Talking Back: Colonized Women & the Colonizing Academy

Mignolo says that the church, the academy, and the museum are the institutions of colonial modernity.

“Gosh,” I think, “That’s two out of three. And it’s not like I don’t plan to work with museums.”

We understand colonial modernity to an imposition of the doctrine (myth) of the Enlightenment. Quijano’s “coloniality of knowledge” was central to this, which is inextricable from the invention of race as a system of superiority and inferiority.

While prejudices and belief about the superiority of one’s group over other groups have existed throughout history, “racism” today derives from “racial science” as developed from Social Darwinism. It was a hierarchy and classification of “race” as a pseudo-scientific concept that was developed alongside and instrumental in global European colonization. A notable example of racial science was Hitler’s concept of the master, Aryan, race. We still see its effects today because colonialism took place over 450 years and affected 84% of the global landmass, which means around 75% of people today. Racial ideology is something that is made up and used to support tremendous violence. When you believe someone is not truly human, you can justify slavery, conquest, and taking power over them (you know better, after all).

“Modernity” developed alongside racism and colonialism. The Enlightenment, in particular, was a movement that ultimately asserted that believing in God and in the supernatural realm was superstition, and that observation and rational thought were supreme. Science, technology, and mastery over race would elevate superior, Enlightened, human beings who would move forward into the future and bring progress to the world. This led to the development of secularism, antagonism towards faith, and liberal theology.

Rationalism had especially devastating effects on the many people around the world who have always believed in the supernatural realm: they were thought to be, primitive, backward and inferior. Their cultures and beliefs needed to be erased to make way for human progress, and, whether as slaves or subjects, they needed to be re-trained to be useful for the project for modernity.

A common evaluation I heard all the time in educational theory was that Europeans, Americans, and the West in general held to natural ability and intelligence while we (diasporic Chinese, alongside other East Asian culture) believed that anyone is able to accomplish anything with education and hard work. While an American might believe that people are just “good at math or not good at math” by nature, we believe that anyone can be good at math. Education systems are developed in such a way that you work, drill, and practice until you are proficient. The driving force and motivation behind this seems to be living under coloniality and believing that you, too, could become human, or equal, or seen, with persistence and grit.

It is only in recent times that I realized that the belief in innate intelligence is so embedded in Western society because it was essential to coloniality. While there are many forms of intelligence, the belief that intelligence is somehow predetermined is in fact based on the same worldview that gave us eugenics. The tropes about innate intelligence, even when they seem benign, are actually racial and gendered. They serve to enforce the already existent, internalized, programming — stereotypes about who is good at what, and who isn’t. For example, many women grow up believing that girls aren’t good enough. A friend told me about a sociology professor who stood up in front of his class and quizzed the students about which race they thought scored the lowest on IQ tests — people still believe this stuff???

It was not long ago that women, Jewish people, Black people, working-class people etc. were believed to have been born of lower intelligence and poor breeding, which is why societal elites believed that entrance tests would effectively bar non-elites from entrance into universities. The university entrance test was born of the idea that simply measuring the intelligence of applicants would prevent Jewish people from being accepted.

From Harvard to Rutgers, Columbia to Tufts, elite colleges and universities began trying anything and everything to control the makeup of their student bodies. Some implemented quotas to limit the number of Jews in new classes. Others focused recruiting in areas they knew had lower populations of Jews, and began looking more closely at extracurricular activities that indicated the social class and religion of applicants. More admissions requirements meant more reasons to turn down students — and a way to mask anti-Semitic school policies.

When Jews won more academic scholarships, schools like Harvard and Yale discontinued them in favor of financial aid. They also embraced the new field of psychological testing, offering tests that measured aptitude and not achievement, such as the Thorndike Tests for Mental Alertness.

“The primitive and biased tests effectively reduced Jewish enrollment [at Columbia] by half,” write education historians Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, noting that many such tests were developed by eugenicists in search of “a purportedly objective way to quantify the structural racism of the day and to have it accepted as scientific.”

In the field of education, I have come to realize that we think of it as a solely intellectual enterprise in that success is attributed to a mixture of talent and hard work. What we don’t realize, in fact, is that how well a person does in college or at any level of formal education has more to do with their emotions and self-belief than we realize. It also has far more to do with their environment, upbringing, and the myriads of social forces at work than we would wish to acknowledge.

Do you know what cripples an individual’s success? Internalized self-belief. Thus, the belief in innate intelligence especially according to race and gender is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It becomes a way to keep people trapped. A girl who grows up believing that she is incapable, stupid and simply “not good” at math and anything else will have no motivation to even try. Why try if you are already afraid, ashamed, and believe that you’re worthless and insignificant? Why ask for a raise if you have always been told to keep your head down, to be meek and obedient rather than assertive?

Low self-esteem creates fear which in turn creates procrastination and emotional paralyses. Self-regulation is a significant factor in success — one’s ability to maintain a positive frame of mind, handle stress, and manage anxiety are probably more important than IQ (which is a made-up construct anyway).

In insular religious communities where the belief that women are easily deceived, unintelligent, and irrational is deeply ingrained in both belief and practice, guilt and self-hatred also run deep. When we belittle someone, we are deliberately crippling them and imprisoning them in their souls and in their minds. Think of all the ways in which we teach women to be ashamed of their voices, their bodies, and their feelings. This is not only grooming for abuse; This is a deliberate way of keeping them inside. Growing up adjacent to Christian fundamentalism, I saw, heard, and read plenty of diatribes against women’s education. Going outside and leaving is a path of rebellion and destruction.

The question that came to me as I reflected on all of the above is: if education and the academy (universities and colleges) are so deeply ingrained in colonial modernity, why should women, and women from the colonized world in particular, have anything to do with these institutions at all? These institutions were built on the construction of the Oriental — our mystique, our primitivity, our backwardness. It is altogether an instrument of domination.

If you have ever thought of yourself as belonging to a particular “race”, you have been “talked to” by coloniality modernity. We have all be “talked to”, and told what our place is.

Given that this is the conversation that is happening, should we be kept from talking back?

The culture I came from is almost a perfect product of colonial values, particularly in relation to knowledge and wealth. I believe in talking back to the university because it is part of the coloniality that permeates every aspect of my life. It is not a choice to “enter” the colonial realm, since we are already structured and shaped by it and have already been consumed within it.

I have every right to speak, because it already shapes the way I am perceived, the opportunities I am given, and the way my voice is (not) listened to.

Think, for example, of all the ways in which we categorize and judge people for having or not having a high school diploma, bachelor’s degree, or doctoral. I am already measured by this system. It creates my place in the world. If you’re a woman of the Global South and the colonized world, your agency is negotiated within this totalizing system, and you seek every chance of agency you can get.

So much of women’s empowerment and the freedom to step outside of immediate abuse is tied to women’s education, and that is not believe we necessarily need to believe the gospel of Enlightened modernity, nor that we need or should seek positions of dominance in the systems to then turn around and do what has been done to us. Say what you like, it does make a difference for women when women are part of the conversations from which laws, policies, and the decisions about distribution of resources are made — not because power is god, but because power is already being exercised with or without them, against them or with the illusion of inclusion (while still being, as a whole, against them). It is not that we seek to be the social/political penetrators, but that differentiation by means of penetration is a reality none can escape.

Voice, agency, existence, and assertion do not constitute violence. There is power within reach to be exercised, and not all power is domination — though domination requires we take a position in relation to it.

Think of the ways in which accumulationism disrupts community life in the Global South. Colonial systems are replicated in that the wealthy hoard both wealth and power, exploiting and colonizing those in their own countries, destroying natural resources and indigenous ways of being in pursuit of the colonial-capitalist dream. We cannot run the risk of doing this again, but this system already replicates itself over and over.

For myself, there is no “outside”. Everything is negotiation. There is no blank slate, no utopia, no freedom. Colonialism has its good side and bad side, its overt abuse and its covert abuse. But whichever side, I still find myself within because our way of being has already been shaped by coloniality for generations. Our entire cultural knowledge as diasporic, place-less, Chinese people is built on negotiating coloniality, and this is all I know. Resistance is never complete, and it always comes from within. This is a reality I don’t even resent, but simply accept.

So yes, women’s education matters. One doesn’t have to believe in the Enlightenment as Lord and Saviour to recognize this.

Education that empowers, and even education that constitutes resistance and talking back still operates within the boundaries of the game. Changing the playing field entirely is too far out of reach, but I am a Foucaldian post-anarchist in that I believe domination is diffused and disparate, and that subversion is not necessarily a grand project or meta-narrative of its own, but “alternatives within the present, at localized points” (Saul Newman). This is why I operate within Christianity and through the language of theology. We all operate with and within some kind of institution to some extent… and perhaps the Western conception of a grand and complete revolution is itself Mignolo’s “master framework dressed in universal clothes”.

We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight.’ Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves… Indeed, if we look around us, and if we look with a different gaze — one that is less focused on
the symbols of sovereignty and the formal institutions of power — we can see the emergence of an alternative conception of the political on the terrain that is (inadequately) referred to as ‘civil society’: not only massive mobilizations against global capitalism and war, but also, at a more micro-political level, diverse affinity groups, autonomous movements, social centres, communes,
independent media centres, political practices, symbolic gestures and direct action techniques. These constitute alternative sites of decision-making and collective action, and alternative forms of political existence. So if we take, as Foucault counsels us to do, a less universalistic and more partisan gaze — the gaze of the militant rather than the jurist or philosopher-king — we find in this alternative and dissenting world, new possibilities of autonomous political life. (Newman, 2010)

… I have suggested that the coloniality of power should not be thought of as a single network of hierarchies, but rather as heterarchical…While many of these struggles have a residual connection to the world-economy, far more are linked to microphysical chains that involve bodies, feelings, and desires. The residual autonomy of the microphysical scale makes itself apparent in global regimes of power. Hierarchical analyses of coloniality often bestow a totalizing power upon the world-system, thus investing it with a sacred character. In fact, ‘hierarchy’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘sacred rule’. Conceiving of the odern/colonial world system as a hierarchy results in its sacralization as a self-constituting power, rather than an understanding of that system as capable of becoming something else. Therefore, Foucault’s greatest contribution to decolonial theory is perhaps the argument that molar analyses, although necessary, run the risk of arriving at a sort of methodological platonism that favours secular trends and longue durée changes while overlooking micro-agencies at the level of body and affect. (Castro-Gómez, 2023).