Decolonizing academia has become a trendy slogan, but let’s be honest — few institutions are willing to dismantle the colonial logic that sustains them. Universities love the aesthetics of diversity but not the labor of transformation. They recruit scholars of color, celebrate them as evidence of progress, and then bury their radical potential under bureaucracy, tokenism, and survival politics.
This is the colonial condition of academia — a space that promises liberation through education, but only if we agree to perform the very structures we came to critique.
The Colonial Psychological Complex of the Academy
The university is not just a site of knowledge; it is a site of psychological conditioning. What I call the Colonial Psychological Complex (CPC) refers to the mental architecture that binds the colonizer and the colonized in a mutual dependency, where domination is not only external but also internalized. Within academia, this complex manifests as the compulsion to validate one’s worth through the language, theory, and hierarchy of the colonizer.
Even scholars who come from oppressed systems are not immune. In fact, the higher they climb, the more they are pressured to replicate the system that harmed them. Tenure, grants, and prestige become the new colonial rewards. Assimilation is rewarded as professionalism. Resistance is punished as instability.
When the Colonized Become the Gatekeepers
This is what I call Colonial Stockholm Syndrome (CSS) — the psychological entanglement between captor and captive that convinces the oppressed that survival depends on the oppressor’s approval. Inside academia, CSS manifests in subtle ways: the need to cite only Eurocentric theorists to be taken seriously, the silencing of emotions in scholarship, and the avoidance of community accountability in favor of “objectivity.”
And it goes deeper. Faculty of color, especially those from working-class or colonized communities, are often recruited to diversify the institution — but once inside, they are disciplined into its logic. They become the model colonized: fluent in the grammar of oppression, fluent in erasure. Some become gatekeepers themselves, policing others for not conforming to the institution’s rituals of legitimacy.
It’s not betrayal — it’s survival. That’s Oppressive Cognition — the state of mental conflict that arises when one must navigate multiple systems of oppression at once. Within academia, this means constantly negotiating between truth and tenure, justice and job security, decolonization and deliverables.
The Mirage of Meritocracy
Academia teaches us that meritocracy is neutral — that if you publish enough, teach enough, and network enough, you will be recognized. But meritocracy itself is a colonial invention. It rewards those who can perform whiteness — not in skin, but in tone, posture, and pedagogy.
The more we adapt to this system, the more distant we become from the communities we claim to serve. The institution thrives on this distance. It prefers scholars who speak about the oppressed rather than with them. It funds “inclusive research” as long as it doesn’t threaten the funding pipeline. It celebrates “community engagement” as long as it doesn’t challenge property, policy, or power.
Decolonization as an Act of Refusal
To truly decolonize academia is not to diversify it — it is to disobey it. It means refusing to measure worth solely through peer review. It means citing Indigenous and Black thinkers as theorists, not just case studies. It means integrating emotion, spirituality, and embodiment into the act of knowledge-making — recognizing that intellect divorced from soul is just another form of conquest.
Decolonizing academia requires more than curriculum reform. It requires dismantling the psychological dependency that keeps scholars tethered to institutional validation. It asks us to confront the colonial comfort embedded in our professional aspirations.
It means asking:
Whose gaze do we write for?
Whose approval sustains our careers?
And what might it cost us — or free us — to walk away?
Liberation Requires Disobedience
The truth is, the university will not save us. It was not designed to. It was designed to reproduce the empire — polished, credentialed, and self-congratulatory.
But those of us within it can still reclaim the space. We can teach students how to see the hidden curriculum of empire in every syllabus. We can write in voices that refuse translation. We can create scholarship that heals rather than harms.
Decolonization, then, is not about leaving the academy — it’s about refusing to let it live inside us. It is the radical act of remembering who we were before the citation, before the committee, before the colonizer convinced us that our knowledge needed permission.
The Colonial Condition is a publication dedicated to critically interrogating colonial legacies, decolonial resistance, and historical reckonings. We challenge dominant narratives and amplify marginalized perspectives. Join the conversation — read, question, and disrupt.