T R . N C Y

This causes problems both when decolonization rhetoric gets misinterpreted and derailed, and when (racist/xenophobic) anti-immigrant rhetoric gets a pass due to conflation with decolonization.

Colonization isn't just "moving to a place where people have different laws/customs".

It's also not "observing traditions or customs of your birth culture after moving to a culture where most people's traditions/customs are different."

Colonization involves essentially setting up your own government and legal system in a place where other people are already living, and subjugating the people already there under this colonial government.

The colonizer group has, de facto or de jure, more rights than the indigenous population.

Colonization historically has also involved pressure, sometimes up to and including enforcement on pain of death, to adopt to some extent the colonizer's cultural or religious traditions.

Many individual colonizers have had urgent and legitimate reasons to need to leave the places they lived before. They may individually have had little choice in where they ended up.

However, if they moved to a place where the government is a colonial one that prioritizes them (officially or unofficially) over the indigenous population, they are now part of the colony and participating in colonization. Their children, still prioritized by the colonial government over the indigenous inhabitants, are colonizers also.

person: ok

—On Love, Marina Tsvetaeva