What Does It Mean To Decolonize Your Mind?
Decolonizing the mind means deconstructing the thoughts, preferences, and values that derive
from a colonial way of thinking. This is a process that inevitably leads to more fundamental questions.
What is a colonial way of thinking? Who thinks in this way? How did people’s minds get “colonized” in the
first place?
A ‘colonial mentality, or ‘the colonized mind’, shows a preference or desirability for whiteness and
cultural values, behaviors, physical appearances, and objects from or derivative of the ‘West’ (i.e.
Western Europe or the USA), with disdain or undesirability for anything coming from the non- ‘West’. It is
present in white people and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), manifesting itself in a
variety of ways. These sentiments can be traced back to the colonial era when Europeans wrote about
indigenous people in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, using the terms “savage,” “wild” and
“uncivilized” to describe their encounters. This was further based on Europeans’ sense of cultural and
biological superiority, leading to the so-called “civilizing mission” to save the uncivilized races from
themselves, so prominently used to uphold imperialism and colonialism.
The belittling of anything non-white and non- ‘Western’ took hold around the world, particularly in
colonized nations, where many internalized the discourse of all things ‘Western’ being superior to
anything indigenous. An example can be found in one study in which researchers found that some Filipino
Americans had internalized the ‘colonial mentality, where being white or American was better than being
Filipino, leading these individuals to conclude that being Filipino meant they were inferior and could never
be attractive [1]. This was correlated with symptoms of psychological distress and depression.
