Colonial administrators’ moral horror deadened with each successive killing.

Evidence

The gallows are put up. The rope has been tied too high. They lift the nigger and put the noose around his neck. The rope twists for a few minutes, then crack, the fellow is thrashing about on the ground. A shot in the neck, and it’s finished. This time it didn’t make the slightest impression on me! And that although I had turned white [sic] with horror when I saw the chicotte used for the first time. Africa has its point after all. I would now go into a fight as though I were going to a wedding. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 896

Categorization

• XREF: The deadening of sensitivity through repeated killing parallels accounts of moral injury and desensitization in war literature, and the psychological numbing theory from the noise/silence books read earlier.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion at the end — ‘whiteness’ signifying horror turning into the ‘white gown of the wedding,’ innocence re-figured through participation in murder — is a dense, paradigm-shifting compression of how perpetrators re-narrate their own transformation.