Racism Vs Colonialism

The conversations about race and racism that we had this week are important conversations to have, especially for us as white people because of the benefits we consciously and unconsciously reap from racism as a systematic form of oppression. I would like to believe that these systems can and will be dismantled. I would like to prove racial “realists” wrong about the inevitability and inescapability of racism. I doubt that this will happen in my lifetime. I would love to be proven wrong.

We mentioned Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” in passing on Monday, intending to talk about it with greater depth on Wednesday, but our class took a different (and really interesting and powerful) course, so I’m going to take this opportunity to talk
Orwell states in the second paragraph of his essay that he “had already made up [his] mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner [he] chucked out [his] job the better” because the mistreatment of the people around him makes him feel “an intolerable sense of guilt.” However, he perpetuates colonialism by not quitting his job, viewing Indian and Burmese people as savage and inferior to him, and, ultimately, by shooting an elephant “solely to avoid looking like a fool” in front of a crowd of onlookers, even though he knows it isn’t what he “ought to do.” What scares Orwell more than what Kipling describes as “the threat of terror” that comes with living among “new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half-child” (Kipling) is “the judgment of [his] peers” (Kipling). However, unlike Kipling, Orwell’s peers are the subjugated people that exist around him, not contemporary white citizens of white nations, who are obviously smarter and more reasonable than the “yellow faced” (Orwell) brutes he has to deal with. Orwell is more concerned about the understandably rampant “anti-European feeling” (Orwell) he recognizes in Moulmein, Burma, where he is stationed as a police officer. Thus, both