Caitlin Kight

The biggest barrier that I've seen to decolonization is ignorance, both in the sense of people not having heard of decolonization and therefore not understanding what it is or why we should undertake it, or even how we might pursue it, but also in the sense of people having a mistaken understanding of what it even is, and therefore thinking that it has already been accomplished, or that it's unnecessary or inappropriate.

Whatever its exact shape, this ignorance can lead to another barrier: anger. I've heard many people expressed frustration that they have to spend time and effort thinking about and undertaking decolonization activities. Unfortunately, it is true that in education, many teachers are not given sufficient time to develop or redevelop their curriculum. However, I think it's all too easy to be lazy in our interactions with others. It does actually take time, if we want to listen to people, to pause and think about what they've said, and then take the extra time to read their body language, and so on. I've certainly caught myself rushing into and through encounters, rather than giving each person the time that they deserve as a fellow human being.

I don't think that we need any more time or energy for decolonization than we need for interacting with others in an empathetic way. However, it is different. And so we need to learn new habits. And perhaps learning those new habits requires us to face some things that we don't like about ourselves, our privilege, for example, or our understanding that we've previously been less compassionate than we might like to admit.

A final barrier to decolonization is fear. When people are angry about the colonization, I think much of that anger comes from fear. People are worried about losing their privilege, whether they recognize it as such, or even use that term to describe it. But fear can also have a positive origin. People are afraid of getting things wrong. They don't want to embarrass themselves or get in trouble. But even more than that, they don't want to hurt others.

A lot of educators I know don't want to use the wrong language. They don't want to marginalize or expose someone, to embarrass their students, or generally, to make the situation worse. I hear a lot of people say that they just want to be told what to do, so that they don't mess things up. They want a checklist, so they can be sure that they have selected the right actions, that they've done those actions in the right order, that they haven't missed anything off the list. I actually take a lot of encouragement from the fact that people feel this fear, because I think that it comes from a place of compassion. And at the end of the day, that's really what we need most to engage with decolonization effectively.