Colonial genocide was rationalized as proof of superiority when technology failed to subdue natives.

Evidence

If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians’. You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages. It was evident in your firearms, your clothing, your housing, your government, your religion. The Indians were supposed to be overcome with admiration and to join you in extracting riches from the country. But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did. They even furnished you with the food that you somehow did not get around to growing enough of yourselves. To be thus condescended to by heathen savages was intolerable. And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much… . So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 411

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the settler-colonial framework and genocide-as-superiority logic central to the reader’s broader Black-radical-tradition reading.