People in academia and woke discourse often talk about colonial knowledge practices, but I feel like this is a topic that is often discussed in a sort of higher-level abstract way that doesn’t get to the real, severe, and immediate impact that these practices have on people’s lives. Like, often academics are interested in how colonial knowledge practices have led to internalized attitudes that are damaging, and that’s undoubtedly important, but also:
Every day right now I’m dealing with cases where Afghan people are getting screwed over because, for instance, only a birth year (and not a birth date) is available and marked on an identity document for someone, or children do not have the same surname as their parents, or someone does not understand how a widow and her children would be considered the dependents of her brother-in-law, or no evidence of support and dependency can be provided because all bills have always been paid in cash because no one involved has a bank account. This is not even getting into differing transliterations of names or even instances where someone is listed by their first and second names only on some documents but by first, second, and third name on others— or cases that others I know have handled where a man simply cannot have more than one wife and her children dependent on him.
The West has created a global system of bureaucracy that works to regulate what is and isn’t “real,” “valid,” and “legitimate.” This is important: it is something that happens totally independent of what any person or group of people feels about any cultural/social behavior; no one is sitting out there feeling a certain way about cultural practices, but stacks and stacks of paper or digital forms are acting to cull people’s lives through various mechanisms, until people learn that they at least have to perform Western expectations. This is why it’s so important to champion critical race theory and its postcolonial (and disability) siblings— because in so many ways there is still massive ignorance of the fact that when we talk about systemic oppression, we are talking about this.
