By Musa T Bey

The Psychological War at the Heart of Colonialism — And the Radical Struggle to Heal and Resist

Colonialism didn’t just steal land and labor. It colonized consciousness, fractured identities, and left wounds that still shape our world. From Frantz Fanon to Black feminists and Indigenous revolutionaries, radicals have long known: freedom means not only breaking chains but decolonizing the mind.

Empire’s First Weapon: Dehumanization

Every empire is built on a lie. The British called it the “white man’s burden.” The French, their mission civilisatrice. The Spanish spoke of God’s will. But beneath these high-sounding justifications lay a brutal psychological project: the systematic dehumanization of entire peoples.

Africans were depicted as beasts of burden, enslaved supposedly because they lacked civilization. Indigenous peoples were labeled “savages” standing in the way of “progress.” Asians were exoticized and infantilized, imagined as passive subjects of imperial benevolence.

This dehumanization wasn’t mere propaganda — it structured the entire colonial world. It allowed European powers to kill, enslave, and steal while convincing themselves they were noble saviors. For the colonized, the damage ran even deeper. Over time, many internalized these imposed ideas, leading to inferiority complexes, shame, and alienation.

As Edward Said showed in Orientalism, colonialism wasn’t just a military force; it was a machine that produced knowledge — in books, art, science, and law — all designed to make domination seem natural and inevitable.

The Colonized Mind: A Fractured Psyche

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary, laid bare the psychic cost of this system. In Black Skin, White Masks, he described how Black people in white-dominated societies are trapped in a violent double bind — always seen as inferior, yet pressured to aspire to the very standards that mark their inferiority.

Fanon called this the “epidermalization of inferiority” — the process by which racism becomes embedded in the very skin of the colonized subject. The colonized person, denied dignity, is pushed toward mimicry: adopting the language, dress, and manners of the colonizer in hopes of acceptance. But this mimicry only deepens alienation. The colonized become strangers in their own bodies, fractured between imposed inferiority and unattainable whiteness.

From Algeria’s banned languages to Kenya’s vilified Kikuyu traditions, from Native American children torn from families into boarding schools — colonial rule aimed not just to dominate physically, but to erase and rewrite the colonized mind.

Trauma That Doesn’t Die: Empire’s Psychological Afterlife

Colonial violence didn’t end with independence ceremonies and flag raisings. Its trauma echoes across generations.

Indigenous communities in North America live with the psychological scars of forced assimilation and cultural genocide, manifesting in high rates of suicide, addiction, and depression. In the Caribbean, descendants of enslaved Africans still navigate the aftershocks of plantation slavery and white supremacy. In Palestine, collective trauma compounds daily under ongoing occupation.

Psychologists call this historical trauma. But radical thinkers argue it’s not simply a medical condition — it’s political. The systems that caused these wounds — racism, capitalism, imperialism — are still operating. The afterlife of empire is alive in the very structures of global power.

The Colonizer’s Denial: A Fragile Fantasy Built on Violence

Empire also twisted the psychology of the colonizer. How does one brutalize entire peoples while believing oneself to be moral? Albert Memmi called this the colonizer’s tragic bind: they exploit but must justify, dominate but claim benevolence.

This fragile self-image requires constant maintenance. Cultural industries — from Victorian novels to Hollywood films — have long depicted empire as a civilizing mission, obscuring its violence. Science and academia were mobilized to produce “knowledge” that confirmed white superiority and non-European inferiority.

Today, this psychological machinery persists. The U.S. frames its wars as spreading democracy. Europe downplays its colonial crimes while profiting from their spoils. Denial, disavowal, and projection remain core imperial tactics — as vital as drones and trade deals.

Healing Through Revolution: Resistance as Psychological Liberation

But empire has never gone uncontested. Across the colonized world, people fought back — not just politically, but psychologically. Anti-colonial struggle was, at its heart, a battle to reclaim stolen humanity.

For Fanon, revolutionary violence was more than strategic — it was therapeutic. Armed resistance shattered the image of the colonizer as invincible and superior. It restored dignity and agency to the oppressed. Revolution became a process of collective healing, breaking the psychological chains of fear and submission.

Resistance took cultural forms too. In Haiti, enslaved Africans fused traditions to create Vodou, turning spirituality into an anti-colonial weapon. In Algeria, underground schools preserved outlawed languages. In Zimbabwe, songs and oral histories kept alive the memory of resistance.

Each act of defiance was an effort to mend the fractured self, to reconstruct identity on terms set by the oppressed, not the oppressor.

Beyond National Liberation: The Black Radical Tradition Speaks

Thinkers in the Black Radical Tradition pushed this analysis further. Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism, argued that capitalism itself depends on racial hierarchy — that colonial dehumanization wasn’t an aberration but capitalism’s foundation.

Black feminists like Angela Davis and Sylvia Wynter revealed how empire’s violence was gendered, targeting women through sexual exploitation, reproductive control, and the imposition of European patriarchy. Wynter called for a complete rupture with the colonial definition of the “human,” urging us to imagine entirely new ways of being beyond racial capitalism.

Revolutionaries like Amílcar Cabral and Thomas Sankara insisted that true liberation meant destroying the “colonial mentality.” Sankara called for building a “new man” — a liberated subject no longer haunted by the colonizer’s shadow.

Their shared insight: real freedom requires a psychological revolution, not just national independence.

Psychological Colonialism Today: Empire’s Lingering Ghosts

Formal empires may have collapsed, but the psychic architecture of colonialism endures.

Racism remains global currency: Blackness associated with criminality, Muslims with terrorism, Indigenous peoples with primitivism. Schools still center European knowledge, marginalizing the histories and wisdom of the colonized. Aid programs and NGOs often reproduce colonial dynamics, positioning the Global North as saviors and the South as helpless dependents.

Radical theorists like Frank Wilderson and Saidiya Hartman argue that anti-Blackness is not an afterthought — it is the deep structure of the modern world, a lingering ghost of colonial domination that continues to produce psychic and material violence.

This is the psychological afterlife of empire. It is all around us — in media, education, borders, and prisons — sustaining trauma while masking its own origins.

Decolonization as Abolition: Healing by Dismantling

Radicals today insist that decolonization must go beyond symbolic gestures and surface reforms. It must be abolitionist in scope — targeting the deep structures that reproduce psychological and material domination.

This means:

Abolishing prisons and police that enact colonial logics of racial control. Dismantling borders that enforce imperial hierarchies of mobility and belonging. Ending global debt systems that keep the Global South trapped in dependency. Transforming schools and universities to center the voices, knowledge, and histories of the colonized.

Movements like abolitionist feminism, Indigenous land-back struggles, and global Black liberation operate with this insight: healing the mind means dismantling the structures that keep it wounded.

As Fanon wrote, liberation requires nothing less than the creation of a “new humanism” — a world where the psychological and structural chains of colonialism are broken, and new solidarities and ways of being are born.

The Mind Is a Battleground

Colonialism wasn’t just theft and conquest. It was a war on consciousness itself — a system that reshaped how people saw themselves and each other. Its greatest weapon wasn’t its armies; it was its ability to make the oppressed believe in their own inferiority.

But belief can be broken. Minds can be unshackled. And when they are, the empire begins to crumble — not just at its borders, but at its very foundation.

As the Black Radical Tradition teaches, freedom is not granted. It is seized, fought for in struggle, and built anew — in the streets, in culture, in collective memory, and in the deepest recesses of the mind.

The battle continues. And the stakes are nothing less than the possibility of a world remade