on that council. They farmed the land in common. They defended it together. They traded with nearby villages on their own terms. Palmares lasted through constant attacks because it had built the ways of governing that let people act together. Ostrom would know it right away. It was a clear community with its own rules. People watched to make sure rules were kept. They had ways to settle fights. They had steps for dealing with people who broke the rules. It was a commons built where the rulers had set everything up to stop one from forming. That is magic in the real sense. Singular people came together and made something the system swore could not be made. One act. Break the plantation's rules. Live the new world now, as if it were already here. Palmares is not a small note to the Black radical tradition. It shows what that tradition is. People the system said were not human built careful, shared self-rule. Their place on the outside forced them to see clearly what shared self-rule takes.

Palmares was one form. The continent it remembered held many more — too many to name here, each ruling itself in its own way. A few, to show the range. The Igbo live in what is now southeastern Nigeria. They ruled themselves for hundreds of years with no central state. They used village councils, age-grade groups, and women who ran the markets. Settling fights was spread out on purpose. The Akan peoples of West Africa held land through the mother's line. The wealth belonged to the family line, not to one person. The Kingdom of Kongo ran a large realm through councils stacked in layers. This was in place before the Portuguese came in 1483, and it lived on for generations after the first upheaval. The Mbuti of the Ituri forest lived by sharing gifts and agreeing together. No chiefs. No fences. This is the refusal that keeps the commons safe. These were not getting ready for Europe to show up. They were what the continent already was when Europe came. They were working systems with rules for using land, passing it on, and settling fights. Ostrom would know them right away. A clear community. Its own rules. People watching to keep them. Ways to settle fights. The forms look different. The basic build of a working commons is the same.

Walter Rodney saw from a different outside.

In 1972, Rodney wrote a book. It was called How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. His main idea changes how we talk about Africa. Africa was not poor by chance. People made it poor on purpose. They used clear methods. We can name those methods and trace them.

Before the slave trade, there was Great Zimbabwe. It was a city with stone walls. It stood in what is now southern Zimbabwe. It was the center of a state. That state controlled gold trade routes. The routes linked the inside of Africa to the Swahili coast. They went on to the Arab world, to India, and later to China. People started building it in the eleventh century. It was at its best in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The walls used no mortar. People cut and fit the stones with great care. This skill took many generations to learn. At its peak, about eighteen thousand people lived there. European colonizers came hundreds of years later. They would not believe that Africans built it. They said maybe the Phoenicians or Arabs built it. They said anyone but the people who lived in Zimbabwe. This was not by accident. Racial capitalism needs this kind of thinking. It refuses to see that Africans could build and grow such things. To take a place, you first make it seem empty. Making it seem empty is the spell. Taking it comes next.

The Atlantic slave trade took people from Africa. About twelve million people, over about four hundred years. Those people came from a whole world. It had cities and trade networks. It had ways to govern millions. It had the skill that fit walls with no mortar. All of that was lost with them. The harm was even bigger than the number shows. For each person shipped away, more died. They died in raids. They died in pens on the coast. They died in the crossing. In the worst hit places, the number of people went down for generations. The money harm made the people harm worse. The trade built African politics around raiding for slaves, not making things. It broke the teamwork that let people grow. It made Africans depend on European goods. That left African makers needing imports. The trade did more than take people. It rebuilt the whole land around what Europe wanted. Then came full colonial rule. By 1900, European powers ruled almost the whole continent. One thing shows how it worked. They built railways to link mines and farms to ports. They did not build them to link African cities to each other. The roads all pointed out. They tied Africa to Europe, not Africa to itself. The colonies were not their own economies. They were just supply lines for someone else's economy. The plan was written on the land in steel.

When the colonial flag came down, one question stayed. What would take the place of the system that took from Africa? Or what would even be allowed to? People tried some answers. In Tanzania, a program called ujamaa built farming around the big-family village. The land was shared. The work was shared. The people in the village ran it. But there were conditions tied to the loans. Rodney was tracing those conditions. The villages fell apart. The same thing keeps happening. African food movements, small farm co-ops, and herding groups in the Sahel all share land, water, and herds. Debt rules written in Washington squeeze them. Land deals paid for elsewhere squeeze them. The same system Rodney named squeezes them. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa now works across the continent. It defends shared seeds against patented single-crop farming. It defends them against the trade rules built to force that farming. This is the same thing Federici saw in Europe. There, the shared lands of peasants were destroyed. People build something new, but it is always under attack. Each shared system they rebuild must be defended against the same forced emptying.

The debt trap kept the same aim, but used money to do it. In the 1980s and 1990s, the IMF and World Bank made a deal with African governments. They would help with debt, but only on terms. The governments had to drop trade rules that protected them. They had to let in foreign money. They had to cut public services to pay the debt.

In Ghana, the deal said the cocoa marketing board had to go. That board was a state body. It gave Ghana's cocoa farmers some power to bargain over world prices. Those farmers had grown cocoa for generations. Now they had to sell straight into a market. A few big multinational traders ran that market. The prices were set in London. The farmers' power to bargain was gone. The taking went on. There is a way to take from a field that takes the crop. There is another way that takes the whole field. The colonial time took the crop. It took cocoa, labor, and ore. It held that taking in place by force. The new deal took the field. The marketing board was like a seed bank. It held the saved power to start again on your own terms. The public services were like the water in the soil. Burn those out, and the land does not just grow less. It loses the power to come back, year after year, no matter how hard the people work. Land that is drained on purpose does not heal on its own. Whoever burned out the seed bank owes the seed. That is the case for reparations. It is not a gift for bad luck. It is paying back for something that was taken.

The question is not why is Africa poor? That makes it sound like poverty just happens. The real question is this. Who gains from this setup? And what keeps it going? Those questions have answers. The answers are clear and exact.

He was killed in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1980. A bomb was hidden in a walkie-talkie. He was thirty-eight years old. For years he had criticized his government. He said it gave in to imperial powers. That government set up his death.

Being exact is why he is still a fight to talk about. It is also the only way the argument works. Vague talk about racism in the system is easy to brush off. Exact claims are harder. This method, this taking, this setup of who gains. Those force a response. In the past, that response was sometimes a bomb in a walkie-talkie. More often it is this: there is nothing we can do.

I heard that phrase a lot in Chelsea.

The trash in my neighborhood was clearly worse than in West Ghent, two blocks away. Shipyard trucks drove through our streets. They left a mess. No one cleaned it up. I told the city leaders. I told the shipyard bosses. White men with power said they were sorry. Then they did nothing. "Nothing we can do," they said. My white neighbors said the same. The neighborhood group said the same. "Nothing we can do" is like a magic spell. When people say it the same way over and over, the spell gets harder to break. Say it slowly enough, and it turns into a wall that stays.

What made me angry — and still does — was knowing what the shrug really meant. It did not mean they could not help. It meant they had chosen whose problems were worth fixing. For more than a hundred years, people built up the lack of care in Norfolk's mostly Black neighborhoods on purpose. They did it through redlining. They did it through tearing down neighborhoods. They did it through where they put highways. They did it through keeping schools apart by race. The shrug is how you keep all that going. You have the power, and you keep it going by doing nothing.

The shrug is meant to stop a question. Rodney keeps asking it. Who is helped by the way things are? And what keeps it that way?

Robinson and Rodney say different things. But they look at the same system. Robinson shows how race works inside capitalism. Race makes it look like workers are not being used unfairly when they are. And when white workers get small rewards for being white, it splits workers apart so they do not stand together. Rodney shows what capitalism does to the lands it takes from. It keeps them poor on purpose. The machine that does this keeps going, even when it changes shape.

Here is what links the two stories. Race matters in both. Race decides who gets left out. Race is the spell that makes stealing look like something else. And race makes the people who were robbed believe a lie. They are told their hard life is just the way things are. But it was made that way by people, over time.

Robinson's book was kept from being printed. Rodney was killed. One man's idea was ignored. The other man was murdered. But the idea lived on. It lived because the thing it describes is still going on. And the people who live inside it still see it clearly. It did not stay outside.

Think about where you live. Look at it by race — but not just who lives there now. Look at its past. Whose land was taken? Whose homes were torn down? Whose work built the things around you? And if you gained from this: what does that mean you owe? Not guilt. Just clear thinking. You can find the facts. The real question is what you do with them.

I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Not the old Richmond from history books. The city history had already passed by. Big things happened there long ago. Then they were over. The people around me had stopped trying to take part. To them, history was finished. No one would win anything anymore. The people I grew up near had one way of acting. I call it the shrug. It means expecting little. They learned it. Then they taught it to their kids. Each new group of kids learned it too. This is the same shrug from earlier in this chapter. The city officials did it in their meeting rooms. They ran out of things to say. It is the same move. But it starts sooner than you would guess. It starts with an arm yanked hard. It starts with a slap to the back of the head. A child learns what is possible. The child learns it before they even know to ask.

The shrug comes in many forms. One kind is quiet. A person turns a shoulder away. Their eyes do not quite meet yours when you bring up an idea. One kind is loud. Some people punish those who do not shrug. They do this most to children. They do it most when children will not give up. Arms get yanked. Heads get slapped. I have watched a child learn this, right in front of me. Close enough to see why someone would say this country is built on child abuse. The colony does not only live in the ones it hurts. It also lives in the people who run the shrug. They pass it down. They force it on anyone who will not act it out.

Fanon saw this clearly. The sickness went both ways.

In 1953, a young mind doctor named Frantz Fanon came to a hospital. He was twenty-eight years old. The hospital was called Blida-Joinville. It was forty kilometers outside Algiers. He set up his ward. He began to take patients.

In a few months, he was treating both sides.

French soldiers came in. They had bad fear and worry. They could not sleep. They could not stop doing certain acts. They told him what they had done in the rooms where they hurt people. Some spoke in a cold, flat way. Some were very upset. Algerian townspeople came in too. They were broken in other ways. He would later name what he saw. These were the marks left on people. They had been hurt on purpose for years. They had been shamed on purpose for years. They had been told they were not human, again and again. He was treating the one who hurt people and the one who was hurt. Both came to the same building. Sometimes in the same week.

Here is one case. A French officer was sent in by his bosses. He had been having violent fits at home. He was beating his wife. That was the problem he came in for. Over a few visits, more came out. The man's job was to question people and hurt them. He described his methods in an exact, expert way. He was proud of how well he did it. He told Fanon why he was there. He wanted to fix his nerves. Then he could go back to his work in Algeria. He said this with no shame. Fanon helped him as well as he could. So he was treating this man as a patient. But this same man was the one hurting his other patients. Fanon saw something. The sickness of the one needed the sickness of the other. The same system made both. Here is what made Fanon one of a kind. He saw that both sides were hurt by the same system. You could not fix the people alone. You had to fix the thing that made them this way. Fanon was not a thinker far off from it all. He was a doctor reading signs. What he found was a sick society.

Fanon was raised on a promise. The promise said anyone could become civilized. You just had to take on its ways. It said the gap between a colonial subject and a citizen could be closed. You closed it with school and good manners. But the promise had rules it would never admit. His book is Black Skin, White Masks. It came out in 1952. It holds his ideas in their first form. In it, a young Black thinker looks at his own life from inside. He asks what it does to you. You are raised in a culture. That culture says you are less. You start to believe it about yourself. You spend your life trying to prove it wrong. You try to prove it to people whose view you do not need. And yet you cannot stop wanting it.

Here is the main idea. The colonized person is not just held down from outside. Colonial rule reaches into the self. It makes a certain kind of person. This person has taken in the colonizer's view of them. They cannot move through the world without that view in mind. They feel their own life through the boxes the colonizer gave them. This is not the person's own fault. It is what the system was built to make.

Think about how this feels from inside.

Imagine you are an Algerian. France rules Algeria. The schools teach French history as if it is your history. In that story, your people look backward. The story says you need to be made civilized. The law calls you a subject, not a citizen. You live in the land. But you do not get the rights that Europeans get. Jobs follow the same color line. The best-paid jobs go to Europeans. The jobs with skills go to Europeans. The jobs with legal protection go to Europeans. Your neighborhood is kept apart from the European ones. The land keeps you apart. The police keep you apart, with everyday harm. You live in this world every day.

Every day you face a system. It has already decided what you are. You can fight back. But then they say you are violent and wild. You can go along with it. But then they say you were born to be ruled. They say you are not ready to rule yourself. There is no spot inside the system where you can prove them wrong. The system decides which acts even count. You did not pick this trap. But living in it every day, for years, hurts you in a real way. Fanon saw this in the hospital. He saw fear that would not stop. He saw people who felt cut off from themselves. He saw bodies sick from the strain. He saw harm turned inward. He saw a deep tiredness. These were people who spent their lives inside a system. The system said they were not fully human. Yet it still made them take part.

The clinic was about more than health. It was about power. The sickness he treated came from the colony.

The colonizer tells a story. The story is about him.

Here is the excuse. The colonizer says the labels are true. He says the colonized really are made to be ruled. He says they are lazy. He says they are wild and backward. He says they are not ready to rule themselves. He says the violence is sad but it helps them grow up. This story is told to the world. It is told back home. Most of all, it is told to the colonized. The colonizer wants to believe it. But it works best when the colonized believe it too.

Here is what Fanon saw in that excuse. The colonizer is really describing himself. The violence. The wildness. The trouble being fully human. The colony itself makes all of this. Then it gets pinned on the colonized. And that is used to say the colony is fair. The colonizer builds the system. The system makes people sick. Then the sickness is called the nature of the colonized. The colonizer looks in the mirror and sees the colonized. But the mirror shows the colonizer. Fanon read it this way. The excuse points back at the one who told it. So freedom here is more than a political fight. It is also a fight in the mind. The colonized person must stop needing the colonizer to approve of him. He must build new ways to think. He must build new bonds and new groups. In them, a new idea of what it means to be human can hold. Fanon thought this break needed violence. That is the most argued-over part of his work. But few argue with what he saw. The colony lives inside the colonized person. So freedom is not only sending the colonizer away. It also means tearing down what the colonizer built inside how the colonized see themselves.

Michael Taussig sees the same mirror in the image. His book is called Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. In it he looks at the rubber boom in the Putumayo. Awful things were done to native people there about a hundred years ago. He calls it a "culture of terror." The terror was not a mistake. It was how the rubber was taken. The colony made something else too, along with the dead. It made the "wild man." The West said the people it hurt were savage and full of dark magic. It put onto them all the things it did not want to see in itself. The wildness was made up. Then it was blamed on the victims, as if it were just their way. But Taussig follows it on. Years later, a healer fought back. The book calls him José García. He took that "wild" mask the West had pinned on him. He used it to heal. The spell was turned back on the ones who cast it.

Algeria threw Fanon out in 1957 for his political work. He went to Tunisia. He worked for the FLN's outside mission. He became their envoy to Ghana. At thirty-five, he learned he had leukemia, a blood cancer. He spoke the book The Wretched of the Earth out loud to his wife Josie. She wrote it down. It took ten weeks. He was dying the whole time. He was flown to Bethesda, Maryland to try a new treatment. He died there in December 1961. He was thirty-six. He was far from Algeria, the land he had helped set free. His body was flown back. He is buried in Algeria.

Foucault could not ask one question. Achille Mbembe was shaped to ask it. Mbembe grew up in Cameroon in the 1960s. The country was free on paper. It had a flag. It had a president who gave speeches about ruling itself. But French money still shaped the economy. And French power still shaped its politics. A new country like this makes deals with the powers that could still hurt it. Cameroon was run by Ahmadou Ahidjo. He held power with a security force and with Paris's approval. The freedom was real. But it was only part of the way there. Growing up like that gave Mbembe a clear view. He was not openly ruled by others, like under the old colony. But he was not really free either. His country had the look of self-rule, but not yet the full thing. From that gap, he could see something Foucault missed. Foucault only worked from the European side. Foucault described how power manages life. But that kind of power sits on an older base. Foucault never looked at that base. Mbembe could see what it was. He was born in Otélé, Cameroon, in 1957. That same year France was crushing the Union des Populations du Cameroun. This was the group that wanted independence. It had pushed for it since the 1940s. France killed tens of thousands in that fight. For many years France refused to admit it. His parents were part of the struggle. Independence came in 1960. The French flag came down. But the violence went on under new rulers. His father was Ruben Um Nyobè. He started the UPC and led it. France tried for ten years to kill him. French troops shot him dead in 1958, the year after Mbembe was born. His father told him it would be safer to go away for a while. So Mbembe went to Paris. There he studied French thinkers: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan. At the same time he wrote the history of the fight against colonial rule in southern Cameroon. He was learning the colonizer's sharpest thinking tools. And he was learning what they could and could not see.

He went back to Africa. He went to Dakar. He led CODESRIA. That is the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. He was building a place for African thinkers, based on the continent itself, not in the old ruling country. He traveled through the region. From a plane window, he saw South Africa for the first time. He did not remember the violence the country was known for. He remembered the swimming pools. From way up high, he could read the race map of Johannesburg. He saw it as a spread of blue rectangles. They were thick in the white suburbs. They were gone everywhere else. That water cost more than most families spent on food in a week. It just sat still in private holes in the ground, for fun. From the air, the colony was clear. It asked: whose body gets to be comfortable? He moved to Johannesburg. Apartheid was over. People were trying to build something new in the wreck of a system made to destroy them. He has been writing from there ever since.

Foucault showed how power works today. It does not work mostly by killing. It works by managing life. It controls bodies. It shapes sex. It runs whole groups of people. The modern state is a machine for managing life. This was true and it mattered. But Foucault built this from Europe alone. He left out the colony. In the colony, life is not managed the same way. The violence is open. The safeguards given to people back home are not given there. That was outside his view. Foucault's question was: how does power make life useful? Mbembe asks a different one, from the colony. Whose life is worth making useful? And whose life can be left open to harm?

His 2003 essay is called Necropolitics. It names something Foucault's ideas could not hold. It is the power to decide whose death is okay. Sometimes that means who gets killed. More often it means who is left without help. No legal rights. No working roads or services. No safety from harm. So staying alive is never sure. This is what necropolitics means: the basic power that all of the state's care for life sits on top of. The colony is the first place this kind of power was used. But the colony is not an odd exception. It is the base. The state's power to make citizens and rules comes from one older power: the right to choose which deaths are okay. Everything else rests on that first choice.

The West Bank is Mbembe's most worked-out present-day case. It is a place ruled by Israel. Palestinian movement is checked at checkpoints. The army's rules come before normal law. The roads and buildings are not made to help Palestinian life. They are made to manage Palestinians as a threat. Settlements are built on land taken from others. Roads go around Palestinian towns. They link the settlements to Israel. They cut Palestinian land into small, cut-off pieces. This makes life unsafe on purpose. In such a place, daily life can be taken away at any time. The choices are made by people who have decided your life is a problem to manage, not a life to keep alive.

The prison in the United States is another case. By the 1990s, it was this kind of death-space, built at home. In 1971 there were 200,000 people in American prisons and jails. By 2008 there were 2.3 million. Far too many of them were Black and Latino. They lived with violence, sickness, and a kind of lasting civic death. No one person made this happen. The choices were spread out. Across prosecutors. Across lawmakers. Across police. Across judges. No single person chose it. But the result was chosen. It was built into ten thousand small choices that all went the same way.

The left-behind neighborhood is another case. In 1968, the Kerner Commission gave a warning. It said American cities were splitting into "two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal." It asked for big spending on city roads, housing, and public services. The response was the opposite. The exact things the commission named got their money cut. Fifty years later, those same neighborhoods are still there. Hospitals closed. Schools short on money. Pollution piled up in one place. Help slow to come when you call. No one announced this as a plan. It came from the weight of many choices made somewhere else about whose lives were worth spending on. The colonial way of thinking lives on. Now it shows up as which deaths are okay in the budget.

I saw this way of thinking at work in a meeting room.

At the time, I was president of the neighborhood league. Shipyard workers left the MHI lot in Chelsea. They drove fifty miles an hour where the limit was twenty-five. The neighborhood business group tried to fix this for over a year. We got stop signs put in. Drivers ignored them. We asked for police to watch during the worst hour, three to four in the afternoon. We were told no officers could be spared. We asked for speed bumps. A city official told us, in the meeting, that in other neighborhoods like ours, speed bumps made it worse. People would damage their cars rather than slow down, he said. We asked about physical barriers. That's not realistic. They ran out of words before they could face what they were doing.

What they said instead was: nothing we can do. Nothing we can do. Nothing we can do. That line is not really about what they can do. It is a choice about whose lives are worth the effort. They cannot say that out loud. So they say it this way instead.

Robinson and Rodney named the structure. Fanon and Mbembe named what the structure does to the person inside it. These are two moves of the same demon. Incantation is a spell cast on the mind. It is slow talk that turns the way things are into the way things must be. Race becomes the label that makes the taking look normal. Nothing we can do, said until it sounds like a plain fact. Inscription does to the body what incantation does to the mind. It carves the structure into the flesh. Into the nerves. Into how you walk. Into how you look at things. Into the quiet sense of which places are yours and which ones make you stay on guard. The arm yanked. The shrug learned young. The shoulders drop where the body has been told it can rest. They tighten where it has been told it cannot. Paulo Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968, while living in exile from Brazil. He held the harder truth: both sides of the line are marked. The body of the oppressed is marked where it is hurt. Their mind is taught the story that makes the hurt look like nature. The body of the oppressor is marked where it is at ease. Their mind is taught the story that makes the ease look earned. Different marks. The sickness Fanon treated walked into his clinic from both sides of the line, and there was a reason for that. This is why getting rid of the colonizer is not yet freedom. The colony in the mind. The colony in the bone. The flag comes down. The mark on the body stays. The spell on the mind stays. The work is to break both.

This is why the commons built in these places refuses more than just a way to run money. Palmares refused the plantation's claim that its people were property. The Zapatista self-rule zones refused the Mexican state pulling away its protection. The Crown Heights mutual aid network refused the neighborhood being left behind. They stocked the fridge on the sidewalk. They stayed after the crisis was over. They learned each other's names. None of these groups held a meeting to argue the deep question. They just answered it in a different way, in what they did, every day. Undo the mark on the body. Break the spell on the mind. Tear open the terrain. All three at once. That is what getting free really takes.

I don't feel guilt, exactly. Guilt just sits there and does nothing. What I feel is this: the least I can do is say something, clearly, to people who trust me enough to listen. I am helping my friends unlearn white supremacy. It is very hard. It is the best thing I can think to do from where I stand. The colony in the mind comes apart the same way it was built. One talk at a time. But the frame that decides which talks count is older than the talk. The next chapter goes there.