Posted by House of Common Sense to Facebook on May 23, 2026.
So why does "indigenous vs. colonizer" almost always mean Europeans, and almost never Bantu, Turks, Arabs, Slavs, or Han Chinese?
A few reasons, in descending order of how much they actually explain:
1. Recency and documentation. European expansion happened in the era of the printing press, photography, census records, and treaties.
The Bantu expansion left no paperwork.
The Arab conquests are 1,300 years old and mythologized as religious destiny rather than conquest.
When the receipts exist, the case is easier to make, and Europeans left receipts.
2. The winners wrote the framework. Modern human-rights language, postcolonial theory, and the very category of "indigenous peoples" were built in Western universities after WWII, primarily to process European guilt over European empires.
The tool was designed for one job.
Asking it to evaluate the Arab conquest of Egypt or the Turkic conquest of Anatolia is like asking a tax form to diagnose a disease. It wasn't built for that.
3. Christendom is critique-able; other civilizations aren't.
You can write a bestseller attacking Western Christian civilization from inside a Western university and win awards for it.
Try writing the equivalent book about Arab-Islamic conquest from inside Cairo or Istanbul.
The asymmetry isn't about history. It's about which societies tolerate self-criticism and which punish it.
So the critical literature piles up on one side and barely exists on the other.
4. The Soviet inheritance. Cold War-era anti-colonial framing was deliberately shaped by Moscow to delegitimize the West while giving its own empire and its allies' conquests, a pass.
That framework outlived the USSR and still structures a lot of academic and activist vocabulary today.
5. Race makes it legible. European colonizers usually looked different from the colonized. Turkic conquerors of Anatolia, Arab conquerors of the Levant, and Bantu expansionists in Africa generally didn't look dramatically different from the populations they absorbed.
The visual contrast made European empire easier to narrate as racial, and once a story has a clean visual, it travels.
The framework's selective application reaches its most absurd point when a people indigenous to a specific land, with continuous presence, language, religion, and archaeological record tying them to it for three thousand years, get labeled "colonial settlers", while the actual seventh-century conquerors who Arabized the region get labeled "indigenous."
At that point the framework isn't describing reality. It's laundering a conclusion.
The label isn't tracking who got there first. It's tracking who it's currently fashionable to blame.
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