Violence proved colonial superiority when technology failed to deliver wealth

Evidence

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: Connects to Robinson’s argument elsewhere that racial violence is performative proof of dominance — echoes the ‘proves your superiority’ logic and parallels the function of ritual violence in the sacrifice essay.
• CANDY: A devastatingly quotable passage: killing people to ‘prove your superiority’ when they out-farm you.