Colonial officials used language hierarchy to justify claims of Indigenous mental inferiority

Evidence

Every colonized people–in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originalityfinds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 77 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial states engineered morality by harnessing affect in their agents. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 426; Colonial emotional attributions constructed the social hierarchies they claimed to describe; Some late-colonial officials publicly rejected the racial hierarchy of ruler and ruled (+28 more)

Related

• Language hierarchy alone does not create inferiority; colonization does (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial rule systematically instills an inferiority complex in the colonized (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial administrators misread their own invented rule as natural racial superiority (similarity 0.83)
• Colonized peoples acquire inferiority complexes through suppression of local culture (similarity 0.83)
• Adopting the colonizer’s language signals an intensified inferiority complex among the educated (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial peoples suffered the same dehumanizing treatment as ancient slaves (similarity 0.80)
• The racist creates the inferiority of the colonized. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial dispositions are trained, contested, and deliberately interpreted (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial labels made the colonized simultaneously inferior and belonging to the land. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial authorities already began politicizing genealogical divisions (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial rule’s native strata produced a renegade nationalist intelligentsia (similarity 0.79)
• Inferiority complexes intensify most among the most educated colonized people (similarity 0.79)
• Linguistic distinctions were extended to claim ontological differences between peoples (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial discourse distinguishes legal equality from factual inequality to justify hierarchy (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial administrators used assimilated natives as agents to erode national culture (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonized peoples acquire inferiority complexes through suppression of local culture #expands (0.70) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 77