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Thursday, June 18, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
MICHIGAN IN COLOR
Resentment: the
politiciation of emotion to
liberate the colonied
GABRIJELA SKOKO
MiC Managing Edtior
The revolutionary nature of Glen Sean
Coulthard’s book, “Red Skin, White Masks:
Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recogni-
tion,” serves as a salute to radical scholar
Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial work through
its exposure of Canada’s systematic mar-
ginalisation of the Native population. In like
manner, the piece introduces an uncomfort-
able notion of the indoctrinated white val-
ues, instilled to naturalise the corruption of
Indigenous culture and self-value which per-
sist today in relation to the Aboriginals who
suffer from psycho-affective attachments
to colonialism and an internalised justifi-
cation of their own subjugation. Coulthard
proposes that this subconscious surrender-
ing of the Aboriginal people creates a stable
environment for the Canadians’ perpetual,
yet subtle, reproduction of colonialism today.
However, at some point, the colonised
becomes “aware” of the coloniser, birthing
resentment within the colonised, and forcing
progress toward proper recognition and reco
nciliation from the coloniser.
Coulthard expresses modern society’s
colonial persistence as straddled between
the coloniser’s denial of the oppressive
structure and the indoctrinated submis-
sion of the colonised. He does this by prob-
ing the non-Native’s refusal to decolonise
through the implementation of “transitional
justice” in a non-transitional structure and
an ignorance regarding resentment’s politi-
cal value. However, he goes on to challenge
this “unchangeable” system, making use of
Fanon’s embracement of resentment as an
essential instrument in the resurgence of self
and cultural affirmation.
Attempts to reconcile injustices against
Canada’s Indigenous people have taken form
of reparative commissions and elaborate
promises to rectify the unbalanced system,
yet the implementation of these reparations
have failed as result of the non-Natives Con-
tradictory denial of colonial history, and a
palpable refusal to practice their own pro-
posed processes.
Meant to guide the Canadian State
through a somewhat seamless process of
reconciliation, the Royal Commission of
Aboriginal Peoples details a productive prac-
tice of “transitional justice”: an approach
to justice which must take place after the
injustice has ceased and there is a clear dis-
tinction between the time of injustice and
the time following. In Canada, society has
perpetuated a “non-transitional” loop that
maintains the settler-colonial relationship
and erases any distinction between that
of the past, present and future. Coulthard
explains that regardless, Canada wields the
Pride Month meets the
Black Liberation movement
JENNY CHONG
MiC Staff Writer
Graphic by Hibah ChughtaiI
June 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of
the LGBTQ+ Pride traditions, which annu-
ally celebrate freedom of sexual identity and
commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969.
Now more than ever, June is the intersection
point for Pride Month and the Black Lib-
eration movement. There have been many
unofficial intersections between historical
Black Liberation movements and LGBTQ+
progress and vice versa, however the ampli-
fication of the LGBTQ+ Black community is
reaching a possibly unprecedented level of
recognition and support worldwide. Since
the end of May, protesters from all 50 states
and at least 40 other countries in six conti-
nents have taken to the streets to demand an
end to systemic racism and police brutality.
Tony McDade, a Black transgender man,
was shot and killed by a police officer in Tal-
lahasee, Fla., on May 27. As a being whose
identity is dually-oppressed, McDade is
among the many Black transgender people
who have been a victim to anti-LGBTQ+
and anti-Black violence. Less than two
weeks after his death, two Black transgen-
der women, Riah Milton and Dominique
“Rem’Mie” Fells, were killed on the same
day. In 2020 alone, there have been at least 15
violent deaths of transgender or gender non-
conforming people in the United States — the
majority of which were women of color, par-
ticularly Black transgender women.
The names George Floyd, Breonna Tay-
lor and Ahmaud Arbery have been plastered
across hundreds of headlines and memori-
alized by anti-racist allies over the past few
weeks. As always, the energy put towards
supporting the Black transgender commu-
nity pales in comparison. Black transgender
people are disproportionately discriminated
against in housing, employment, healthcare
and policing systems. Nonetheless, main-
stream media and political leaders are com-
plicit in this discrimination and perpetuate
the racist, sexist and transphobic harras-
ment they face on a daily basis.
The Trump administration announced
it will eradicate protections for transgen-
der patients from sex discrimination two
weeks into Pride month. The announcement
occured on the fourth anniversary of the
Pulse nightclub shooting and during the cur-
rent COVID-19 pandemic, when the Black
LGBTQ+ community is being exposed at
large. Healthcare is a fundamental right all
humans should have access to, yet 1 out of 5
transgender or non-conforming people have
reported being denied healthcare on the
basis of their gender. The ruling is not only
a direct attack against trans rights but is also
one which disproportionately affects Black
transgender people. Over 20 percent of Black
transgender people reported to be HIV-posi-
tive compared to 2.64 percent of transgender
people of all races. Black transgender people
are also affected by HIV in far greater num-
bers compared to the general Black popu-
lation and the general U.S. population, 2.4
percent and 0.60 percent, respectively.
Removing protections against discrimina-
tion in healthcare worsens the health crisis
of Black transgender people. Their access
to medication would become more limited
if denied treatment by medical profession-
als, and they would have to resort to using
illegal or non-prescription drugs, which can
put their physical and mental well-being at
a higher risk, while forcing them to practice
criminalized survival.
We must fight for Black LGBTQ+ lives
and LGBTQ+ lives must fight for Black lives.
In order to dismantle systemic racism in all
degrees of civic life, we must not pick which
battles are worth fighting for. All Black lives
matter: It can not be exclusive...
Read more at michigandaily.com
proposal of this transitional system to disas-
sociate past colonialism with their modern-
day cultural hierarchy: “Where there is no
period marking a clear or formal transition
from an authoritarian past to a democratic
present— state-sanctioned approaches must
ideologically manufacture such a transition
by allocating the abuses of settler colonisa-
tion to the dustbins of history.”
Canada relies on the internalised system
and manipulative policy enforcement which
they exhaust to restrict the rights of Indig-
enous people. The enforcement of extin-
guishment, the Modified Rights Approach,
the non-assertion approach and the Jobs
and Growth Bill Act all served as mediums
of institutionalised outlets for Indigenous
subjugation.
Coulthard explains that decorative lan-
guage such as “restorative justice” creates
an environment in which reconciliation
becomes fixated on the “legacy of past abuse,
not the abusive colonial structure itself.”
When colonial corruption is categorized
as historical, it liberates the coloniser from
responsibility in today’s disparate relation-
ship, assuming blame to the colonised who
must have an inability to move on. This
way, the coloniser can maintain their sys-
tematic superiority by disguising the cur-
rent settler-colonial structure as an invalid,
negative emotion harboured by the Natives
toward the non-Natives which prevents the
advancement of their mutual relationship.
In embracing the standpoint of transition-
al justice, the coloniser assumes the Natives’
resentment to be irrational and it is framed
as the primal perpetuator of the social and
political instability at hand. This common
misunderstanding of resentment confuses
the emotion for the subjectively less produc-
tive french term: ressentiment. Ressenti-
ment is “portrayed as a reactive, backward,
and passive orientation to the world;” under
this definition, the once subjugated has been
liberated in a literal sense but fosters this
subjugation in a conscious refusal to move on
from the past, ultimately subjugating them-
selves.
The difference is resentment’s politicised
nature, making it a powerful foundation for
reconciliation. Resentment is formed against
a recognized “enemy of injustice;” recogniz-
ing this “colonial enemy” frees the colonized
from their internalized subjugation and
compels them to revalidate their individual
and cultural worth. Coulthard defines this
Fanon-inspired process as, “a purging, if you
will, of the so-called ‘inferiority complex’ of
the colonized subject … In such a context, the
formation of a colonial ‘enemy’ … signifies a
collapse of this internalized psychic...
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