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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...

Read more at michigandaily.com

