Fahmida’s Reviews > Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal > Status Update

Humanization, then, is not merely our psychic response to colonial dehumanization — it exposes the absence of material analysis in our societies. As a project, it is largely the mandate of a specific class: “man… was one of the values invented by the bourgeoisie.”

“If we want to address the empire, we need to be fluent in its vernacular. But this expectation is asymmetrical. We are often admonished by critics who are illiterate, or purport to be illiterate in our language.”

“We are not human, automatically, by virtue of being human — we are to be humanized by virtue of our proximity to innocence: whiteness, civility, wealth, compromise, collaboration, nonalignment, nonviolence, helplessness, futurelessness.”