White Skin, Black Mask: Portrait of the Self-professed ‘Decolonizer’

Christoph Hesse critically discusses contemporary decolonial endeavours, which, as Hesse shows, distort history towards a reality which is not ‘found’ but produced in order to confirm the necessity of the decolonial program. In this context, to decolonize does not mean classical political action but to point out grievances which are only addressed ex-post, on the level of academic discourse and attempts to clean up language from exclusory vocabulary. The political impact, as Hesse points out, is therefore limited to an elevation of the disadvantaged on a discursive level, without actually tackling existing inequalities. To address the problems decolonizers profess to be concerned with, Hesse suggests a more self-reflexive and dialectical approach, instead of decolonial revisions of history. Decolonization Antiracism Antisemitism