National IQ scores as estimated by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in their book “IQ and Global Inequality” (2006: 51-61). This work has been widely negatively reviewed by colleagues for its poor methodology, accuracy and speculative conclusions. In 2020 the European Human Behavior and Evolution Association formally concluded that “[a]ny conclusions drawn from analyses which use these data are therefore unsound, and no reliable evolutionary work should be using these data.” (EHBEA 2020).

Let us, for the sake of argument, take the race realists at their word. Let us accept the contested, disputed, methodologically embattled claim that IQ tests measure something real, stable, and heritable across populations and that aggregate scores differ meaningfully between racial groups. Let us set aside the substantial scientific literature showing that the a priori categories of “Black” and “White” do not map cleanly at all onto genomic reality, that genetic diversity within the group called Black Africans exceeds that of the entire rest of the human species combined, and that group differences in IQ scores correlate far more reliably with access to nutrition, education, and freedom from chronic stress than with anything we actually discovered in the genome. Let us set all of that aside.

Let us grant the hierarchy: East Asians at the top, Ashkenazi Jews as the apex of the white cluster, white Europeans next, and black Africans at the bottom. Let us treat this not as a racist fantasy dressed in the language of science, but as a brute empirical fact, a truth too uncomfortable for polite society but courageous enough for the intellectually honest. Now let us follow the logic.

East Asian IQ

If IQ is destiny, if as race realists seem to believe higher intelligence reliably produces civilizational superiority, then East Asian civilizations should have dominated the world. And in many respects, they did. China invented writing, gunpowder, the compass, paper money, cast iron, and ocean-worthy vessels capable of crossing oceans centuries before Europeans managed the Atlantic. Japan and Korea absorbed and extended these inventions with extraordinary sophistication. These are not the achievements of a cognitively disadvantaged people.

And yet. Chinese admirals did not enslave the populations of Africa. Their fleets did not colonize other continents to work its people to death in silver mines, and ship the profits home. Merchants did not establish plantation economies built on the systematic dehumanization of imported human beings and destruction of biodiversity. The most technically capable civilizations on earth, possessing ships and navigational tools that their competitors lacked, looked out at the wider world and largely declined to conquer it.

The race realist has no satisfying answer to this. If intelligence explains white expansion and empire, why did the highest-IQ populations on the planet not produce the grandest empires? The technology was there. The organizational capacity was there. Something else was not, or rather, was there something else present that the European case lacked?

The uncomfortable implication for the self-declared whites

This brings us to the awkward upper middle of the intelligence hierarchy: white Europeans. Smart enough to build the ships. Smart enough to develop the navigational mathematics, the cartography, the gunpowder weapons. Smart enough, in short, to do or imitate what East Asians had already figured out how to do, but apparently not smart enough to stop themselves from using those tools to inaugurate five centuries of colonial genocide, chattel slavery, ecological devastation, and the deliberate dismantling of functioning societies across four continents.

Race realists invoke IQ differences to argue against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Their concern, stated plainly, is that black people may be receiving jobs or university places for which they are not the most qualified candidates. This troubles them deeply. It strikes them as a distortion of meritocracy, an unfairness to the system. But a consistent application of their own logic demands that we ask: what has European cognitive capacity actually produced, when given unchecked institutional power? The Transatlantic Slave Trade. The Congo Free State. The Scramble for Africa. The Doctrine of Discovery. The enclosure of lands across all continents. The invention of industrial warfare, culminating in two world wars that killed approximately one hundred million people in the span of thirty years. The development of nuclear weapons. The construction of an economic system, i.e. capitalism as practiced, that has produced extraordinary wealth alongside extraordinary immiseration, and which now threatens the habitability of the planet itself.

If we are going to hold cognitive capacity responsible for civilizational outcomes, then the civilizational outcomes of European modernity – or, if you prefer, ‘white genius’ - look less like the fruits of superior intelligence and more like the consequences of a species clever enough to build weapons of mass destruction but not quite wise enough to put them down.

The alleged deficit at the bottom

Now consider the group the race realists rank lowest: those named by self-proclaimed whites as black people. Sub-Saharan African pre-colonial civilizations were not characterized by the global projection of destructive power. No African empire embarked on a campaign of intercontinental racially motivated enslavement. No African fleet arrived on foreign shores to work the local population to death in mines and plantations. The extraordinary linguistic, religious, agricultural, artistic diversity of African cultural traditions produced societies that were, on the whole, adapted to their environments in ways that sustained those environments rather than consuming them.

This is not romantic primitivism. African civilizations had wars, hierarchies, violence, and injustice, as all human societies do. But they did not produce the particular pathology of European modernity: the drive to reduce the entire planet to a resource extraction operation, to convert forests and peoples and cultures into financial abstractions, to accumulate surplus not for any human purpose but as an end in itself.

If “lower IQ” produces this outcome, i.e. relative ecological harmony, cultural robustness, the absence of world-historical destructive ambition, then the race realist framework has inadvertently constructed an argument for the adaptive superiority of the bottom of its own hierarchy.

The Ashkenazi paradox

Here the argument arrives at its sharpest and most dangerous edge, and it must be handled with care. Not because the conclusion is antisemitic, but because it demonstrates precisely how racist logic, followed consistently, produces antisemitism.

The race realist literature consistently identifies Ashkenazi Jews as the highest-IQ subgroup within what they have constructed as the white European cluster (N.B.: It has to be noted that before the Holocaust the whiteness of Ashkenazi Jews was not a given at all, Jews were generally not considered white, but they are by contemporary race realists). This high IQ is deployed as an explanation for Jewish overrepresentation in academia, law, medicine, and finance. It is meant as a compliment, a concession to the uncomfortable truth, and as proof that race realist are not antisemite white supremacists.

But the same framework, applied consistently, produces an uncomfortable question. The State of Israel, designed in significant part by Ashkenazi Jewish intellectuals, has in its management of the Palestinian question constructed a political and territorial arrangement that much of international law and the majority of the world’s governments regard as a sustained violation of human rights. It is a project of considerable organizational and legal ingenuity. It is also, by many measures, a catastrophe, for Palestinians above all, but also increasingly for Israelis and Israel itself, which has maneuvered itself into a position of permanent siege, international delegitimization, and internal democratic erosion.

If the highest-IQ group among those deemed ‘white people’ produces an extraordinarily sophisticated political architecture that also turns out to be a strategic and moral trap, then what exactly is the race realist’s model of the relationship between intelligence and wisdom? Between cognitive capacity and the ability to act in one’s own long-term interest, let alone anyone else’s?

The race realist, of course, does not intend to make this argument. But the logic is theirs. They built the framework. They insist it applies universally. Should they be surprised when it generates conclusions they would prefer to disavow?

What this reductio ad absurdum shows

This essay has not argued that black people are cognitively disadvantaged, or that East Asians are cognitively superior, or that white Europeans are a middling caste of self-destructive empire-builders, or that Ashkenazi Jews are clever architects of their own misfortune. None of these claims are true. The racial categories on which they depend are 18th-century European inventions that do not align with contemporary genomic understandings. The heritability of IQ within populations tells us almost nothing about differences between groups. The causal pathway from genes to cognition to civilization is not established and is likely not soon to be uncovered.

What this essay has argued is that if you grant the premise of the race realist framework, just for the sake of argument, just to see where it goes, it does not vindicate the complaint against diversity and inclusion and for meritocracy. It does not establish the natural superiority of Western civilization. It leads, instead, to a series of conclusions that should horrify any intellectually and morally honest person.

The race realist framework is not simply wrong as a matter of science, though it is that, it is also internally incoherent as a matter of logic. It implicitly promises to explain inequality as a natural fact and civilizational hierarchy through cognitive capacity, but it cannot explain why the civilizations with the most cognitive capacity did not produce the most enduring, peaceful, or ecologically sustainable outcomes. It cannot, in the end, explain very much at all, except perhaps the needs and fears of the people who reach for it. That should give us pause. Not about the intelligence of any racial group. But about the intelligence of a framework.

A note: This essay argues by granting its opponent’s premises in order to expose the consequences. It does NOT endorse race realism, racial hierarchy, antisemitism, or anti-white sentiment. The scientific consensus that human genetic diversity does not map onto popular racial categories in ways that support deterministic claims about cognition remains robust. The point is that the race realist argument fails even on its own terms.

An illustration from H. Strickland Constable's Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of View, 1899

Science speaks. It speaks in numbers and in names, in classifications and categories, in terms borrowed from dead languages and living prejudices. And here lies a problem we rarely examine: the tools with which science constructs its understanding of the world are linguistic before they are anything else. Before a dataset, before a microscope, before a peer-reviewed conclusion, there is a word. And words, as any honest thinker must acknowledge, are never innocent.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is an invitation to a more rigorous honesty about what science is and how it works. Language is the atmosphere in which all inquiry breathes. It shapes what we can ask, what we can see, and what we can say we have found. To practice science without attending to the language it uses is like studying the ocean while ignoring water.

Nowhere is this truer than in the fraught and consequential history of race science, which offers one of the most illuminating case studies of what happens when language runs ahead of evidence, when categories harden into facts, and when the map is mistaken for the territory.

Consider the word race itself. It comes to us trailing centuries of usage, freighted with ideology, slippery in its referents. And yet it behaves in scientific discourse as though it were precise. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European naturalists sat down to name and classify the human world, and what they produced was not a neutral taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the founder of biology and the great systematizer of nature, divided humanity into subspecies, and those divisions were not merely descriptive. They were evaluative, or at least his followers such as Johan Friedrich Blumenbach and Christoph Meiners would interpret his work as merely a ladder of human races. The language encoded a hierarchy: europaeus was rational and governed by law; africanus was indolent and governed by impulse. The categories came first. The “evidence” was arranged around them.

This is the grammatical structure of prejudice: noun before observation, verdict before trial. I don’t say this lightly. The hierarchical categorization of people as ‘white’ or ‘black’ was already juridically encoded in Slave Codes such as the Barbados Slave Code (1661), Code Noir (1685), Virginia Slave Codes (1705) before Linnaeus was even born, and thus decades before he published his Systema Naturae (1735). And the remarkable thing is how durable this structure proved. The words outlasted the arguments that generated them. “Caucasian,” coined in the late eighteenth century by German anatomists such as Meiners and Blumenbach, who thought the people of the Caucasus mountains were the most beautiful Europeans, persists in scientific literature today. It has no biological referent. It measures nothing. It describes nothing that cannot be described more precisely with other language. And yet there it sits, in peer-reviewed journals, in medical records, in genetic studies, a ghost word haunting living science, testifying to the persistence of the conceptual frameworks that language carries long after their justifications have collapsed.

There is a phrase worth dwelling on: to close the world. When we name something, we close it. We fix it in place. We make it available for analysis, comparison, transmission. This is precisely what language does for science, and it is language’s great gift. Without the capacity to render reality into discourse, there can be no accumulation of knowledge, no checking of one observer’s findings against another’s, no science at all.

But every act of closing is also an act of exclusion. To name is to select. To categorize is to draw lines that reality itself may not contain. The philosopher’s question of whether our categories discover the joints of nature or impose them upon it, is not merely academic. In the case of racial classification, the answer is alarmingly clear: the categories were imposed. The lines were drawn for political purposes and then presented as biological discoveries. Monogenists, such as Charles Darwin, argued that all humans shared a common origin; polygenists, including Voltaire, argued that different races were different species entirely. This was not a scientific debate that produced political consequences. It was a political debate conducted in scientific language.

Darwin understood something of this, even as he remained, unavoidably, a man of his moment. His insight that human characteristics graduate into one another, that the boundaries between supposed types dissolve under examination, was a linguistic as much as a biological observation. He noticed that naturalists could not agree on how many human races existed, and that the disagreement stemmed not from insufficient data but from the arbitrariness of the category. The word “race” was thus generating the illusion of a thing. Still, Darwin fell in that trap and I have always been confused how to interpret his insight in relation to the claim in The Descent of Man (1871) that “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races”. Did he mean dissolvement or genocide? Its later Social Darwinists that would opt for the latter interpretation.

The consequences of linguistic choices in science are not always confined to the page. In the nineteenth century, German and Belgian colonists in central Africa encountered two groups of people, Hutu and Tutsi, whose differences were partly occupational and partly matters of degree. The colonists needed categories. Categories required names. And names, once applied, acquire the solidity of facts.

The so-called Hamitic hypothesis classified Tutsi as a racially superior group, more European, more capable of civilization, more deserving of administrative power. This was pseudoscience in service of colonial administration. But what happened next is the most chilling part: the colonial categories were internalized by the colonized. The names became identity markers enshrined in identity documents. The identity documents became instruments of persecution. The words, generated in the service of a 19th-century racial fantasy, persisted into the 20th century as the architecture of a genocide. In 1994, the language of Linnaeus’s heirs helped to organize the murder of approximately 800,000 to a million people.

This is not a warning against naming things. No, we need language. But it is a warning against mistaking names for the thing itself, against forgetting that every act of rendering reality into discourse is a choice, is an abstraction and reduction, shaped by power and interest, and should always be available for revision.

Contemporary genomics inherits this history whether it acknowledges it or not. The datasets from which our understanding of human genetic variation is drawn are massively skewed toward European ancestry. This is partly a function of where the science was first practiced, partly a function of who had access to resources, and partly a function of which populations were deemed worth studying. The bias is structural. And structure, in science as in architecture, determines what can be built.

Skewed data produces skewed conclusions. But the problem compounds when the language used to describe the data is itself skewed. A study that treats European genetic variation as a baseline and measures everything else as deviation is making a linguistic choice before it makes a scientific one. The grammar of the analysis encodes the assumption. And because scientific language travels so efficiently, because it is designed for transmission and replication, the assumption travels with it, replicated across institutions, textbooks, and policy documents.

The ongoing use of the term “Caucasian” in genetics papers is one symptom of this. It suggests that the concept it names has legitimate scientific content, which it does not. Clearing it from the literature would require not just terminological housekeeping but a reckoning with the conceptual framework that introduced it. That is harder work than finding a synonym, whether it is ‘white’ or ‘of European descent’, the same issues arise if we do not question the box on which we put the label. It requires asking what the word is doing, what it is supposed to do, and what other linguistic choices might accomplish the legitimate work while refusing the illegitimate inheritance.

Similarly, the persistent citation of fraudulent “national IQ” data, which claims to measure cognitive ability across populations and consistently places sub-Saharan African nations at the bottom, illustrates how language provides cover for ideology. The studies from which these figures are drawn often tested malnourished children, or children assessed in languages not their own, and then presented the results as measurements of innate capacity. The language of measurement lends authority. The authority obscures the method. The method is not science. But it speaks in science’s idiom, and that is sometimes enough. And what do we even mean by intelligence? Is it simply what an IQ test measures? We use the same word when talking about large language models, yet many experts remain uncertain whether these systems deserve that label at all. The choice of language is telling: those who champion AI clearly understand the cultural prestige attached to the word “intelligence,” as though it were the highest of human virtues, eclipsing everything else we hold dear: love, care, empathy, solidarity.

Here is what should be said plainly: the rendering of reality into discourse is always biased, always partial, always a product of the conditions under which it was produced. This is not a scandal. It is the condition of inquiry. The scandal would be to pretend otherwise, to treat the current vocabulary of a science as its permanent and final vocabulary, to mistake the closing of the world for its completion.

Part of what science is, properly understood, is a commitment to reinterpretation. The history of genetics is not only a history of discovery but a history of revision, including the revision of its own worst chapters. That revision requires linguistic awareness: an attention to what the words are carrying, where they came from, whose interests they serve, what they make visible and what they occlude.

A science that ignores this is less rigorous. It has failed to examine one of its primary instruments. To practice genetics today without understanding that it was partly developed to serve a political ideology of racial hierarchy is the opposite of objectivity: it is a choice to be unconscious of the forces shaping the work. And unconsciousness, in science, is a methodological flaw.

None of this means that the categories science uses are useless or that the project of understanding human biological variation should be abandoned. Race may be a social construct, but social constructs are real (Money is also a social construct and is very real for most of us). They structure life, determine outcomes, and produce measurable biological effects through the mechanisms of stress, access to healthcare, environmental exposure, and the accumulated weight of discrimination. A genetics that ignores these social realities will miss causes it might otherwise find.

What it means, rather, is that scientific language should be held accountable to scientific standards. Terms should be examined for what they assume, not only for what they assert. Datasets should be interrogated for what they exclude, not only for what they contain. The history of a concept should be part of the analysis of that concept, because history is not merely background but it is evidence about how the concept was formed, what it was designed to do, and whether it can be trusted to do what it now claims to do.

This is not an addition to science. It is science. The capacity for self-examination, for turning the instruments of inquiry upon the instruments themselves, is what distinguishes rigorous inquiry from the confident repetition of inherited assumptions. Language is the medium in which science moves. Becoming conscious of the medium is an essential part of the work, perhaps the hardest part, and certainly the part most often deferred.

We speak and write, and in speaking and writing we draw the world. The lines we draw deserve the same scrutiny we give to the things we claim to find between them.

In Europe, since the end of World War II and even more since the 1970s, we have tended to avoid the concept of “race,” fraught as it is with memories of the Holocaust and colonial terror. Yet I want to argue that abandoning the term “race” altogether risks losing analytical precision when we seek to understand inequality and violence. Indeed, the concept of “race” remains necessary in order to highlight the historical continuities of specific forms of violent human relations. Replacing race with ethnicity often functions as a euphemism that obscures an important distinction: not all ethnic relations are racial. Let me explain what I mean here.

Ethnicity refers primarily to processes of identification. It involves how groups understand themselves and are understood by others in terms of shared culture, history, language, religion, or origin. Ethnic differences are ubiquitous. People everywhere produce distinctions, such as between those in the valley and those in the mountains, those on either side of a river, or those from one part of town versus another. Such differences may generate stereotypes, rivalries, or even hostility, but – as Iwill explain below - they are not necessarily “racial,” because they do not necessarily have political or economic consequences. Swedes and Norwegians may identify as distinct socio-cultural groups, but their relationship is not racial. Yoruba in Nigeria and Zulu in South Africa recognize differences, yet these differences are not racialized. Even groups with very different historical trajectories who live on the same land such as Native Americans and Black Americans, or Japanese Brazilians and Armenian Brazilians, do not automatically stand in racial relation to one another. The point that I want to make is that in order to have a clear understanding of racism as more than prejudice and stereotypes, we have to understand that ethnic difference alone does not produce race.

So, when could we talk about race? Based on my historical research I would argue that race emerges when perceived differences —whether biological, phenotypical, cultural, religious, linguistic, vocational, or even imagined— are politically and economically weaponized in ways that structure and justify inequality and unequal treatment. Skin color can be such an observed difference, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. The Irish did not look particularly different from the English but were nevertheless racialized as biologically and culturally inferior, a classification that normalized exploitation and precarious living conditions. Palestinians and Israelis may not be phenotypically distinct, yet cultural and historical markers are mobilized to justify unequal treatment. Hutu and Tutsi share language, religion, and much of their culture; their distinction lies partly in historical economic differentiation and was later codified under colonial rule into rigid, hierarchical categories treated as immutable. In each case, what matters is not the nature of the difference itself, but the social process that transforms difference into hierarchy.

A key distinction, then, is that ethnicity requires some degree of self-identification, whereas race does not. Groups can be racialized regardless of how they identify themselves. People who do not see themselves as belonging together may nevertheless be categorized as a single racial group—such as migrants, Muslims, Native Americans, or people of African descent. Over time, prolonged racialization can produce new forms of collective identification, sometimes embraced strategically for political reasons, as in the case of Black political identity or movements such as les indigènes de la République. Over long period of times a racialized cluster of different people can start to self-identify as an ethnic group, such as what happened to African Americans. In this sense, race can generate ethnicity, but ethnicity does not necessarily generate race.

Another significant distinction concerns power. Ethnic relations do not inherently imply domination. Different ethnic groups may coexist without systematic inequalities between them. Even where prejudice exists, it does not become structurally meaningful unless it affects access to resources, rights, or life chances. For example, employment, housing, or political participation. Race, by contrast, always involves power relations. It is inseparable from relations of domination because it organizes human difference into hierarchies that justify unequal treatment.

For this reason, racial relations are always imbued with violence, or at least with the potential for legitimate (state) violence. A racialized group is constructed as a threat, to identity, survival, or prosperity, thereby legitimizing coercion against it. Race becomes the mechanism through which exclusion, expropriation, exploitation, and, in extreme cases, extermination are rationalized. It is not merely a tool of division; it is a technology of inequality.

I know that in the wider world, and in the European world I live in, the concepts of race and ethnicity may be used interchangeably. I believe that this is a mistake, because every time one seeks to point at the racial nature of specific political and economic relations, one can always argue that it is actually about ethnicity and thus has nothing to do with race. Conceptual clarity therefore requires distinguishing ethnicity from race not by the type of difference involved, but by the social processes and consequences attached to that difference. Ethnicity concerns identification and cultural distinction. Race concerns the hierarchical politicization of difference in ways that structure material inequality and legitimize violence. Keeping this distinction allows us to retain analytical precision while acknowledging the historical realities that the concept of race was created to describe.

© Getty Images

Few scientific fields today enjoy as much prestige as those connected to space travel: physics, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, aerospace engineering. Our films are saturated with them, and every rocket launch is framed as a moment of collective awe, as an emblem of progress, ingenuity, and destiny. Space has become not only a scientific frontier but a cultural obsession, a projection screen onto which we cast our hopes for the future.

Yet the imagined world of space is strangely sterile. We picture it as a domain of plastic and metal, perhaps dotted with plants, but plants perfectly controlled, sealed inside glass and steel habitats scrubbed daily into hygienic perfection. It is a vision of technological purity, but also of technological morbidity: a necrophilic fantasy of a cleaned-up future where everything is new, controlled, and lifelessly pristine.

Rockets themselves are the ultimate symbols of this techno-fixation. Though we present them as marvels of engineering, there is something profoundly fragile and almost absurd about them. A colossal, phallic tower erupts into a violent plume of fire, burning kerosene and liquid hydrogen, only to propel human bodies toward a destination defined primarily by absence. We launch ourselves, quite literally, into nothingness and burn immense amounts of resources to do just that. For humans, however, space is almost entirely empty, inhospitable, and devoid of observable life.

This fixation becomes even more perplexing when contrasted with the reality of Earth. We inhabit a planet of extraordinary richness: millions of species, complex ecosystems, relationships between organisms we barely understand. Even as we are actively destroying this living world, we fantasize about escaping it, about colonizing barren planets, terraforming them into environments suited to us, preferably constructed from concrete, glass, plastic, and metal. We dream of recreating Earth badly rather than learning to live within the Earth we already have.

Every form of life on this planet exists within its own relational world: its own ontology, its own social organization, its own way of being. The diversity of these relationships is astonishing and deeply enriching. Yet instead of engaging with this complexity, we direct our fascination toward lifeless expanses.

What, then, makes space science so emotionally charged for us? Why does it generate such excitement, such reverence? Part of the answer may lie in a cultural narrative that equates conquest with achievement. Space becomes the ultimate frontier, the final territory to penetrate. In this framing, rockets and astronauts are celebrated as heroic symbols of mastery. Science, which could be poetic, i.e. a source of connection, curiosity, and wonder, risks being transformed into an instrument of domination, spectacle, and alienation.

Perhaps the most striking example of this contradiction is the claim that traveling to space fosters ecological awareness. The argument suggests that seeing Earth from orbit will awaken environmental consciousness. But this logic is paradoxical: must we leave the only place in the universe where we can observe abundant life in order to understand its value? The idea borders on the absurd. Appreciation for life should emerge from immersion in living systems, not from witnessing their absence.

Meanwhile, space occupies a central place in dominant imaginaries of the future: a site of purification, transcendence, and salvation. Yet it might just as easily be interpreted as a symbol of collective abandonment—a turning away from the responsibilities we hold toward our own world. Astronauts are often framed as heroes, but perhaps the deeper heroism lies elsewhere: in those who remain embedded in threatened ecosystems, in communities resisting deforestation, urban sprawl, and ecological sterilization.

There is also a quieter tragedy unfolding alongside our cosmic ambitions. The night sky itself, once a shared human inheritance, is being eroded by satellite constellations and orbital debris. One might imagine that even if we destroy much on Earth, we would at least retain the ability to look upward and encounter the vastness of the cosmos, to feel humility before it. Increasingly, even that experience is mediated by technology and privilege. To witness an unpolluted sky, to feel small beneath the stars, one must often travel faror pay dearly.

Space fantasies promise transcendence, but they risk deepening our estrangement from the living world that sustains us. The problem is not curiosity about the universe; curiosity is essential to science and to humanity. The problem arises when fascination with lifeless frontiers eclipses care for the vibrant planet beneath our feet. The future worth striving for may not lie among sterile domes on distant planets, but in rediscovering how to live, humbly and attentively, within the extraordinary biosphere we already call home.

©David Whittaker in People

Intersectionality has become an influential framework in contemporary social analysis, invoked to explain the simultaneity and interdependence of different modes of discrimination and oppression. Yet in its wide diffusion, it has also been flattened. The concept has been developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to illuminate how Black women’s experiences of discrimination escape the analytical capacities of single-axis frameworks. It may be important to note however that “intersectionality” already existed as an analytic way before Crenshaw coined the concept in 1989. We can at least go back until May 1851, the year Black abolitionist Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) made an influential abolitionist speech[1] in which she discussed the intersection of race and gender, or more recently the Black feminist Combahee River Collective (1974-1980) statement of April 1977. Yet intersectionality is now too often misread as the idea that every additional marginalized identity simply adds “more oppression.” The resulting arithmetic model of oppression as stacking rather than structuring obscures what Crenshaw emphasized from the beginning: oppression is relational, contextual, and shaped by how systems of power interact, not by tallying identity markers.

This flattening becomes evident when intersectionality is applied to for instance the experience of Black men, whose place within racialized and gendered hierarchies does not fit neatly into a model that assumes male privilege persists uniformly across racial and class lines irrespective of context. As both philosophers Tommy J. Curry and Norman Ajari have argued, the framework is often deployed in a way that renders Black men insufficiently legible as victims of racialized gendered oppression, even though their subordination within racial capitalism is also deeply structured by gendered violence, sexual regulation, and social control. Rather than expanding our analytic capacities, such misapplications of intersectionality sometimes reproduce the very invisibilities that Crenshaw sought to correct.

Intersectionality’s analytical potential

Crenshaw’s intervention was precise: antidiscrimination law treated “race” as implicitly meaning the discrimination of men of color, while gender basically meant the discrimination of white women. Thereby the distinct experience of Black women was systematically erased. Intersectionality emerged as a method to show how institutions are structured in ways that simultaneously racialize and gender bodies. But when intersectionality is reduced to a quantitative model of additive disadvantage, two distortions occur: systems of oppression are treated as independent rather than mutually constitutive; and marginalized identities become the unit of analysis, rather than the systems of power producing marginalization. This simplification leads to the common assumption that Black men, as men, retain “male privilege” in all contexts, while their gender can interact with race to produce intensified surveillance, criminalization, and vulnerability.

Indeed, the assumption that gender domination always advantages men as a category overlooks that patriarchy itself is racialized. As legal scholar Iyiola Solanke argues, racialized systems generate specific intersectional harms, which are forms of oppression that emerge not from the addition of race to gender and class or vice versa, but from the fusion of racial hierarchy, gender hierarchy, and class hierarchy into a unique mode of domination. Gender is not simply gender for everyone: it is gender as altered – among other systems of oppression – through race, and race and gender as altered through class etc.

Black man

Applying intersectionality to Black men exposes an important contradiction: if patriarchy grants cisgender men dominance, why does this not necessarily translate into the same kind of dominance for Black cisgender men? The lived reality shows that Black masculinity is not treated as privileged or granted the benefit of the doubt. Instead, it is often viewed as dangerous, hypersexual, threatening, and disposable. This perception is also shaped by class. Being racially marked as Black is frequently linked to being probably part of the working class, a group that is on its turn stereotyped as prone to violence. As a result, racial and class biases reinforce each other: society assumes Black men are violent not only because of racist stereotypes, but also because their racial identity is interpreted as a sign of lower-class status, which carries its own violent stereotypes.

Consequently, the cultural, institutional, and physical policing of Black men reveals how their presumed dysfunctional masculinity functions not as a resource but as a liability. White men of all classes are systemically discouraged to respond to Black men as fellow members of a dominant gender category; rather they are conditioned to respond through a racialized schema in which Black masculinity is the primary site of perceived threat against white male dominance over all women. It is important to emphasize here that the threat of Black men is to be understood as primarily a physical threat, a threat of the body. White men are afraid of the Black male body, as the white existential crisis of being ‘wiped out’ or ‘replaced’ is a real fear that at least partly drives fear for and thus violence against Black men.

This refers precisely to Tommy J. Curry’s argument: the violences directed at Black men must be understood as manifestations of racialized male subordination. Through the lens of racialized power, Black men experience gender as vulnerability rather than domination. Curry demonstrates that Black males are disproportionately subjected to homicide, incarceration, physical violence, and sexual exploitation, yet their vulnerability is obscured by the assumption that men in general cannot be structurally victimized by gender.

Ajari, drawing from Fanon and Black existentialism, points out that Black masculinity is constructed through a “politics of unworthiness”: Black men are denied civic and ethical recognition because their bodies are perceived as inherently excessive, unruly, or potentially violent. Thus, the violence inflicted upon them is framed as necessary and even “natural” defense. In other words, Black men are not merely marginalized within a racialized hierarchy; their masculinity is the instrument through which racial domination is stabilized.

This becomes especially visible in white dominated public discussions of migration in light of misogyny, feminicide, and sexual violence, where strong societal outrage tends to surface most readily when the perpetrators are “dark men,” i.e. Black or otherwise racially stigmatized as violent men. These cases are then taken up in ways that reinforce the misleading notion that such men are “naturally” the primary drivers of gender-based violence, an idea rooted in long-standing racist portrayals of racialized men as inherently dangerous or sexually violent. Yet men in general, of all classes, races, and ethnicities are responsible for misogyny, not racialized men specifically or especially. Research shows that the overall majority of white women who experience violence from men are overwhelmingly harmed by white men, those white men they know and trust, such as partners, acquaintances, bosses, superiors, colleagues, or family members, and only very rarely by strangers, let alone so-called “dark strangers.” And this dynamic unfolds against the backdrop of a long history in which Black men have been unjustly and repeatedly accused of harassing or assaulting white women. Intersectionality, when properly understood as a system-level analytic, is capable of accounting for this, but only if it resists its popular misinterpretation as a ladder of disadvantages. Of course, it is beyond any dispute that any form of misogynous behavior should be plainly condemned, irrespective of the perpetrator’s or victim’s racial or class status.

Gendered racialization of boys

The racialization of black men is not confined to adulthood but starts already in childhood. Research such as social psychologist Tamara R. Buckley’s study of Black boys’ experiences reinforces the need for a more nuanced, intersectional understanding of Black male experiences. Buckley demonstrates that Black boys are routinely cast as threatening, hypermasculine, or deficient, which are stereotypes that are not simply racial or gendered but racial–gendered, inseparable in their formation and effects. However, her findings show that, in contradiction to Black stereotypes of “hypermasculinity,” Black boys often develop androgynous, fluid, and flexible gender identities. Both alleged masculine and feminine traits appear to be associated among them with healthier self-concepts. This shows that it is impossible to confine Black male experience to a fixed box called “Black masculinity” and thus also that the stereotype of the “naturally hypermasculine” Black male is empirically completely unfounded. Moreover, Buckley importantly shows that negative racial identity attitudes correlate strongly with lower self-concept and lower school belonging.

When these Black boys enter institutions such as schools, courts, workplaces, irrespective of their gender identity, sexuality, or class status, their bodies are read through a dominant lens of racialized masculinity that produces disproportionate punishment, fear-responses, and negation of their subjectivity. The simultaneous racialization and gendering of Black boys illustrates what Solanke calls intersectional discrimination, which arises not from identity categories but from the social meaning imposed upon how those identities interact. Thus, Black men’s experiences complicate simplified versions of patriarchy. In a white supremacist society, masculinity does not operate uniformly; its privileges appear to be gated through several intertwined systems of oppression such as race and class.

Restoring intersectionality’s critical edge

To recover the analytic power of intersectionality, we must thus reject the arithmetic model and return to Crenshaw’s structural insight: different systems of power co-produce the social positions people occupy. Black men’s vulnerability does not “cancel out” the patriarchal structures that harm women, nor does it negate the reality of male privilege in too many domains. Rather, it demands recognition that patriarchy and white supremacy converge in ways that uniquely target Black men, just as they converge in distinct ways to target Black women or Black trans and queer people in violent ways.

Intersectionality is therefore not the basis for a competition of victimhood; it is an analysis of how power is organized. Black men’s experiences remind us that gender, like race, is not merely a personal identity but a political position created within specific social and historical formations. To understand the full spectrum of racialized violence, intersectionality must retain its structural focus by tracing how institutions, narratives, and material conditions create different vulnerabilities for different groups. Re-centering this approach opens space for a more honest, less ideologically constrained analysis of Black masculinity, one that refuses both the romanticization of Black male resilience and the pathologization of Black male existence.

Sources

Ajari, Norman (2019). La dignité ou la mort: Éthique et politique de la race. Paris: La Découverte.

Buckley, T. R. (2018). Black adolescent males: Intersections among their gender role identity and racial identity and associations with self-concept (global and school). Child Development 89(4), e311–e322.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, 139–167.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43(6), 1241–1299.

Curry, Tommy J. (2017). The man-not: Race, class, genre, and the dilemmas of Black manhood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Solanke, Iyola (2009). Putting race and gender together: A new approach to intersectionality. The Modern Law Review 72(5), 723–749.

[1] Sojourner Truth’s speech didn’t have a specific title and is usually referred to as “Ain’t I a woman?”. The first transcript written by the abolitionist Marius Robinson, who was present at the convention, appeared in June 1851. Yet the sentence “Ain’t I a woman?” does not appear in that transcript. In May 1863 Frances D. Barker Gage published a very different version with speech characteristics associated with Southern African-Americans. This version became the historic standard. However, Truth was born and raised as an enslaved person in New York, spoke Dutch as a first language and only learned English when she was 9 years old. It is extremely unlikely that her speech would resemble the speech of Southern African Americans and it seems that Barker Gage consciously edited the text for a white audience as to appear more authentically written by a Black person. It may be noted that the phrase “Am I not a man and a brother?” already appeared in the late 18^th century abolitionist circles. The version “Am I not a woman and a sister?” appears in the 1820s in Britain and becomes widely known in the US in the 1830s. It seems probable that this may have impacted Barker Gage’s editorial decisions and title choice.

© Norman B. Leventhal Map Center

Mainstream economics seems to reproduce a perspective of the world where ‘civilizations’ are mainly understood as discrete entities. Indeed, for two years in a row the Nobel Prize for Economics went to economists who argue that Europe grew wealthy because of its unique inherent features. Well-established economists such as Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, and Simon Johnson won in 2024 for their body of work, arguing that economic success is mainly due to Western countries’ established political institutions that protected property rights, encouraged innovation, and supported broad participation in economic life. This year Joel Mokyr with Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt won the prize for their research which basically argues that unique cultural qualities help to explain the economic successes of the West. As a consequence, these mainstream economists propose a developmental framework that still conveys the idea that the rest of the world should imitate the ‘Western model’ in order to achieve similar economic developments as Europe and its settler colonies. This is a treacherous tendency to detach Western economic growth from its colonial legacies. In the book Decolonizing Economics several scholars offer a strong critique of these mainstream explanations for the Industrial Revolution and global economic development.

While applauding the rather innovative historically grounded methods of analysis that these mainstream economists finally introduce, decolonial scholars argue that these explanations are unfortunately incomplete, because they treat colonialism as a background event or as something that simply “interrupted” the development of certain regions. From a decolonial perspective, however, colonialism was not an external shock. It was rather a central engine of Western development. At the same time, it created deep and lasting underdevelopment in many parts of the Global South and as a result, economic growth in the West and poverty elsewhere should not be researched as separate historical stages. On the contrary, they are interlocked as two parts of the same process.

The awarding of the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics to Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson has reignited debate over the intellectual legacy of Acemoglu and Robinson’s earlier, best-selling book Why Nations Fail (2012). Much of this debate risks conflating two distinct bodies of work: a popular synthesis written for a general audience, and a set of rigorous empirical papers that fundamentally reshaped how economists understand institutions, development, and the long-term effects of colonialism. While Why Nations Fail is a legitimate target of critique, particularly in its treatment of African history, those critiques do not necessarily invalidate the scholarship for which the Nobel Prize seems to be awarded.

It is true that the paper that underpins their Nobel recognition does a far better job than Why Nations Fail at dissecting the political economies of African nations and, crucially, at tracing the enduring institutional damage caused by colonial exploitation. Through careful empirical strategies, Acemoglu, Robinson, and Johnson demonstrate a direct causal relationship between institutional quality and long-run economic development, decisively rejecting the idea that prosperity itself gives rise to good institutions. In doing so, they provided some of the strongest quantitative evidence to date that colonial extraction systematically stunted institutional development across much of the Global South, and thus not merely geography, culture, or human capital, as many still argue.

This distinction matters because Why Nations Fail makes claims about pre-colonial Africa that are much more problematic than their later academic work. Several passages in Why Nations Fail echo a long tradition of Eurocentric narratives that portray African societies as institutionally stagnant or incapable, rather than as historically dynamic polities shaped by ecology, trade, warfare, and external intervention. However, it is important to be precise in what is being criticized. Acemoglu and Robinson do not, in their academic work, advance a view of pre-colonial Africa as ahistorical or institutionless. Nor did they receive the Nobel Prize for their popular book Why Nations Fail. They were recognized for demonstrating — against earlier modernization theories — that Europe did not become rich because it was inherently smarter or more institutionally enlightened. Instead, European prosperity emerged from historically contingent processes, including colonial violence, racialized ideology, and systems of extraction that simultaneously strengthened institutions at home while hollowing them out abroad.

At the same time, critics are right to argue that Why Nations Fail often fails to place racism, imperial ideology, and coercion at the center of its narrative. By emphasizing institutions in abstraction, the book can reproduce a Eurocentric perspective in which Europeans appear to have “built good institutions,” while others simply did not. Without foregrounding the violence that enforced these institutional divergences, and the racism that justified them, the explanation risks sounding like a moral hierarchy rather than a historical one. In short, criticizing Why Nations Fail is both valid and necessary, especially regarding its treatment of African history. But extending that critique to dismiss the Nobel-winning scholarship of Acemoglu, Robinson, and Johnson may be a mistake because their later work not only corrects many of the book’s weaknesses, but also provides a powerful empirical indictment of colonialism’s long shadow. Thus, a nuanced reading requires resisting black-and-white judgments and engaging seriously with both the strengths and the limitations of their contributions.

Still, I’m not convinced that the general reader will make this assessment, not that their work will automatically generate a more relational understanding of global inequalities. Academic papers are usually only read by academics, while best-selling books like Why Nations Fail are even more than a decade after their publication widely read by the general public and have a significant impact on what people, not just academics but also policy makers and decision makers, imagine to be the economic analysis of the Nobel Prize laureates. This is even more important in the light of this year’s Nobel Prize laureates Joël Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt, whose work further contributes to a rather Eurocentric understanding of global economics, more akin to the arguments in Why Nations Fail, even if that happens inadvertently, and even if their academic papers reveal a more nuanced and complex picture. Still, in light of a history in which scientific findings are too often coopted to serve the status quo we need to stay critical.

For instance political economist Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven offers an important and critical examination of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Joël Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for their work on innovation-driven economic growth. She argues that their research reflects and reinforces a deeply Eurocentric and politically consequential understanding of capitalism, innovation, and development .She contends that the laureates’ theoretical approaches fetishize technology by treating technological innovation as an autonomous driver of economic growth, detached from its underlying exploitative social relations, global class structures, and political conditions. This “technology fetish,” she argues, allows economists to sidestep the violence, exploitation, and expropriation that historically enabled capitalist development, particularly through colonialism, imperialism, and racialized labor systems.

Mokyr’s historical account of the Industrial Revolution, for instance, emphasizes ideas, Enlightenment culture, and a “market for ideas” as the foundation of sustained growth in Britain. Kvangraven argues that this narrative ignores two crucial dimensions: the transformation of social relations that created capitalist wage labor, and the global nature of capitalism. By focusing on endogenous European factors, Mokyr’s account naturalizes capitalism and obscures how British industrialization happened in a globalized network that relied on colonial extraction, enslaved labor, and technologies developed in imperial contexts.

Kvangraven also turns to Aghion and Howitt’s formalization of Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction.” While their models acknowledge that innovation creates winners and losers, their methodological nationalism limits their explanatory power. Indeed, by focusing on national research policy, competition, and social safety nets, their framework risk to fail capturing how technological innovation depends on the global organization of production and the unequal division of labor embedded in global value chains.

This limitation becomes especially problematic when their theories are applied to the global South. Policy prescriptions derived from their work, such as domestic savings, education, liberalization, and financial development, treat innovation as an internal, national process and ignore constraints imposed by global capitalism and uneven development. As a result, these models, which start from a premise that states are discrete entities, cannot explain either persistent underdevelopment in the global South or the continued dominance of corporations in the global North.

Kvangraven concludes that the Nobel Prize performs an ideological function by promoting a romanticized and depoliticized view of capitalism. By framing economic progress as manageable through institutions and technological fixes, mainstream economics obscures its own colonial origins and political character, reinforcing Eurocentric assumptions rather than confronting the structural inequalities at the heart of global capitalism.

Therefore, in line with Kvangraven’s critique a decolonial perspective changes fundamentally how we understand global economic history. Development in Europe did not happen in isolation. It relied on extraction, exclusion, exploitation, dispossession, and the weakening of economic structures in colonized regions. The story of Western success, therefore, cannot and should not be separated from the story of colonial exploitation.

A key example illustrates this argument forcefully. Britain’s Industrial Revolution depended heavily on cotton. Yet the growth of Britain’s textile industry was tied to the deliberate destruction of India’s own thriving cotton and textile sector. Colonial policy ensured that raw cotton could be shipped cheaply to Britain. British factories then produced textiles that were sold back in India at prices local producers could not match. This combination of forced extraction and market domination directly contributed to Britain’s industrial growth. It also produced long term economic damage in India.

In this view, capitalism itself emerged as a system that created both development and underdevelopment at the same time. Western growth required the extraction of labor, resources, and markets from colonized regions. For this reason, underdevelopment in places like Africa and South Asia is not an accident or solely a sign of political and economic failure of these states. It is also a structural outcome of how global capitalism and the economic world order first formed.

This perspective of our common global history has important consequences for economic policy today. In line with the Nobel Prize Laureates of economics, many mainstream economists argue that in order to become developed high income countries such as Western states, developing countries should adopt Western style institutions or follow the same sequence of reforms that appeared in Europe in the past centuries. However, according to decolonial thinkers, this approach is fundamentally flawed. The Western path to development cannot be understood in isolation of the international colonial world order it helped to shape. Consequently, this path cannot be repeated because it depends on violent and destructive colonial relationships that should not be recreated. When countries such as India attempt to follow the same model, they may produce high growth figures, yet these numbers often hide deep inequality and widespread exclusion from stable, dignified work. In fact, these countries reproduce the political economy of colonial empires, maybe not by colonizing faraway lands anymore, but rather by colonizing its own people and territories.

The deeper problem then seems to be Eurocentrism. This is the habit of treating Europe’s historical experience as universalizable, while ignoring the colonial violence, environmental destruction, and economic subordination that helped make European development possible. If that central fact is left out, policies based on Europe’s past will remain inadequate and misleading, at least if one is of the opinion that reproducing colonial political and economic relationships is undesirable.

The decolonizing perspective argues instead for development strategies that are specific to each context. There is no single recipe that all countries must follow. Development should focus on social well-being, fair labor conditions, and environmental sustainability, rather than on copying Western models of capitalist progress that have been at the source of deep-seated inequalities, exploitative labor conditions, and ecological catastrophe. It also calls for a careful examination of how global economic systems continue to reproduce in a neocolonial fashion the social and ecological destruction of our world.

In short, this argument reframes the history of global development. It asks us to see Western wealth and Global South poverty as interconnected outcomes of the same historical forces. By doing so, a decolonial perspective challenges the idea that mainstream economics still disseminates throughout the world, namely that Europe’s recent history of the past centuries would be a template for the rest of the world. Rather, we should be encouraged to search for new economic models that support just and sustainable futures, rather than repeating the harmful patterns of the past.

22 Nov. 2022, © Number 10

Intersectionality is too often flattened into a checklist: race plus gender, race plus class, race plus sexuality. This arithmetical view obscures what intersectionality actually refers to: the dynamic political production of vulnerability and conditional belonging. It is not a technique for stacking identities but a grammar describing how hierarchical systems fit together, rearticulate, and weaponize each other. Intersectionality does not measure identity; it maps power.

With that premise, the intersection of race and class becomes a site where the promise of upward mobility and the fantasy of proximity to whiteness can converge to produce political commitments that serve reactionary, exclusionary projects. This dynamic is visible in the rise of people of color who collaborate with conservative and even far-right movements, from proponents of anti-immigration rhetoric in Europe to high-profile conservative figures in the US and UK whose racial identity is invoked as a shield against accusations of racism. The same dynamic also shapes the precarious whiteness of the white working classes, who are structurally incentivized to police their whiteness precisely because their class position renders it insecure.

What emerges from these cases is not contradiction but pattern: whiteness and racial privilege are extended conditionally, strategically, and temporarily, and those who rely on such conditionality, whether upwardly mobile people of color or downwardly mobile white workers, are also the first to be sacrificed when political and economic crises intensify. The “usefulness” of their racial or class identity to dominant groups is never permanent. This essay argues that this precarity is not incidental but foundational to how race and class co-produce one another in modern nation-states.

Conditional inclusion: people of color in anti-migrant projects

Throughout European contexts some naturalized citizens and second-generation residents of color openly support or even lead anti-immigration campaigns. Social scientists Leonie Mugglin and Simon Mastrangelo document this phenomenon in Switzerland, where activists with migration backgrounds join radical-right parties to distinguish themselves as “deserving minorities” and to draw boundaries against “undeserving” newcomers. They perform respectability and “Swissness” to escape persistent racial ascriptions of foreignness.

This dynamic is not unique to Switzerland. The UK offers a long history of political figures of color - among them Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel, and James Cleverly - who vigorously champion hardline immigration restrictions. Their presence is continuously instrumentalized as evidence that Conservative or far-right policies are not racist. Their racialized bodies become political technologies: proof that borders are neutral, that anti-immigration stances are cultural rather than racial, that whiteness is an ethos anyone can earn.

But the fragility of such conditional inclusion becomes clear the moment economic anxiety spikes or the far-right base seeks scapegoats. The backlash against the spouse of J.D. Vance, the racist comments hurled at Vivek Ramaswamy, and the open racialized insults directed at Rishi Sunak in the UK all demonstrate the same lesson: when “shit hits the fan,” race reasserts itself as a fault line no amount of political loyalty can bridge.

In these moments, people of color who collaborated with authoritarian, reactionary, or exclusionary projects discover that they were never insulated from racial hierarchy. Their value lay not in their humanity but in their utility—their ability to appear as tokens, as multicultural alibis, as “proofs” that racism is not operative. Once crisis hits, their presence becomes irrelevant or even threatening; they are swiftly ejected from the circle of protection. They are not quite “useful idiots,” but they occupy a structurally similar position: useful so long as they help launder whiteness, disposable as soon as whiteness no longer requires laundering.

The class politics of whiteness: precarious and policed

My argument that whiteness has phenotypical, cultural, and class dimensions is crucial here. Too often whiteness is treated as a fixed racial category, obscuring how class shapes its stability or instability. The white working classes are “white,” but their whiteness is continuously cast into doubt because their class position renders their belonging suspect. They experience forms of symbolic degradation, expressed through concepts like “chav,” “white trash,” “hillbilly,” and in which whiteness appears as failed whiteness, whiteness not fully achieved.

This creates a dangerous incentive: they are encouraged to overperform their whiteness, not only by distinguishing themselves from people of color but also by distancing themselves from poor people of color in particular. They are taught to believe that racial solidarity is the only resource available to them, because class solidarity would require aligning with racialized out-groups and that is a move that might cost them their most precious (and precarious) asset: whiteness itself.

This is why in moments of economic decline, political elites and far-right movements redirect frustration away from class inequality and toward racial outsiders or imagined cultural enemies. It reassures the white working classes that they are still on the “inside,” even as the material benefits of whiteness continually erode.

But here too the precarity remains: the white working classes are also the first to be sacrificed when elite interests are threatened. Whiteness protects them symbolically but not materially; they are politically courted yet economically abandoned. Their whiteness is real but insufficient; it grants just enough privilege to prevent cross-racial solidarity, but not enough to provide security or stability.

Upward mobility for people of color

The inverse dynamic applies to the wealthier or upwardly mobile classes of color. Their class position grants them partial access to whiteness, not phenotypically, but through education, wealth, cultural capital, and also public displays of loyalty to the established order. This loyalty is what makes it possible for institutions to treat them as honorary insiders.

However, this inclusion is also precarious. It requires continuous performance: policing the borders of the nation more harshly than white elites do; denouncing “wokeness” to demonstrate ideological safety; presenting their own biographies as proof of meritocracy; and disavowing systemic racism to affirm national and white innocence.

And yet, as anyone can observe, they too are easily cast out. The far right will praise them as long as they reinforce hierarchy but will turn on them instantly when political crisis demands a scapegoat. Rishi Sunak experienced this viscerally: a billionaire, a defender of elite economic interests, yet still called a racial outsider the moment anger against the ruling class intensified. The message is clear: for people of color class privilege can grant access to whiteness only temporarily and only on loan.

Why none of this is paradoxical

The patterns outlined above are frequently described as hypocritical or counterintuitive. Why would migrants oppose immigration? Why would people of color join fascist movements? Why would poor white people side with elites who exploit them? A non-metric understanding of intersectionality reveals that none of this is paradoxical. These positions are not mistakes; they are products of how race and class co-constitute social hierarchies. People seek security, dignity, and belonging through the pathways available to them. When societies reward boundary-making and binary thinking —between “deserving” and “undeserving,” between “good” minority and “bad” minority, between legitimate citizens and illegitimate “outsiders”— people respond accordingly.

Intersectionality thus reveals that race disciplines class (poor white people must exaggerate whiteness to retain symbolic value), class disciplines race (middle-class people of color must disavow racial solidarity to access conditional or honorary whiteness), and neither whiteness nor belonging is stable. Rather, they are contingent political constructs, always under threat, always maintained through exclusion. This is why people of color who collaborate with authoritarian or far-right regimes do not escape racialization. And this is also why the white working classes cannot rely on whiteness as a shield against class discrimination and abandonment. Of course, both demographics are positioned differently within the racial order, but both are subject to the same fundamental logic: hierarchies require expendable populations, and those closest to the line of exclusion are the easiest to sacrifice.

To conclude

To understand the intersection of race and class, we must reject the idea that intersectionality somehow can calculate who is “more oppressed” And who less. Intersectionality is not a metric; it is a map of domination and co-optation. It shows how the promise of proximity to power, whether through whiteness or through class privilege, can always be used to pit marginalized groups against each other and to secure the dominance of elites.

The upwardly mobile person of color who embraces authoritarian politics, the white working-class citizen who clings to racial privilege, or the tokenized minority deployed to defend exclusionary policies are not aberrations. They are the predictable outcomes of a system that distributes belonging conditionally and encourages individuals to police their own and others’ eligibility for it. If there is a lesson here, it is that conditional inclusion is not inclusion. It is a trap. And the only escape, politically, morally, as well as structurally, lies in rejecting the terms of conditionality itself and to embrace the principle of solidarity unconditionally.

© Peter Pettus, Alabama Port, Alabama, 1965

In both academic and activist circles that are addressing racism and (neo)colonialism, much energy has been devoted to analyzing the psychic, social, political and economic formations of ‘whiteness.’ Yet, many of these analyses, however accurate, when used as political tools risk reproducing the very dynamics they aim to dismantle. We often begin and end with white guilt. As Gloria Wekker has shown in her pertinent study of the Netherlands, colonial guilt is frequently renegotiated into renewed claims of white innocence, i.e. a refusal of responsibility grounded in associations of whiteness with purity, rationality, and reason. This reflex is not unique to Europe or the Netherlands; it is a global inheritance of colonial education, shaping black, brown, and white lives alike in relation to what Sylvia Wynter calls the ideal of a Western bourgeois form of being human.

An alternative to guilt, such as Paul Gilroy’s suggestion that shame may be a more productive concept than guilt, has I believe also proven treacherous terrain. Too often, shame turns not into reflection but into its opposite: white pride. In the current climate of authoritarian resurgence and anti-migration politics, the rejection of shame does not produce accountability, rather it produces defensiveness, backlash, and reactionary calls, such as British historian Niall Ferguson’s work, to celebrate colonial histories.

A similar dilemma arises with the discourse of white privilege. While this concept has illuminated structural inequities, Lewis Gordon and others have noted its limitations. “Privilege” implies an excess to be stripped away, as though justice could be achieved by subtraction. But what we call “white privilege” is more accurately the uneven distribution of what should be basic human rights. To frame them as privileges inadvertently fuels resentment: the idea that white people are being asked to surrender something rightfully theirs. In reaction, we see the reassertion of what Charles Mills called white rights and Lewis Gordon refers to as white license, which are not human rights but the claimed right or license to exclude, to dominate, to hate, and ultimately, to kill.

If guilt becomes innocence, shame becomes pride, and privilege becomes license, then perhaps our critical analyses have failed — not because they were incorrect, but because they did not accomplish what they needed to do politically. They have revealed the mechanics of coloniality, sure, but not disrupted its affective economy.

To do so I believe that thinkers within the Black Radical Tradition offer important insights. James Baldwin, Aimé Césaire, or Frantz Fanon remind us of a deeper truth: colonialism dehumanizes everyone. The colonized is stripped of humanity so that exploitation, expropriation, and death can be justified; but the colonizer forfeits humanity by becoming the agent of such rationalized violence. One is cast as a monster to be killed, the other becomes a monster who kills. Both are supposed to lose their souls. Baldwin captured this paradox when he wrote that beneath hatred lies only pain. Hatred is not natural but cultivated, a psychic shield against the unbearable recognition of colonial monstrosity. Many white people, too, sense that something is profoundly wrong, yet rather than confront the pain, they often – as they are stimulated to do - cling to hate in order to survive coloniality. We see the same in the Israeli occupation of Palestine: the more unbearable the reality of domination, the more hatred is needed to numb the horror, and those who awaken to the truth like among others Alon-Lee Green and Standing Together, find themselves unable to sleep.

So what is to be done? The solution may lie in retrieving an older language, one preserved in the Black Radical Traditions of the past centuries: the struggle for dignity. Colonized peoples have long framed their resistance not simply as a demand for inclusion or rights, but as an affirmation of human dignity—the irreducible worth of life beyond the calculus of rights and privileges. If colonialism robs both colonizer and colonized of their humanity, then what is required is not more guilt, shame, or pride, but the restoration of dignity.

This includes white dignity. Not pride in colonial histories, not innocence or exceptionalism, none delivers any dignity, but dignity in the sense of reclaiming relational humanity from the dehumanizing logic of colonial domination. For whiteness to be more than a mask for guilt or an alibi for violence, for whiteness to be no more than a phenotype associated with an origin, it must be reoriented toward dignity: the recognition that to deny others’ humanity is also to wound one’s own.

The challenge before us, then, is not to perfect analyses of guilt, innocence, shame, or privilege, but to reframe the conversation entirely. If the colonial world produces monsters, justifying inhumane action, the work of decolonization must be the work of becoming human again. And that is I believe the work of dignity.

© Montecruz Foto

Decolonization is often remembered as the moment when European empires collapsed and formerly colonized nations finally gained their independence. After the Second World War, dozens of countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean secured sovereignty, seemingly breaking free from centuries of imperial domination. Yet the story is not as straightforward as a clean break from colonial power may suggest. In fact, as astute observers warned for at the time - such as the first president of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, the French-Martinican decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon or Congo’s first prime minister Patrice Lumumba - the very terms of decolonization ensured that the colonial project did not end, but instead became globalized in new ways.

To be recognized as “independent,” newly liberated nations not only inherited of state structures and institutions that had been designed for colonial gain but were also expected to adopt a political model that mirrored the European nation-state. Independence required them to establish centralized governments, territorial borders, bureaucracies, and institutions of authority patterned after European ideals of statehood. In other words, to join the community of “civilized” independent nations —embodied most visibly in the United Nations— postcolonial states had to reproduce the European imagination of politics consisting of at least these three characteristics: homogenous national identities, rigidly defined borders, and centralized authority. Far from escaping colonial legacies, the process of decolonization actually universalized them.

This meant that the period of independence after World War II was also the period when European political norms became entrenched across the globe. New nations could only be admitted as legitimate actors if they demonstrated that they were capable of replicating the spatial and racial logics that underpinned European empire. Decolonization, then, did not dismantle colonial structures of thought. Instead, it required formerly colonized peoples to internalize and reproduce them in order to be acknowledged as competent political actors.

At the same time, the independence of new nations came without reparations or restitution for centuries of expropriated land, stolen labor, and violent exploitation. There was no redistribution of wealth to compensate for what empire had taken. Often it was even worse than that: before leaving colonizers actively undermined the liberation movements that had made decolonization unavoidable, often resulting in the death of their leaders, and triggering civil wars that usually ended with the power grab of totalitarian puppet for western political and economic interests. Yet even without civil war, postcolonial states were left impoverished, stripped of resources, but still expected to develop into functioning capitalist nation-states. This condition placed them in an impossible bind: they had to turn to the very powers that had enriched themselves through colonization in order to secure capital for development. In doing so, they often entered new relations of debt and dependency, paying back their former colonizers for the privilege of attempting to exercise independence.

Moreover, to survive within this global order, postcolonial governments frequently adopted colonial practices themselves, enforcing hierarchies and exploiting marginalized populations within their own borders. The global system of power that emerged after decolonization was not one of equality but of “coloniality”—a continuation of imperial logics under the guise of independence.

Kwame Nkrumah quickly recognized this reality and he described the post-independence condition as “neocolonialism”: a situation in which former colonies achieve only the appearance of sovereignty while remaining materially dependent and subject to external exploitation. What emerged, therefore, was not the true end of colonialism, but its transformation into a new form: formal independence combined with ongoing subjugation.

In this light, decolonization was not simply the collapse of colonial empires. It was more importantly the moment when empire’s foundational structures —its ways of organizing space, power, and race— were diffused and consolidated across the globe. The legacy of this process still shapes our world today, as nations continue to wrestle with the contradictions of independence within a system built on enduring colonial inequalities.

Calls for ever-stricter migration policies dominate political campaigns across Europe. Politicians compete to promise tougher border controls, harsher deportation schemes, and deals with third countries. These proposals are sold as pragmatic solutions to a complex problem. But in reality, they neither solve migration nor strengthen society. Instead, they worsen the situation, they deepen fear, fuel polarization, and steadily corrode democracy itself.

A truly ‘closed border’ in Europe is an illusion. To achieve it would require mass surveillance, forced deportations, and a willingness to trample civil liberties, all tools more at home in authoritarian regimes than in European states that self-identify as liberal and democratic. Even then, migration would not stop. It would simply be pushed underground, creating new networks of undocumented workers, exploitation, and insecurity. In practice, stricter policies often generate less control, not more.

Yet politicians keep pushing them. Why? Because migration has become less about governance and more about political theater. Migrants are cast as convenient scapegoats for society’s deeper problems: skyrocketing housing costs, rising inequality, stagnant wages, and strains on public services. These are real challenges for most of us, but they are structural and homegrown. They require long-term investment, fairer taxation, and more equitable economic policies. Blaming migrants and feeding into xenophobic impulses may win applause at rallies, but it won’t build a single affordable home for no-one.

The danger is not only that these measures fail, but that they corrode the very institutions that hold democracy together. When civil rights are eroded in the name of so-called ‘border security,’ they are eroded for everyone. When xenophobia is legitimized as policy, trust in the rule of law crumbles. Step by step, the space for pluralism and dissent shrinks. And in the end, the price of these short-term political victories is paid by society as a whole.

If we assume that today’s leaders know their proposals are ineffective, then the migration debate reveals itself for what it truly is: a struggle for power. Borders and asylum seekers are the stage props, but the real target is the democratic rule of law. That is the conquest. And if we keep letting it happen, the final outcome will be bitterly ironic: in trying to defend ourselves from outsiders, we will have dismantled our own freedoms from within.

In the end, we all lose.

Public debates about violent crime in Europe, the United States, and beyond frequently reduce complex social realities to questions of race, ethnicity, migration, or culture. These culturalist and/or racist framings are not neutral: they are the residue of centuries of colonialism and systemic racism, which continue to shape the way societies perceive and respond to violence. In Europe when a white man commits a violent act, it is usually described as the aberration of a “lone wolf.” When a racialized person, particularly someone with a Muslim or migration background, commits violence, the same act is almost immediately racialized or culturized, i.e. explained as “Islamic terrorism” or as evidence of cultural dysfunction.

Such asymmetrical explanations distort reality, stigmatize entire communities, and obscure the actual drivers of violence. To understand violent crime, we must move beyond racialized narratives and confront the structural, historical, and psychological conditions that generate cycles of violence across continents and in specific communities. I want to develop such an analysis, drawing on examples from Europe, the United States, and even Africa to illustrate how systemic exclusion, discursive framing, and internalized racism combine to produce and perpetuate violent crime.

The interpretive double standard in discussions of crime is clear. In Europe, no white man is ever called upon to apologize for crimes disproportionately committed by members of his demographic: not for pedophilia scandals, school shootings, racist attacks, investment fraud, or organized far-right violence. These crimes are generally depoliticized and attributed to individual pathology or psychology. By contrast, crimes committed by racialized individuals are often collectivized. If a Muslim youth engages in violence, the offense is frequently reduced to “Islamic terrorism,” even when the motives are personal or local. If an Afghan migrant kills his wife, cultural deficiencies will be presented as probable cause. Media headlines and political speeches routinely transform violent acts from racialized minorities into evidence of communal failure. In this way, white violence is individualized while racialized violence is culturalized. The result is a hierarchy of accountability: majority groups are permitted individuality, while minority groups are forced to carry collective blame.

This is not simply an intellectual failing but a political choice. As Stuart Hall (1997) argued, media representation is central to the reproduction of racial hierarchies: “race” is not just observed in crime but constructed through it. The racialization of crime sustains existing power structures by making minority communities appear inherently suspect and in need of constant surveillance.

Cultural explanations obscure the structural realities that actually drive violent crime. Across contexts, the most consistent predictors of violence are poverty, exclusion, family instability, and early trauma. These factors are not exclusive to any group, but racialized and migrant communities are disproportionately exposed to them due to systemic inequality.

Consider intraracial homicide statistics in the United States: over 80% of white homicide victims are killed by other whites, while most black victims are killed by other black people. This reflects social proximity, not racial pathology. People are most often victimized by those with whom they live, work, and interact. Yet the concept of “Black-on-Black crime” is mobilized to imply an inherent racial dysfunction, while no one speaks of “white-on-white crime.”

Similar discourse is reproduced in the UK. As Akala (2018) argues in Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, the idea of “black crime” is a myth that says far more about the structures surrounding black life than about black communities themselves. It reflects what black people in the UK often share, i.e. patterns of deprivation and exclusion, not innate cultural traits.

Another dimension of systemic racism is that racialized communities are not only more vulnerable to crime but also more likely to be criminalized for it. In the United States, black youth use drugs at lower rates than their white peers, yet are disproportionately arrested and punished more severely for the same drug-related offenses. Even minor encounters with the criminal justice system can escalate into long-term exclusion: criminal records limit access to housing, employment, and education, thus perpetuating cycles of marginalization.

Police violence follows a similar pattern. Although more white Americans are killed by police in absolute numbers, African-Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed proportionally. Moreover, officers who kill white victims are more likely to be charged than those who kill black victims, underscoring a legal system that values white lives more highly.

In Europe, comparable patterns can be observed even if statistics are less explicitly racialized. In France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK, people with African, Caribbean, or Middle Eastern migration backgrounds face disproportionate policing, higher school exclusion rates, and elevated unemployment. Because guns are not as widely distributed among civilians as in the US, in Europe police killings are less prevalent, but the racialized double standards are just as salient. In that context migration is criminalized as such, with public discourse portraying entire communities as potential threats, if not because of violent crime then because of their cultural habits, high birth rates, and because they come to steal ‘our’ jobs. Mainstream institutions treat them less as citizens to be protected and more as suspects to be contained.

Moreover, structural inequalities are reinforced by a psychological dimension: internalized racism. Young people of color, especially those with migration backgrounds who were raised in Europe, grow up absorbing all these same negative stereotypes about their communities that white people absorb. These stereotypes are rooted in colonial histories and perpetuated by contemporary media and political discourse. The constant association of migration with crime and dysfunction fosters feelings of inferiority and alienation. This self-hatred sometimes manifests as aggression directed within their own communities. Yet, when this dynamic is acknowledged, it is rarely interpreted in terms of internalized racism. Instead, it is reframed as evidence of cultural deficiency, which in turn reinforces the very stereotypes that sustain the cycle. This is a classic case of what Frantz Fanon (1952) described in Black Skin, White Masks: the psychological scars of colonialism manifest both in the internal life of the subject and in the reproduction of colonial hierarchies within communities themselves.

The United States often appears exceptional because it has statistics on race and these are so stark. Let’s explore a few of them. Black Americans are six times more likely than whites to be murdered, most often by other Black people. Yet the disparity is goes much further. Black women are 1.5 times more likely to suffer miscarriages than white women, regardless of income or healthcare access. Despite smoking fewer cigarettes, African-Americans are 34% more likely to develop lung cancer. Black men make up 40% of the prison population while constituting only 13% of the general population. Such disparities are sometimes attributed to “Black culture” or even genetics. But these claims collapse under scrutiny. The disparities are not intrinsic; they are the product of historical disempowerment, systemic exclusion, and ongoing discrimination.

Europe presents strikingly similar patterns, though the data are less explicit. Postcolonial migrants and their descendants face structural barriers in employment, education, housing, and healthcare. Far from failing to integrate, they are consistently excluded by institutions that continue to operate on colonial logics. As in the US, disparities are misrepresented as cultural deficiencies, masking the deeper reality of systemic racism.

Let’s take a brief look at the African continent which I believe underscores the analysis. Violence and instability are often explained as ‘tribalism,’ ethnic tensions, or plainly backwardness, but this ignores the devastating legacy of colonialism. Centuries of land theft, resource extraction, and cultural erasure left many African nations with fractured social fabrics, arbitrary borders, and former colonial state systems designed explicitly for exploitation. Independence did not undo these damages. Instead, elites — often educated in Western institutions and trained in Eurocentric paradigms — govern in ways that reinforce colonial logics, reproducing internalized anti-Blackness at the level of governance.

The cumulative effect of racialized framings is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When crime is persistently associated with migration, minority identity, or non-whiteness, communities become stigmatized. Policing intensifies, opportunities contract, and cycles of exclusion deepen. Youth growing up under these conditions internalize the stereotypes projected onto them, sometimes fulfilling the very predictions society makes about them. This cycle ensures that public discourse, far from solving the problem, actually perpetuates it. Violence becomes both the product of structural neglect and the confirmation of stereotypes that justify further neglect.

Violent crime can thus not be explained by race, ethnicity, migration, or culture without reproducing harmful myths. The true engines of violence are structural, such as poverty, exclusion, and trauma, not just personal trauma but historical trauma, and augmented by the psychological dimension of internalized racism or very low self-esteem. Across the globe, from American cities to European suburbs to African postcolonial states, what may appear on a superficial level as racial or cultural pathology is in fact the consequence of historical domination, systemic exclusion, and the enduring legacies of colonialism.

Breaking this cycle of violence requires taking all human beings seriously and thus more than calls for integration, diversity or migration bans. It demands dismantling the colonial logics that still underpin powerful institutions in both the Global North and South. Structural reforms must be paired with efforts to address the toll of racialized discourse, which stigmatizes minorities, fuels alienation, and perpetuates hate and self-hatred. Only by reframing violent crime as a symptom of historically grounded systemic injustices, rather than cultural deficiency, can we move toward genuine justice, equality, and safety for all.

References

Akala (2018). Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire. London: Two Roads.

American Journal of Epidemiology (2013). “Preterm Birth in African-American Women.” American Journal of Epidemiology, 177(11): 1271–1279. Available at: http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/177/11/1271.full

American Lung Association. “African Americans and Tobacco Use.” Available at: http://www.lung.org/stop-smoking/about-smoking/facts-figures/african-americans-and-tobacco.html

Fanon, F. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Fraser, D. (2005). “IQ and Race Talk.” Public lecture. Available at:

Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage.

Huffington Post (2013). “Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System Persist.” Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/04/racial-disparities-criminal-justice_n_4045144.html

Miscarriage.about.com. “Why Do Black Women Have More Pregnancy Losses?” Available at: http://miscarriage.about.com/od/riskfactors/f/Why-Do-Black-Women-Have-More-Pregnancy-Losses.htm

Starkey, D. (2011). BBC Interview on the London Riots. Available at:

Demart, S., Schoumaker, B., Godin, M. and Adam, I. (2017). Burgers Met Afrikaanse Roots: Een Portret van Congolese, Rwandese En Burundese Belgen. Brussels: Koning Boudewijn Stichting/Fondation Roi Baudouin.

Standpoint theory as it has been sketched in feminist thought is mostly associated with thinkers such as, among others, Donna Haraway (1988) and Sandra Harding (1993). Standpoint theory suggests that a particular standpoint offers a specific insight into social life. In this sense, there is no particular standpoint that has a privileged perspective, since all standpoints possess unique epistemic value. Effectively, it consists of ‘socially situated knowledge’, which can maximize objectivity in the sense that it provides a balance to the sum of human knowledge (Harding 1993: 52). This then can produce a coherence of knowledge that cannot be achieved when self-reflexivity and the constraints of a particular perspective are ignored or dismissed.

As Grada Kilomba also powerfully puts it, when “scholars claim to have a neutral and objective discourse, they are not acknowledging the fact that they too write from a specific place, which, of course, is neither neutral nor objective or universal, but dominant. It is a place of power.” (Kilomba 2008: 31). Kilomba doesn’t dismiss objectivity but rather points out that research traditions that claim to be neutral and that are not aware of their subjectivity can hardly be called objective (cf. Haraway 1988; Harding 1993).

As researchers in the social sciences, we are powerful human beings interested in having a thorough understanding of social life. Consequently, the subjects of our research are always connected to the researchers themselves as we are simultaneously actors, participants, observers, and interpreters of the social action we describe and analyze. However, that does not mean that there is no truth to be found in the account you lay out. Even if truth is subjective, it does not follow that any subjective account is truthful (cf. Mohanty 2003; Harding 1993).

The purpose is not to dismiss the Western bourgeois scientific project but to question its dominance and to improve it by enriching it with more perspectives. This stance echos how ‘socially situated knowledge’ holds that there is no particular perspective that is epistemically privileged but that to enhance objectivity we need to produce a coherence of knowledge that is self-reflexive and conscious of its constraints (Haraway 1988; Harding 1993).

Literature

• Harding, Sandra. 1993. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is Strong Objectivity.” In Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. Thinking Gender. Routledge.

• Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

• Kilomba, Grada. 2008. Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism. 1. Aufl. Unrast.

• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke University Press.

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Freedom is often heralded as a cornerstone of the human condition, yet its true meaning is deeply contested. The modern liberal conception of freedom tends to prioritize individual autonomy, i.e. the absence of external constraints or interference. However, a closer examination of the linguistic, historical, and philosophical roots of freedom reveals a far richer and more relational understanding. True freedom is not merely about being unshackled; it is about the ability to form meaningful relationships, act together with others, and build communities of love and interdependence. This insight resonates with historian Timothy Snyder’s distinction between positive freedom and negative freedom in his 2024 book On Freedom, as well as with linguistic analysis, precolonial philosophical traditions and decolonial thought, which all emphasize the communal essence of liberty.

The etymology of “free” provides a striking perspective on its original meaning. Derived from a Germanic root connected to the word “friend,” freedom historically implied the capacity to form friendships and interdependent relationships. In this sense, freedom was never about isolation or independence but about building bonds of trust and care.

This relational understanding is even more explicit in Dutch, where the word vrijen, cognate with the English “to free,” means “to make love.” To be free, then, is to possess the ability to form loving, reciprocal relationships and to live in a community of equals. Freedom entails the capacity to keep promises, foster trust, and nurture interdependence.

Similarly, the Latin root of “liberty,” liber, reveals that freedom is not merely an individualistic state. While liber signifies being free, it also carries the connotation of “belonging to the people.” In Roman antiquity, a freed slave did not simply gain the ability to act without restraint but became a citizen, a member of ‘the people’, a community of equals. This transition underscored that freedom involved the right to participate in a web of mutual respect, obligations, and interdependence, an ability denied to slaves. Freedom, in this sense, was inseparable from belonging and recognition within a specific community.

Historian Timothy Snyder expands on this relational view by critiquing the modern tendency to equate freedom with the absence of constraints. In On Freedom, Snyder differentiates between two concepts: negative freedom and positive freedom.

The first is the mistaken notion of freedom as the absence of the state, as the undoing of constraints, and as a rejection of responsibility or obligation. Snyder points out that this view is ultimately hollow because it leads to a vulnerability rather than empowerment. In Dutch, the term vogelvrij —literally “free as a bird”— illustrates this danger. While it might evoke an image of uninhibited liberty, just like a bird that can fly wherever it wants (If you Google images for ‘freedom’ you’ll often find a pic of a person alone with arms streched out to the sky), it historically meant being placed outside the protection of the law, making one vulnerable to looting, enslavement, or even death. To be utterly “free from” responsibility, relationships, or communal ties is not to be truly free but to be dangerously exposed and powerless.

In contrast, Snyder emphasizes that real freedom involves acting together politically to create the conditions for a flourishing society. This conception of positive freedom requires state investments in public goods such as education, healthcare, and shared spaces — institutions that enable individuals to act freely. Freedom for others and with others is what Snyder sees as the essence of true freedom. It is a call to build a society where people are supported and protected, where their relationships and opportunities can thrive.

While Snyder doesn’t address the etymologies of freedom and liberty his pertinent distinction aligns with the historical and linguistic roots of freedom, reinforcing the idea that liberty is not merely a personal possession but a shared endeavor. Real freedom depends on the structures and relationships that allow individuals to live meaningfully and securely within a community.

The African Bantu philosophy of Ubuntu offers a similar insight into the relational nature of freedom. Central to this worldview is the idea that a person’s identity and well-being are inseparable from their relationships with others, encapsulated in the phrase, “I am because we are.” In this perspective, freedom is not an individual achievement but a collective one. A person cannot be free in isolation because their very existence is defined by their connections to others.

This resonates with Snyder’s notion of positive freedom, as both emphasize that individual well-being requires communal support. Just as Ubuntu asserts that there is no self without the community, Snyder argues that there can be no freedom without shared responsibility and collective action.

At the heart of this relational understanding of freedom is I believe the concept of love, and this is also how I understand the French decolonial activist Houria Bouteldja, when she speaks of revolutionary love. To be free is to have the capacity to care for and commit to others, to form bonds of mutual trust and respect. Love, far from being a constraint on freedom, is its foundation. Without love and interdependence, freedom becomes empty and unsustainable.

This perspective challenges the modern dichotomy between autonomy and dependence. Modern liberalism often treats dependence as a threat to freedom, but the relational view recognizes that human beings are inherently interdependent. Love and community are not obstacles to freedom but the very means by which it is realized. This idea that freedom, at its core, is about the ability to form connections and building spaces where the vulnerable and the strong can assert their right to be seen, heard, and valued, is also I think what Myriam Aouragh points at when she speaks of ‘radical kinship’ in the struggle for human dignity.

The implications of this relational perspective are profound. If freedom is fundamentally about relationships and community, then it cannot be reduced to the absence of constraints or external interference. A truly free society requires collective investment in the public good such as education, healthcare, public spaces, and other commons that foster mutual care and interdependence. This vision of freedom also critiques the dangers of unchecked individualism. When freedom is defined solely as personal autonomy, it neglects the conditions that make autonomy possible. As vogelvrij warns, freedom from all constraints ultimately leads to vulnerability and exploitation. True freedom requires structures of protection, support, and belonging.

Freedom, when understood in its relational essence, is thus not about isolation or unbounded autonomy but about connection, love, and community. Its linguistic roots in terms like “friend,” vrijen, and liber point to a rich history of seeing freedom as interdependent and communal. Precolonial philosophical traditions like Ubuntu, Snyder’s “freedom for”. Bouteldja’s ‘politics of revolutionary love,’ and Aouragh ‘radical kinship’ further emphasize that freedom is realized not in isolation but through collective action and mutual care.

To be free is to belong, to love, and to act together with others to build a society where all can flourish. This understanding not just enriches our concept of freedom but more importantly offers a powerful critique of individualistic ideologies that dominate modern liberal thought. In a world increasingly marked by alienation and division, reclaiming the relational and collective dimensions of freedom is more urgent than ever. Only by embracing our shared humanity can we realize the promise of true freedom.

References

Aouragh, Miriyam. 2023. “Towards a Theory of Radical Kinship.” Race & Class 65 (1): 39–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968231167362.

Bouteldja, Houria. 2016. Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love. South Pasadena CA: Semiotext(e).

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.

Snyder, Timothy. 2024. On Freedom. New York: Crown.

Tutu, Desmond (2013). Who we are: Human uniqueness and the African spirit of Ubuntu (video). Templeton Prize (published 4 April 2013).

When one looks at our current world, our recent colonial history, or even goes back a few thousands of years, and sees how humans have shaped the world, one may be tempted to think that we are inherently violent and destructive living beings. But is that really the case? And should we just accept this pessimistic and deterministic perspective? I don’t think so.

In his research and publications, the American anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson challenges the idea that warfare is an inherent and inevitable aspect of human behavior. He argues that war emerged due to social, economic, and political conditions, particularly in the past 12,000 years, rather than as a result of an innate predisposition to violence. War thus appears to be a pretty recent phenomenon, considering that our species has been around for at least 300,000 years. This seems to be the case if one examines evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and primate studies which refutes claims that humans are biologically hardwired for warfare. Moreover, this observation aligns also with biologist Olivier Hamant argument that in all biological systems – including humanity – it is abundance that triggers conflict and competition, and not scarcity. Considering that about 12,000 years ago agriculture became a central part of several human societies and that agriculture made it possible to create an abundance of stored food that could be consumed months or years later, one can be tempted to see that war is also a consequence of this technological feat. But here too we should be careful to not jump too quickly to any conclusions. Based on archeologist David Wengrow’s and anthropologist David Graeber’s arguments in their fascinating book The Dawn of Eeverything, many scenarios are possible, there is so much we don’t know that we should be cautious to not project current assumptions on past human societies. Rather than violence maybe what makes us human is the immense creative potential to create our own worlds, violent or peaceful, as warriors or lovers, as cruel or compassionate.

The scholarly debate about ‘human nature’ and our disposition to be either violent or peaceful may according to Ferguson be divided into two camps: "hawks," who believe war is a result of evolutionary pressures, and "doves," who argue it emerged due to social complexities that triggered resource competition. The hawk perspective links human violence to natural selection, where warfare served as a means for the strongest to gain resources and mates. This view is supported by proponents such as evolutionary psychologists but also political scientist Francis Fukuyama and international relation scholar Bradley Thayer, who suggest that xenophobia and ethnocentrism are extensions of early human tribal protection instincts.

However, according to the "doves," while humans do have the capacity for warfare, it is too easy to assume this is as an ingrained biological instinct. Rather, one could just as well, and probably even better, argue that war emerges as a result of social structures and changing environmental conditions. If war were an innate human tendency, we would expect to see clear evidence of it in small-scale societies across the globe and across prehistoric records. However, it appears that early humans likely did not engage in organized conflict until the rise of complex societies, sedentism, and agriculture, which seem to have created the conditions necessary for collective violence. Wengrow and Graeber would even doubt that, pointing at examples of complex societies with irrigation and sanitation systems, grand architectural structures, and urban life who would have no apparent forms of social hierarchy or violent oppression. This doesn’t mean that we should idealize these societies nor consider them as the default, but it just tells us that we shouldn’t think in deterministic terms when it comes to inequality and violence.

In line with them Ferguson emphasizes that the archaeological evidence often cited by hawks is ambiguous and therefore not to be seen as “hard” evidence from which one can draw with certainty that humans are hardwired for violence. For example, Paleolithic cave paintings that some interpret as depicting warfare could just as well be interpreted as representations of shamanic rituals. Weapons like maces, once seen as proof of warfare, may have been ceremonial objects. Even skeletal remains with injuries require careful interpretation to distinguish between accidents, homicides, and warfare. Some skulls show signs of non-lethal violence, reflecting personal disputes rather than organized conflict. Basically, nothing is certain and this uncertainty is an opportunity to imagine better human futures.

Moreover, saying with some certainty that warfare is naturally part of human nature is as simplistic—and certainly potentially harmful—as claiming that Africans would be hardwired for ethnic conflict because of culture or race. While it’s true that many African communities experienced frequent conflict before colonial times, what we define as “conflict” needs to be reconsidered. Anthropological research suggests that many of these so-called wars were more like a mix of competitive sports and cultural ceremonies, involving a mixture of music, dance, poetry, and martial arts. Although these events could turn out violent, they rarely led to massive deaths or bloodshed. Think about it: While hooliganism is definitely a thing, it would be incorrect to frame every football competition as a violent war rather than a moment of party and conviviality. And even that comparison probably fails to give us an insight in these precolonial societies. In the context of precolonial societies, it appears that if someone or a few people were seriously injured or killed, the fighting typically stopped immediately and a peaceful resolution was sought. Large-scale massacres or campaigns of ethnic cleansing, like those seen in the 20th century, appear to have been virtually absent in these contexts. This is not to say that before the advent of colonialism there were no massacres. The archeological and historic record clearly points at probable and certain massacres. Yet, one cannot reduce the human condition to these examples because peaceful times are largely evidenced by the absence of traces. As a result the archeological record is just like your current news site: biased towards bad and horrific news.

Ferguson’s research also highlights examples from different regions, showing that warfare did not emerge uniformly. For instance, in areas like the southern Levant, and in line with Wengrow’s argument, no evidence of war has been found before 3200 B.C., despite the presence of the aforementioned conditions that might facilitate conflict. Ferguson therefore suggests that many societies developed social mechanisms that promoted peace, such as kinship ties, cooperative hunting, and conflict resolution strategies and that these arrangements helped prevent widespread violence. One could speculate that what we are currently organizing as international sports events could have worked in the past as proxies for war, albeit not just as sports events, but also with political implications for those who win or lose a ‘game.’

It appears then that war is not a biological necessity but a cultural invention that arose in specific contexts in recent human history. As mentioned before, in line with biologist Olivier Hamant competition as a framework of human action appears to be the result of a context of abundance. This observation challenges the popular media narrative, which often sensationalizes violent archaeological finds while ignoring the many instances where no evidence of conflict is found. Ultimately, this offers a more optimistic view of humanity, suggesting that war is not an inevitable part of our nature but that as humans we have the capacity to make or unmake war and peace, that we are not determined by biology, but shaped by culture, a thing we created and that we can recreate, renegotiate, and thus change in relation to fluctuating circumstances.

Some also point to chimpanzees as proof that violence is in our genes. But chimpanzee aggression seems often to be the result of human interference, not natural behavior. One could argue that this interference creates an abundance that then leads to conflict. And let’s not forget—humans are just as closely related to bonobos as to chimpanzees, our common ancestor would have lived eight to six million years ago. Bonobos, instead of fighting when they meet a new group, tend to respond with affection and bonding. So who are we then, rather chimps or bonobo’s. The truth is probably more complex than any answer on this question.

We also tend to admire ancient cultures that left behind grand monuments like pyramids and temples. While recent research has challenged the idea that the pyramids must have been built through slave labor, and suggests that it seems very probable that free people collaborated in a systems of corvées similar to national service, rather than through forced labor. But perhaps we should also be more impressed by cultures that left few grand architectural traces behind, those who appeared to be so in tune with the environment that we only know of stories and barely have physical traits to lean on. We often assume the lack of large structures means these societies were less advanced or more "primitive." Yet, it’s worth considering the opposite: massive monuments that survive for thousands of years may rarely be built without violence or forced labor. In contrast, many early hunter-gatherer nomadic and sedentary human societies—but actually many recent human societies too—seem to have lived more peacefully, relying on cooperation, family ties, friendships, and ways of resolving conflict without bloodshed. Since these “primitive” societies made up the majority of human history, and since we do know that civilizations with grand stone monuments could also be egalitarian and peaceful, maybe we should pay more attention to their ways of life than to the civilizations that did build grand stone monuments and also waged ‘great wars’ with ‘great kings.’

In short, if we wish to believe in life and in a future for humanity, we need to move away from the idea that humans are naturally wired for war. Instead, we should focus on understanding the cultural and environmental factors that have shaped conflict throughout history. All of this suggests that war is not something built into our genes, but rather a cultural reaction to specific situations. That’s a hopeful thought.

CC0, George Hodan

In an age defined by acceleration, optimization, and systemic fragility, what we need is not a political or economic revolution but a radical cultural shift. This is what biologist Olivier Hamant calls for when he argues for a radical reorientation of our societal values. As director of the Michel-Serres Institute, Hamant champions a cultural transition from the prevailing cult of performance and competitivity to what he envisions as a civilization of robustness and thus cooperation. Drawing inspiration from biological systems, Hamant tells us a story that we actually know, in line with many indigenous ways of being and thus offers not just a critique of the present but a hopeful roadmap for the future.

At the heart of Hamant’s thesis is a critical distinction between two modes of operating: performance and robustness. Performance is typically lauded as the gold standard—achieving objectives with maximum efficiency and efficacy (i.e. achieving objectives with the least means possible). Competitiveness is an inherent outcome of this pursuit. When biological systems prioritize performance, they become obsessed with optimization, leading to a narrow, reductionist view of the world. This focus on performance often drives competitive behavior in various sectors. In our contemporary world, this logic underpins everything from urban design and agricultural practices to corporate productivity and even leisure. Whether in capitalist or state-run systems, performance-driven optimization has become a universal ideal. Robustness, by contrast, is the capacity of a system to remain viable amid fluctuation and unpredictability. Rather than returning to a prior equilibrium after disruption, which is encapsulated in the concept of resilience, robustness seeks rather to prevent destabilization altogether by absorbing shocks and adapting in real time, always open for change. This quality is not derived from efficiency or efficacy at all but from diversity, redundancy, and imperfection.

Performance seems to be stimulated by abundance. Biological systems teach us a counter-intuitive principle: abundance stimulates competition and conflict. This is what one sees with all life, from bacteria to mammals, in a plentiful world performance and competition become the default. When resources are plentiful, living beings, including humans, tend to engage in competition rather than cooperation. Hamant uses the example of a parasite that, when exposed to abundant resources, becomes hyper-specialized and loses functions, operating in an "ultra-performing" and competitive mode. This applies to human history too, where the invention of agriculture, colonization, and industrialization, all fueled by the pursuit of abundance, have continuously stimulated competition an conflict.

Hamant’s critique is rooted in the growing instability of our global systems. We no longer live in a “world of averages” but one of extreme deviations: a world of mega-fires, pandemics, geopolitical upheaval, and ecological tipping points. Optimization, though seemingly rational decision-making, paradoxically erodes the very buffers that make systems viable. Our networks, finely tuned for peak efficiency, have little room for error. A single blockage in the Suez Canal, a just-in-time hospital with no inventory, or a disrupted global supply chain becomes a cascading crisis. In a world in which climate change goes hand in hand with more and more unpredictable and extreme weather, one can imagine that we are in need of a new paradigm grounded not in predictability and abundance, but rather in arbitrariness and scarcity. We do need to be performative and resilient but rather cooperative and robust, always responsive to new situations.

Yet, the current obsessive pursuit of performance leads to counterproductivity. Gains in efficiency often backfire, as illustrated by the Jevons Paradox: making processes more efficient typically spurs greater consumption. Efficient fridges lead to more fridges; digital tools free time that is quickly filled with new demands and addictions. Goodhart’s Law further complicates matters: when metrics become targets, they lose meaning, warping behaviors across academia, economics, and governance.

Ultimately, the cult of performance burns through both human and ecological capital. Individuals face burnout; ecosystems collapse under the weight of extraction; nations prepare for or go to war. The most extreme expressions of this mindset are what Hamant terms “projects of death,” which echoes Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics: grandiose techno-solutions like Mars colonization, luxury bunkers, mega-cruise ships, or deep-sea mining. These ventures exemplify control fantasies that sidestep the root issues, intensifying risk rather than mitigating it.

Therefore we are in need of a strikingly different model rooted in what we have learned from biology and ecology. We are after all also a biological system. In the living world, robustness is not the result of perfect control but of strategic imperfection. Nature favors suboptimality: photosynthesis captures less than 1% of solar energy, yet sustains life on Earth. Plant cells grow irregularly, yet produce consistent and symmetrical organs. Trees limit their growth and maintain hidden reserves that ensure survival through environmental stress.

The lessons are clear: robust systems embrace what performance logic deems wasteful: redundancy, randomness, heterogeneity, diversity, imperfection, and unfinishedness. These characteristics, while inefficient in the short term, provide on a higher scale the long-term adaptability that performance systems lack.

Translating these principles into practice, Olivier Hamant advocates for seven possible strategies:

• 1. Preparation over prediction: rather than forecasting the future, we must cultivate systems ready for the unknown.

• 2. Robustness audits: institutions should evaluate and embrace the “counter-performances” that contribute to long-term health, such as unstructured time and informal interactions.

• 3. Decentralization and diversification: under stress it is local, diverse, and flexible systems—whether in energy, agriculture, or governance—that outperform centralized monoliths.

• 4. Agroecology: replacing industrialized monocultures with biodiverse farming restores ecological balance and community autonomy.

• 5. Repair and shared use economies: moving from ownership to stewardship, prioritizing durability and resource circulation.

• 6. Educational reform: from competitive, top-down learning – as is standard practice today – to cooperative, conflict-resilient pedagogy that values collaboration over hierarchy.

• 7. Social cohesion: strong relationships, mutual trust, and collective well-being form the bedrock of any robust society.

Rather than aiming to reform the core of the existing system, we should be encouraged to look to the peripheries, the small-scale, often overlooked initiatives already embodying robust principles, and to strengthen their impact. Repair cafés, community gardens, citizen assemblies, cooperative housing, and local energy co-ops may seem marginal, but they hold the seeds of transformation. Like ecological edge zones, these “margins” are hotspots of innovation and resilience. Over time, they may “contaminate” the dominant culture with more sustainable, human-centered practices.

Despite the magnitude of our global crises, this is a fundamentally optimistic vision. He frames our current moment as an inflection point: a departure from the Neolithic paradigm of control toward a world that thrives on fluctuation and interaction. The civilization of robustness is not a retreat into scarcity, but a step into a different kind of abundance: not of things, but of relationships, meaning, and shared experience. It promises a more joyful, enduring, and humane way of life, one that does not merely survive the storms of the future but learns to dance and sing with them, probably not so different from those days when we couldn’t predict heavy storms or solar eclipses, but learned that it was through - albeit slow - but robust collaborative strategies that we could survive such a scary but beautiful world.

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CCO1.0. ‘The industry (1878-1938)’ by Richard Roland Holst.

What passes for utopian thought in Silicon Valley today is, in truth, a mutation of the darkest chapters of recent human history. Behind the gleaming rhetoric of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), IQ-maximization, and interstellar destiny lies a familiar impulse: the cold, totalizing, instrumental rationality that animated colonial conquest, racial science, eugenics, and the Holocaust. The ideologies of transhumanism, effective altruism, longtermism, and related tech-optimist visions may appear as bold steps toward a better future. But they are rather a system of a recursive return to the logic of domination, now refitted in algorithmic armor.

This is not just a critique of some fringe corners of AI speculation, but a confrontation with a powerful and well-funded ideological project financed by tech-billionaires and intellectually vindicated by Oxford philosophers, Ivy Leage psychologists, and other influential alleged intellectuals. These tech-optimist ideologies represent a dangerous continuation—and in some ways, an escalation—of a destructive mode of thought: one that reduces life to abstractions, knowledge to classifications, and progress to quantitative data.

In their 2024 essay, The TESCREAL Bundle, philosopher Emile Torres and computer scientist Timnit Gebru lay bare the direct lineage of this ideology: it is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition. Many of the same noxious attitudes—racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, sexism—persist within AGI research communities. The movement to build AGI is, as many hav come to realize, not at all a value-neutral or speculative science, rather it is built on a historically deeply compromised epistemology that is at the root of the horrors of slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust and ecological destruction.

Frankfurt School cultural theorists like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer connected after World War II the horrors of the Holocaust to a critique of the Enlightenment which refers to the philosophical and social compulsion to reduce reality to sterile abstractions. Individuals become specimens. Lives become variables. Difference is not celebrated but eliminated. For Theodor Adorno the historical apex of this way of thinking was the Holocaust, what he called the “administrative murder of millions.” In tech-optimist thought and actions this same logic is revived through the obsession with intelligence metrics and “genius,” where human worth is reduced to one quantifiable number. Those who fail to meet the standard—non-geniuses, the disabled, the poor—are rendered by this logic disposable. They are useful only as data sources, as training sets, as fuel for a so-called “god-machine.”

Postcolonial thinker Aimé Césaire called this process thingification: the colonial logic that transforms people into tools, cultures into caricatures, and nature into resources. It is a “scientific” epistemology that, under the guise of progress, measures, classifies, and … kills in name of material accumulation. The quantification of human value through IQ tests is in that context a descendant of phrenology and sterilization programs.

Torres and Gebru reveal that many AGI proponents frame their mission as the creation of a technological utopia. In this tech-optimist world view humanity will end-up as software uploaded into “the cloud." But this is a utopia for whom? And at what cost? This vision of the future, stripped of biological life, powered by “uploaded minds” and algorithmic intelligence, is the very realization of Adorno’s warning that “pure identity is death.” It is a world where everything messy, non-identical, or embodied, everything that suffers, resists, or exceeds calculation, is condemned to be cast aside in the name of optimization. This tech-optimist future is a sanitized, lifeless cosmos in which life, in its richness, its contradictions, and its vulnerabilities has no place.

This is what Césaire diagnosed so sharply: “progress” as an ideology of empire. Europe, he argued, did not civilize the world. Rather, it ravaged it in the name of financial profit. Colonialism was not a detour or abberation from modernity, no, it was its actual engine. Today, the cult of AGI utopia performs the same trick. The pursuit of technological salvation is used to justify economic domination, social stratification, and epistemological erasure. Billions are poured into speculative systems that may never work, while the actual suffering of the present, of workers, migrants, ecosystems, goes ignored or actively worsens.

Adorno insisted that instrumental reason—reason reduced to calculation—produces total systems that erase the particular. He called for an ethics of attention to suffering, to the singular, to what cannot be neatly folded into a concept. Gebru and Torres make a similar demand when they critique “safe AGI” strategies that attempt to build a “presumably all-knowing system.” Such a system, they argue, cannot be meaningfully tested or controlled. The dream of an omniscient machine is not safety, as they claim, but the erasure of the world in its complexity. This is precisely what Adorno called for: a refusal of universals detached from the particular. We must reclaim a mode of thinking that honors specificity, embodiment, and limitation. These are not flaws or weaknesses, they are what life is.

In the end, what tech-billionaires and their intellectual backers are doing is a lethal and apocalyptic theology. The “tech GOD” at its center is a fetishized abstraction: intelligence without body, optimization without ethics, computation without compassion. As Adorno wrote, when universals become dominant, they are transfigured into spirits, i.e. objects of worship that demand sacrifice. The pursuit of AGI has become such a sacrificial rite. It requires the denial of the real, the present, and the plural in favor of a monolithic future that can only be imagined by the powerful.

And like all theologies built on hierarchy, it finds common cause with the far right. As Gebru and Torres show, tech-optimist thinkers and funders have collaborated with extreme right-wing forces. This is not incidental. Césaire reminded us in 1951 that fascism was never a break from Western rationalism, not at all actually, as he shows, it was its continuation. Europe tolerated Nazism because it had practiced its logic in the colonies. The same hierarchical, supremacist, death-dealing reasoning that justified slavery and empire now powers our machines, and the ideologies behind them.

If there is hope, it lies in rejecting this epistemology. The problem is of course not intelligence as such, but how we define it, why we define it, whom this definition serves, and what it erases. We need a decolonization of science, not as a metaphor, but as a concrete material and intellectual task. We must abandon the fantasy of universal optimization and turn back to the real: the suffering body, the entangled ecosystem, the poem, the anomaly, the voice that resists.

Adorno wrote that the measure of truth is suffering. Césaire turned to surrealism, myth, poetry, and memory to retrieve what scientific reason had tried to kill. Gebru and Torres call us back to responsibility, to ethical specificity, to systems that do not seek to conquer the world but to live within it.

Of course, technology is not by definition bad, but the tech-optimist view of the future is death. It is a continuation of centuries of scientifically legitimized destruction, redressed in allegedly neutral code. It offers not utopia, but the final, perfected system of domination: clean, efficient, post-human, dead. Let us demand life.

Literature

Adorno, Theodor W. 1966. Negative Dialectics. London: Taylor & Francis e-Library.

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 1947. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso Books.

Césaire, Aimé. 1945. “Poésie et Connaissance.” Tropiques 12:157–70.

———. 1950. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. 2024. “The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence.” First Monday, April. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636.