What They Never Meant for Us to Question

There are questions every colonized society is taught not to ask. They are not forbidden by law, but by fear. They live beneath the surface of polite conversation, beneath tradition, beneath reverence. And yet, they shape everything.

Who benefits from what we believe?

Who decides what is sacred?

Who taught us to equate obedience with virtue?

Colonization did not require permanence through chains alone. Chains rust. Fear does not. The most successful empires understood this. They learned that if you could teach a people to discipline their own thinking, the work of domination would continue long after the overseer disappeared.

I grew up revering answers I had never chosen. I learned early that belief was not something to examine but something to defend. Questioning was framed as rebellion. Doubt was treated as moral failure. And history—real history—was softened until it no longer threatened the story we were expected to uphold.

This is how power survives.

Colonial systems do not announce themselves as violent. They introduce themselves as necessary. As civilized. As salvation. They replace indigenous ways of knowing with “proper” ones. They teach us that our languages are informal, our spirituality primitive, our past inconvenient.

Eventually, we internalize the message. We begin to police ourselves.

We pray instead of planning. We wait instead of organizing. We hope instead of building. And when systems fail us—as they were designed to—we are taught to blame fate, sin, or divine will rather than policy, history, and power.

This is not accidental.

The danger of decolonizing the mind is not that people will lose faith—it is that they will gain agency. And agency threatens every system built on dependence.

To question is to disrupt. To understand history is to remove innocence from domination. To realize that what we inherited was never neutral is to reclaim choice itself.

I am not interested in replacing one dogma with another. Liberation does not require new masters. It requires intellectual honesty. It requires the courage to sit with discomfort and the humility to admit that some of what shaped us did not serve us.

This is difficult work. It often costs relationships. It invites misunderstanding. It exposes the fragility of identities built on unquestioned belief. But growth has never been gentle.

We must stop confusing tradition with truth.

Our ancestors survived unspeakable violence not because they lacked intelligence or spirituality, but because their humanity was inconvenient to empire. The greatest lie colonization told was not that we were inferior—it was that we needed permission to think for ourselves.

We do not.

Decolonization of the mind is not about erasing the past. It is about understanding it clearly enough to choose differently. It is about refusing to outsource our morality, our dignity, and our future to systems that were never built with us in mind.

The most radical act today is not rebellion.

It is remembrance.

Remembering that we were never empty vessels.

Remembering that belief without choice is not faith—it is inheritance under pressure.

Remembering that freedom begins the moment we allow ourselves to ask the questions they hoped we never would.

And once those questions are asked, there is no returning to silence.