Deep Future – Reflection — Power Lost, Power Feared
One of the most destabilizing realizations to emerge from reading Culture and Imperialism is not simply how much of the world Europe once controlled, but how long it controlled it—and how suddenly that control collapsed.
From early colonial footholds in the 1600s to near-total global dominance by 1914, European powers governed, administered, extracted from, and culturally normalized their rule over much of the planet. After World War II, that dominance faded with remarkable speed. What took centuries to build unraveled in decades.
That matters.
What is often framed today as racial anxiety or “replacement” fear looks increasingly, through this lens, like power loss on a civilizational scale. The people now described as “the other” were never truly absent. They were present as colonial subjects, as cheap labor, as background figures in someone else’s story. What has changed is not their existence, but their position.
In Europe, former colonial subjects now appear as migrants, citizens, workers, competitors—no longer subordinated by default. The discomfort seems less about numbers than about status: the transition from dominance to parity.
America mirrors this pattern in its own way. Black Americans constitute a smaller share of the population than during slavery, yet Black progress—culminating symbolically in the election of Barack Obama—triggered profound backlash. What I once saw simply as racial resentment increasingly looks like delegitimization: success reframed as fraud, accomplishment recast as unearned, equality interpreted as exploitation.
What’s striking is that these narratives insist on victimhood while emerging from positions that long benefited from structural advantage. They speak the language of loss, not because something was taken, but because something once assumed is no longer guaranteed.
Said’s quiet lesson keeps returning: empire did not require hatred to function—only normalization. And when normalization breaks, fear rushes in to fill the gap.
I’m still thinking this through. I don’t yet know how much of Europe’s story belongs in my own telling, or whether America alone provides a sufficient case. But the throughline feels clearer now: race supplies the vocabulary, power supplies the motive.
This isn’t a conclusion yet. It’s a reorientation.
And it feels like the kind of clarity that needs patience before it becomes persuasion.
One of the most destabilizing realizations to emerge from reading Culture and Imperialism is not simply how much of the world Europe once controlled, but how long it controlled it—and how suddenly that control collapsed.
From early colonial footholds in the 1600s to near-total global dominance by 1914, European powers governed, administered, extracted from, and culturally normalized their rule over much of the planet. After World War II, that dominance faded with remarkable speed. What took centuries to build unraveled in decades.
That matters.
What is often framed today as racial anxiety or “replacement” fear looks increasingly, through this lens, like power loss on a civilizational scale. The people now described as “the other” were never truly absent. They were present as colonial subjects, as cheap labor, as background figures in someone else’s story. What has changed is not their existence, but their position.
In Europe, former colonial subjects now appear as migrants, citizens, workers, competitors—no longer subordinated by default. The discomfort seems less about numbers than about status: the transition from dominance to parity.
America mirrors this pattern in its own way. Black Americans constitute a smaller share of the population than during slavery, yet Black progress—culminating symbolically in the election of Barack Obama—triggered profound backlash. What I once saw simply as racial resentment increasingly looks like delegitimization: success reframed as fraud, accomplishment recast as unearned, equality interpreted as exploitation.
DEI becomes “illegitimate credentials.”
Identity becomes “race-only politics.”
Inclusion becomes “replacement.”
What’s striking is that these narratives insist on victimhood while emerging from positions that long benefited from structural advantage. They speak the language of loss, not because something was taken, but because something once assumed is no longer guaranteed.
Said’s quiet lesson keeps returning: empire did not require hatred to function—only normalization. And when normalization breaks, fear rushes in to fill the gap.
I’m still thinking this through. I don’t yet know how much of Europe’s story belongs in my own telling, or whether America alone provides a sufficient case. But the throughline feels clearer now: race supplies the vocabulary, power supplies the motive.
This isn’t a conclusion yet.
It’s a reorientation.
And it feels like the kind of clarity that needs patience before it becomes persuasion.