The distinguished psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote profound words in his 1961 classic Wretched of the Earth. In this literary masterpiece, Fanon deconstructed the colonized mind.
“The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist’s sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession; of sitting at the colonist’s table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized man is an envious man.”
The book Wretched of the Earth has always given me pause to think about colonized minds. In America black people whose ancestors were brought from Africa as slaves were stripped of a worldview to be replaced by something else. That something else is the lust or yearning after what the colonizer has i.e. language, customs, material items, or worldview. With this being said, it is easy to understand why some Youth Service Officers at Connecticut Juvenile Training School do not resist the oppression they suffer. Let me be clear.
The colonizer has provided YSOs at CJTS with a living caring for incarcerated residents ( mostly residents of color ). Thus employees on the lower economic scale at CJTS can dimly see hopes of living like upper management. Yet this "lusting" as Fanon called it inhibits people from pointing out oppression; to voice concern about injustice might cause retaliation by management, ending a lifestyle of some comfort. If YSOs took a correct view of what goes on in their environment they cannot not deny being in the grip of a colonized mindset. To embrace a colonized worldview makes you a prisoner of the oppressor ; you will accept trinkets and items from hands determined to keep a foot on the neck of employees.
In order to transcend a colonized mind people must embrace goals or ideals higher than what they see oppressors holding. However in order to aspire to higher ideals people must seek to be free of shackles on the mind. After all Richard Lovelace said "stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." When and if YSOs wake up to reality they will discard the colonized mind Fanon writes about.
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