When existing in a neocolonial nation-state, one must always be vigilant in observing the mechanisms that those who are in power use in order to remain in such a position. Self-defense as it has been taught to us, typically entails retaliation of a physical nature, but when oppression manifests in ways that are not solely physical, we must also utilize alternative methods of defense that not only protect our bodies, but our minds, our souls, and our identities.

In order for the state to continue operating under the status quo, it provides citizens with an illusion of safety and freedom. One of the ways that this is done is through constitutional promises to treat everyone equally under the eyes of the law. Of course, these promises are often not met, but the illusion that we are all constitutionally equal lets the privileged classes feel justified in their ambivalence toward the struggles of the marginalized because if explicit oppression is illegal, then the state must not be allowing it to happen. This is of course a farce. Although acts of violence between citizens may be criminally outlawed, there are forms of systemic violence that are imposed on us that nevertheless persist, but they persist in a fashion that renders them difficult for the average person to recognize and subsequently question.

Violence imposed by the state can take many forms, making it harder to miss and more easily justified through education. Almost all methods by which the state seeks to kill us are so deeply ingrained within our culture, education and economic system that the cycle of abuse has become nearly impossible to escape in the Western imperial social structure. The system preys on the feelings of despair and powerlessness that it imposes upon us and in that manner, kills us. Whether this be through explicit methods such as state police committing acts of murder on marginalized bodies or through implicit methods such as creating material conditions so dismal for some that a path of self-destruction through the means of something like drug use becomes the only escape from the oppressive cycle of systemic abuse inevitably leads to death on a wide scale; these are only some examples of the methods that the system uses to usurp our bodies and minds and in turn, kill us before we can even have a chance to defend ourselves.

A prevalent form of colonial violence that affects all of us is the notion of gender. The colonial state teaches us gender through a very essentialist view, but this very idea of the existence of gender is a form of violence in itself. The fact that I am seen as a woman by nature has led to feelings of alienation from my fellow humans and feelings of dysphoria regarding my own identity and my own body when I do not conform to the constructed ideas of womanhood that have been thrust upon me since birth without my consent. These constructs of gender have been so ingrained into our society that we find it almost impossible to imagine a structure without the imposed binary and many of us even find comfort in them. The violence that ensues from the conception of gender harms all of us, but it harms racialized bodies the most. I feel as though I am only really a woman in terms of my interactions with others. When sitting alone, doing laundry, eating food, watering my plants, (and so on,) I do not feel an underlying sense of “womanhood”. In all honesty, I’m not even sure what womanhood completely entails. My femininity, at least from my own perspective, is a performance and only exists to the extent of my perceived “feminine” behaviour in the eyes of others which manufactures the basis of my identity as a woman. The more that I think about it, the less sense gender makes to me. As it stands, it seems as though the only necessity of the stratification of gender in the imperial world stems from a need to divide the working class into easily controlled groups that can be exploited and pitted against one another.

To exist in a body that is deemed marginalized by society is already much like having a target on your head, but to exist in the half of the population that is still considered the lesser sex brings a myriad of added struggle. This, I think, is why intersectionality is so important when it comes to self-defense because all of those constructed attributes are intrinsically intertwined with one another when it comes to oppression based on identity. The interconnectedness of marginalized identities has also been historically used to justify the violence that is brought upon Queer and BIPOC individuals. As Susan Mann illustrates in her 2012 piece, “the nineteenth-century invention of homosexuality was also a racialized one. In order to make their case about the fundamental difference between heterosexuals and homosex­uals, Victorian sexologists borrowed heavily from the terminology and theoretical frameworks associated with the racist sciences of the era” (Mann, 2012). This is not a stand-alone occurrence, nor is the hidden genocide of queer and racialized bodies a thing of the past. According to a report by the Human Rights Campaign, at least 25 transgender or gender non-conforming people were fatally shot or killed by other violent means in 2019. It must also be mentioned that this report includes only recorded instances and as we have seen with the ongoing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis, and more specifically, the Pamela George case, it is not and has never been in the interests of the pigs to investigate violence against racialized or queer bodies. This of course is not surprising considering the primarily racist origins of policing and the prison industrial system’s overarching goal to facilitate the continuation of slavery through a more palatable illusion of moral justice, but it is still worth noting nonetheless. “One can hardly miss the spatiality of the violence and its relationship to identity as well as to justice.” (Razack, 2000)

In Eli Clare’s piece, Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness, Clare recognizes our frequent desire to try and separate the body from our identity and our struggle. In order to become more palatable to colonial standards, lots of people seek to separate the body from the cultivated identity of the soul and due to this colonial view of queer and racialized individuals, it is understandable why many would want to create a divide between the body and the mind because as Lee Ann Bell points out, ​“Those in subordinated groups, however, can never fully escape being defined by their social group memberships” (Bell, 1997).

As appealing as it sounds to be able to remove oneself from the physical and detach our identity from our physical attributes, it would be foolish to omit the mutual dependence between our physical form and our marginalization because, under the colonial view, we will often never be more than our physical identity, but “the problems faced by any marginalized group of people lie, not in their bodies, but in the oppression they face. But in defining the external, collective, material nature of social injustice as separate from the body, we have sometimes ended up sidelining the profound relationships that connect our bodies with who we are and how we experience oppression.” (Clare, 2001).

I believe that this separation is useful in some facets but when I think a way of pushing back against these oppressive standards of acceptance is by embracing our traits that are conventionally undesirable under colonial rule (e.g. queerness, blackness, femininity etc). By embracing and celebrating our identities that are deemed unworthy, we are able to release ourselves from the desire to be accepted by these standards and by showing that we can survive and thrive outside of this conformity, we effectively begin to decolonize our identities. A large part of radical self-defense can be synthesized through the act of decolonization. Decolonization of the self and our actions is imperative in the process of defending oneself, and subsequently extending that defense to others.

Another important method by which we may defend ourselves is through the use of language. The very production of knowledge itself is controlled by power structures that are used to eradicate and condemn the language born from BIPOC cultures. Although the physical genocide of Indigenous peoples within KKKanada has visibly ended, the genocide on Indigenous cultures and languages continues. Language itself is used by imperial powers to subjugate and control those who do not conform to the standards of language imposed by our colonial education. This is especially pertinent within academia, where individualism and academic jargon is encouraged in order to make knowledge inaccessible from the lower classes. By making knowledge inaccessible through language and money, the colonial rule further suppresses the potential for marginalized individuals to command power. As Bobby Seale says in Seize the Time, “The racists and the narrow-minded chauvinists do not want black people, Chicano people, Puerto Rican, Asian, and poor white people to study and know their own true history-because their history will tell the truth about America today.” (Seale, 1970). This is applicable not only to direct accounts of history as we know it, but the same can be said for oral history as well. Because colonial education seeks to force us to conform with the white, European standard of language, relearning and reclaiming the languages and colloquialisms that imperialism seeks to destroy, a very powerful form of intellectual retaliation occurs.

In the same vein of defending oneself through the use of language, the reclamation of oppressive terms is another method of self-defense and a way to refuse consent to our oppression. By reclaiming these words, we effectively remove the oppressive power that they hold and eventually, they no longer have the ability to harm us. To Clare, “Queer is not a taunt” anymore “but an apt descriptive word.” (Clare). This is an important method of self-defense and one which I have learned to cultivate in my own life. When I was a young teenager, the term “dyke” was hurled at me more times than I can count. This was largely because of my physical appearance and the ways that I expressed myself to the world. Although I knew that I was a sapphic woman*, the slur still made me feel a sense of disgust. Disgust directed toward the world but also directed toward myself. Over time, however, I realized that there was nothing shameful about this identity that was imposed upon me and although I don’t necessarily enjoy placing labels on my sexuality due to the fact that my identity and existence are still debated, I suppose that my attraction to women does technically make me a dyke, and so what? Dykes rule.

Almost all methods by which the state seeks to kill us are so deeply ingrained within our culture, education and economic system that the cycle of abuse has become nearly impossible to escape in the Western imperial social structure. However, the essence of pride and the act of embracing the facets of our identities deemed unworthy under the colonial view is a very important way to defend our bodies and souls. If we are able to cultivate an essence of pride within the struggle, that essence in itself becomes an act of self-defense. From this, we can begin to finally emancipate and amputate our bodies and minds from the state’s murderous goals.

• Clare, Eli. 2001. "Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness." Public Culture 13, no. 3 (2001): 359-365. muse.jhu.edu/article/26252.
• Hassett-Walker, Connie. 2019. “The Racist Roots of American Policing: From Slave Patrols to Traffic Stops.” The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/the-racist-roots-of-american-policing-from-slave-patrols-to-traffic-stops-112816.
• Human Rights Campaign. 2019. “A National Epidemic: Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence in America.”. HRC.: 1-32.https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/Anti-TransViolenceReport2019.pdf
• Mann, Susan. 2012. “The invention of homosexuality and heterosexuality”. In Doing Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity (pp. 239-240). New York: Oxford Press.
• Razack, Sherene H. 2000. “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15, no. 2 91–130. doi:10.1017/S0829320100006384.’
• Seale, Bobby. 1970. “Seize the time: the story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton.” New York: Random House. (pp. 412-429).