Rainbow – Photo: Stephen Oakes
By Gurnam Singh | Opinion |
Decolonisation has become something of a buzzword within academia in recent times, with many universities seeking to find ready-made solutions. Mention a toolkit and you will have your hands snapped off. Toolkits can assist on a journey toward decolonisation, but true decolonisation does not work like a sat-nav system; it requires a much deeper dive, a disruption of the certainty of racialised identities, and ultimately, an ontological rebirthing.
The challenge of decolonisation can be compared to a rainbow. The rainbow is real insofar as it is visible to our eyes but only when it rains and the sun shines. Interestingly, the rainbow, with its vivid colours, is said to come from the scattering of white light, but in reality, there is no such thing as ‘white light’, or rather that white light, as we know it, is made up of an infinite shade of colours spanning the spectrum. Put another way, white light represents an obliteration or absence of colour.
Another interesting fact about a rainbow is that when it appears, it is personal to us; which is why the rainbow moves as we move. In other words, it is a perception corresponding to our unique standpoint. And last, in mythology, we are told that there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, which probably means that if we are able to understand the true essence of a rainbow, we may just be gifted with the richness of wisdom, or perhaps we should avoid futile treasure hunts!
So, what does all this mean for decolonisation? It means a realisation that like white ‘colour’ ‘whiteness’ only exists as a negation of something else; it has no inherent properties for itself. However, it can erase all other wavelengths of light by collapsing them together. In other words, other than as a supremacist dehumanising discourse, whiteness has no ontological purpose.
When we realise this, we can realise that just like light, we are all made up of the same essence, but we do, perhaps through birth and experience develop slightly different wavelengths, which is what makes us unique persons. We are the same but we are also different. But relying on our visual sense alone to register our differences is at best problematic, and at worst dangerous.
Decolonisation requires us to see each other holistically, indeed, to see into each other’s souls. The educationalist Henry Giroux suggests that we need to become ‘border crossers’’. In a world where humanity is divided along physical, economic and cultural boundaries , the task of a border crosser is to transcend false identities. This requires an existential shift which I fear toolkits simply can never achieve.
Ultimately decolonisation is the liberation of ourselves, and when we can truly comprehend the tricks that light plays with our perceptions and thinking, we may just be able to realise the true pot of gold, that is the possibility of seeing the Other in non-hierarchical ways, as equals yet with unique personalities.
Gurnam Singh is an academic activist dedicated to human rights, liberty, equality, social and environmental justice. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Warwick, UK. He can be contacted at Gurnam.singh.1@warwick.ac.uk
* This is the opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Asia Samachar.
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