When looking up the etymology of a word, sometimes you need a backstory. For example, kleenex and hoover were once brand names. Or, how did we get ‘sincere’ from ‘without wax’? These are hardly grounds for complaint. But other disconnects are. For example, you’d think that a hate crime would have something to do with hate. Or that diversity and inclusion wouldn’t mean conformity and exclusion. Or that ‘indigenous’ would be an indexical rather than a rigid designator. Or that ‘post’ would mean ‘after’.

Sometimes it does, as in ‘post-war’. But elsewhere, as in post-colonialism, it means ‘as-a-consequence-of’. So you’d think that if you’re taking a course about Post-Colonial Africa, it’ll be about those aspects of African society that are a consequence of its colonial past. But apparently not. North Africa was colonised by the ancient Greeks, then the Romans, a few centuries later by the Arabs. And then a few centuries after that once-colonised North Africans colonised most of Sub-Saharan Africa. But apparently it’s only what emerged post the 1960s from Nineteenth Century European colonialism that counts as Post-Colonial Africa. No doubt there’s a backstory to that. Likewise that American prosperity was built only on the backs of slaves from Africa, notwithstanding slavery had been ubiquitous in the Americas for millennia.

So wherein lies the complaint? That we’re not given these backstories. And for good reason. That slavery wasn’t introduced in 1619 trivialises black slavery. That colonialism is as old and ubiquitous as the human race trivialises European colonialism. That the Blackfoot are no more indigenous to Southern Alberta than were the Normans to Cornwall trivialises the abuses of the Indian Residential Schools. So if burying these backstories has a political agenda – and it does – so does exhuming them.

To trivialise is to normalise. To normalise is to naturalise. And to naturalise is to take the wind out of our high dudgeon. After all, if the rapist enjoys the same moral status as ebola, shaking your fist at the injustice of the one but not the other is just silly. Why does ebola get a moral pass but queue jumping doesn’t?

These are the questions that kept me up at night throughout a thirty year career in moral philosophy. I sleep better now, but probably because I no longer get paid to stay up. You don’t either. So don’t worry about it.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: colonialism, etymology, slavery