Engineered Fractures—Colonialism's Toolkit of Division
Post #2 in the racism between races series
“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip…it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts it, disfigures it, and destroys it.”
Frantz Fanon
Reader Guidance Before We Dive In
Before we go further, this series is meant to interrupt—not just inform.
We’re not here to scroll, nod, and move on.
We’re here to unlearn, remember, and rebuild—together.
If you haven’t read the introductory post, please pause and do so now.
It offers the ground rules, guiding values, and why this work matters—especially among the Global Majority.
Introductory Post
This space is one of care, not comfort.
We are building shared truth, not performative peace.
We listen to learn, not to defend.
“Divide and conquer” isn’t just a strategy. It’s an infrastructure.
It was built, brick by brick, to fracture our kinships, reorder our loyalties, and tether our worth to proximity with whiteness.
Colonialism didn’t just steal land—it stole relational coherence.
It taught us to fear each other, rank each other, and distrust our own wholeness.
We became tools in an empire’s game, not only when we were conquered—but when we were convinced that survival meant aligning with the conqueror.
Caste, Colorism, Eugenics: Infrastructure of Fragmentation
Systems like caste aren’t relics—they’re engineered hierarchies, refined by colonial rule and weaponized by whiteness.
The British didn’t invent caste in South Asia, but they rigidified it, turned fluid spiritual traditions into fixed racial taxonomies, and enforced them with legal might.
In Latin America, the pigmentocracia—where skin shade maps to status—was formalized under Spanish colonialism, and its logic still governs job access, media representation, and marriage markets .
Colorism is not a “preference.”
It is a colonial export.
It was designed to reward proximity to whiteness—biologically (eugenics), socially (class), and spiritually (salvation).
It criminalized dark skin while fetishizing “exotic lightness.” And too many of us inherited the lie that being closer to whiteness made us safer.
Buffer Classes and Weaponized “Model” Identities
Colonial regimes didn’t only oppress—they outsourced oppression.
They built buffer classes of intermediaries: lighter-skinned enslaved people assigned supervisory roles. Converted Indigenous people tasked with disciplining “heathens.”
Asian merchants set up between Black and white communities to mediate—and be blamed for—racial capitalism’s cruelty .
Enter the model minority myth.
It tells one community of color: “You’re different. You’re not like them.”
It’s a setup.
A strategy to fracture solidarity, reward assimilation, and redirect rage.
In truth, the “model” is built on silence, obedience, anti-Blackness, and proximity to whiteness—not liberation.
It’s not an honor. It’s a cage.
Language, Religion, and Forced Loyalty to Empire
Language is memory.
It holds the cadence of our ancestors, the prayer of our people.
So when colonial powers banned Indigenous languages—from Yoruba to Quechua to Tagalog—they weren’t just changing speech. They were severing inheritance.
Christian missionaries didn’t just bring a gospel—they brought an erasure.
The colonial project didn’t ask “What do you believe?” It asked, “Will you conform?”
And conformity became the currency of survival.
But survival on colonial terms meant betraying Indigenous cosmologies, queering lineages, and the matriarchs who held collective memory.
The trauma of forced loyalty shows up today as:
policing accents
mocking traditional names
shaming African spirituality as “primitive”
equating whiteness with order, and Blackness with chaos
These are not quirks. They are colonial outcomes.
Reclamation Invitation: A Truth-Tending Prompt
Take a moment with this:
What part of your identity was treated as “less than” under empire—and how were you taught to abandon it?
Who were you asked to distrust in order to be accepted?
Where have you upheld division because it felt safer than connection?
This is the sacred undoing.
Naming the fracture is how we begin to repair.
Up next:
Part 3: The Global Reach of Anti-Blackness
From the Caribbean to South Asia, from Arab media to Latine telenovelas—we'll name how anti-Blackness became a colonial lingua franca, and why rooting it out is everyone's responsibility.
Ready to keep building?
Invite your circle.
Let’s keep telling the truth—until no fracture goes unnamed.
Personal Anchor & Invitation
This work is personal. It’s ancestral. And it’s systemic.
I don’t do DEI—I teach communication, leadership, and power through an Indigenous lens.
This series reflects 40+ years of learning how to walk people through systems they didn’t even know they were holding.
Those of you who resonate with this body of work:
