The Queen is dead. Colonization is not.

Guest post by my friend and colleague who prefers the pseudonym BK.

Queen Elizabeth has died. Certainly a shock to the world, despite her age of 96 years old. And as the world will be abuzz with mourning and protest alike, this can and should be a time for honest conversations. The queen is dead. Colonization is not.

In the face of the monarch Queen Elizabeth passing perhaps we can rip ourselves away from the algorithms that tout her as a benevolent, someone of unmatched dignity, the last of her kind and exceptional royal for a moment. Some of that may be true, but as someone that has no interest in the royal family beyond what they represent I am more interested in both telling and hearing the other story.

But is it indeed another story? Rather than engaging with this like our mass hysteria fueled media would have it, perhaps we might stop and look at the other side of the story — what is indeed the only true story. The story that implicates the queen in being an oppressor, a colonizer and a woman who was not merely someone who came to any of these positions as an innocent bystander but as an active participant in Britain’s colonial rule. This isn’t about celebrating her death, or dancing on her grave, but rather what the crown represents, its dark past, and its ill-fated future.

We have to decide whether we want to maintain the oppressive status quo and participate in benign chatter about the queen’s passing, how she is reunited with her beloved Phillip, and just how wonderful the rainbow gleamed over Windsor the day she died, or whether we want to also tell the truth.

There has been a loss. For some a massive one. It is appropriate to mourn and/or grieve if that is one’s chosen response. I recognize what the queen represents to many British people and in the current climate she seemed like a steadfast icon that allowed a deeply fragmented and in-crisis Britain to hold onto a narrative that seemed to salvage some of its broken pieces right now. Particularly in the global west the queen’s 70- year reign was a time marked by stability and diplomacy – something that is sorely absent in politics globally.

In recent history, the Royals took great pains to distance themselves from the country’s politics as well as their long colonial history, yet it doesn’t undo the past nor does it stop the continued catastrophizing of peoples subdued under British rule. Rule marked by racism, White Supremacy, and homogeneity. We must not expect those that do not mourn to engage in asinine politeness about a passing monarch who represented destruction, domination, genocide and slavery. If you are more worried about decorum and being polite when a dominant oppressor passes, then perhaps you must ask yourself how much you are interested in hearing the truth and telling it while those that have actively been oppressed do not feel they need to be polite around the symbol of their oppression passing. For those people that still suffer the consequences of the queen’s brutal colonialism and racism both abroad and also in the UK the dominant legacy the queen leaves behind is a violent one. It is one that is still ongoing and a legacy from which the Royals continue to profit from to this day. This is a/the honest conversation.

As I see the onslaught of Facebook posts celebrating the queen, her life, her reign I feel myself tensing up as I feel the strain in brown and black bodies, bodies not unlike my own, in queer bodies, and bodies in poverty aching because their narrative matters less than this dominant one that seeks to uplift a symbol of their oppression — and the deeply held pain in these bodies is not only overlooked but oppressed over and over again by those that prefer a world that is and remains colonized. Colonization is not just an issue of land, it is an issue of the mind.

The queen’s death brings out how much we want to hold onto our colonized minds. Minds that allow us to look away from less convenient stories that continue to oppress those that have suffered at the hand of the monarchy and whose lands continue to bleed from the violent oppression of colonial rule.

While some might argue that the queen attempted to make amends through her Commonwealth tours, many rightly argue that the Royal Family has not adequately faced up to the proportions of its colonial and imperialist power. Harvard history professor Maya Jasanoff writes “By design as much as by accident of her long life, her presence as head of state and head of the Commonwealth, an association of Britain and its former colonies, put a stolid traditionalist front over the decades of violent upheaval. As such, the queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.”

Among many things, the Queen’s death should be a time to consider the people we hold up as representations of civility and dignity. It is time to understand why a global celebrating of the life and death of a head of state that represented deep and lasting colonization continues to perpetuate a nostalgic myth that is at best unhelpful and at worst a diabolical lie that only delays our reparation, restoration, and reconciliation process. 

If we want change, rather than jumping on the commemorative bandwagon, let’s consider what we are posting because change always comes with re-evaluating our own world-views and ways of being in the world. For those seeking to bring more peace and unity, and that want to reduce the harm that is so palpably felt over social media in the grotesque white-washing of a deeply violent and harmful narrative – to those of you that care, let’s have the courage to call it out and change the way we speak of oppression, of systems built on deep seated inequity and let’s hope that the king’s journey of reparation begins today.

In the words of Hannah Arendt: “Justice requires sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.”

There is much lamenting and reparation left to do. The queen is dead. Colonization is not.