The White Man's Parasitic Burden

Scrolling through sensational headlines, you notice posts describing a genocide going viral. The images are shocking, yet you initially dismiss them—after all, haven’t you heard that such atrocities are often exaggerated? Later, you search for articles that confirm your belief that the reports are overblown. You find opinion pieces portraying these events as mere political propaganda. Reassured, you share these articles with your inner circle, reinforcing a comfortable, familiar narrative.

This is confirmation bias in action: you’ve sought only the evidence that supports your prior beliefs rather than your commitment to uncovering the truth. In doing so, you inadvertently protect yourself from the difficult reality of widespread suffering, choosing comfort and camaraderie over engagement with a painful truth.

Imagine discussing racial inequality with a colleague over lunch. Although they recount recent incidents of police brutality, mass displacement, or deliberate aerial bombings, you nod along while feeling detached. You dismiss systemic racism as a political exaggeration while seeking out videos and articles that downplay these issues. You pride yourself on being rational and open-minded—even as you neglect to recognise the bias that blinds you to the lived experiences of marginalised communities.

This bias blind spot prevents you from acknowledging your own susceptibility to confirmation bias: you readily critique the biases of others while remaining blind to your own self-deception. You have been trained to not understand the suffering of the “other”. That detachment comes at a price—it is the price of not truly understanding the generational trauma inflicted by decades of systemic injustice.

This self-deception leads you to reject challenging information and differing perspectives. You won't understand how we have been traumatised and carry generational trauma because of what Western governments have done to us. You won't understand me because your frame of reference is completely different. You don't know what it's like to have your country go through bloody coup after bloody coup, only because it served the interests of some foreign government thousands of miles away.

Western hegemony writes history in a way that often renders the suffering of “the others” invisible. If your country is not part of the dominant cultural narrative, your people, your history, and indeed your very existence may be sidelined, relegated to a historical footnote. It is the news editor with a deep-seated bias meticulously excising entire chapters from the historical record while presenting a sanitised narrative—a phenomenon where the absence of discussion about certain injustices is treated as evidence of their nonexistence.

You will never understand the systematic dehumanisation we've been dragged through, all in the name of maintaining Western hegemony—white supremacy by another name. It is why Hitler's war crimes became mainstream, but not King Leopold, Cecil Rhodes, or Winston Churchill.

People are being carefully guided toward collective amnesia by an endless parade of distractions. Colonial injustices continue to run rife across the planet, on every continent, and you're being made to forget; forget the countless murders for corporate greed so they become nothing more than a statistic in your mind. The endless stream of statistics—over 50,000 murdered Palestinians (40% of whom are children), 6.8 million IDPs in the Congo, 25 million people in need in Sudan, millions of Uyghurs locked up in China and subjected to torture and forced labour, and countless other documented atrocities—meets a mind that prefers numbers to the gut-wrenching details of shattered lives.

It is easier, they say, to understand raw data than to confront the visceral reality of human suffering. Your mind can fathom and process that horror much more than seeing the limbs of babies scattered across the blood-drenched earth. It's why they don't want us sharing the images from war-torn regions, and it's why we must never stop.

What you don't quite realise is that even if you don't believe you are associating an anchor with your beliefs or perceptions, you have been indoctrinated with certain anchors that pull on your mind. For example, you know the media is biased. You know it’s a tool of Western hegemony (see Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media), but you may not be aware of the severity. You've excused it believing that they are protecting you from "the others."

"Sure, the system is a little corrupt," you say, "but at least it's not as bad as those Middle Eastern countries", you hasten to add. You’ve been indoctrinated to believe the government cares about you. You start to justify how the government protects you. You are being deceived by the halo effect—the proclivity for positive impressions (or cognitive bias) of someone or something that affects the way you interpret the information about someone or something with whom you have formed a positive impression.

In other words, Western governments have otherised the rest of the planet so much, that you elect to cower under their morally bankrupt shadow because they promise to protect you from those big, scary non-human entities thousands of miles away who, given the chance, will kill you all.

Boo!

I used writing as a way to process my grief and rage—a form of therapy. I had to step away to shield my heart from becoming utterly numb to it all, but I felt a heavy guilt: too privileged, able to detach; too much like a traitor to my people for turning away. I returned so I wouldn’t forget, determined not to let indifference become the norm. I chose to become numb to the indifference. Numb to the malicious intent. Numb to how much my people have been dehumanised. Numb to the numbness.

They want to drain the energy behind the struggle. It is a weapon deployed against us by those who wish us to remain passive, to cower under the false promise of protection. The consequences are profound: an impotent heart, depriving you of your divine gift to cry when needed, and a clipped tongue unable to speak truth to power. Over time, the silence becomes complicity—the quiet consent that allows injustice to flourish.

“I don't like to be involved in politics...”

Neither did the baby whose head was decapitated after the Rafah Tent Massacre. Imagine the pain in the eyes of the father lifting his headless child from the rubble or a baby’s slow, agonising death from starvation.

Did that sentence make you grimace? Did you wince? Did it make you uncomfortable? Did it give you pause? Did you ask yourself why?

“It's a complicated issue...”

Stop pontificating over faux intellectual talking points and start addressing what's happening. It is a thousand times easier to disassociate, but you can't! How terrifying it will be for you when you need to cry, but your tears run dry. When you need to feel, but you find your heart long dead and buried in a forgotten place.

Woe to you and your dead hearts. Your silence has rendered you complicit in the persistence of injustice. It is the silent endorsement of atrocities, the quiet consent to the dehumanisation of others. It is the turning away from suffering, the refusal to acknowledge the pain that is not your own.

Allow yourself to be haunted by the images, by the long, drawn-out, mournful cries.

Allow yourself to feel.

While you sermonise, we will never forget the boy who scraped the remains of his mother from the ground, nor the children forced to witness their father burn alive in an Israeli airstrike deliberately targeting civilians.

We will never forget the agonising vision of a seven‑month‑old baby slowly and painfully succumbing to starvation, or the heartrending sight of parents desperately shaking their lifeless child—only to be met with the empty shell that once cradled their beautiful baby’s soul, now returned to its Creator.

We will never forget the politicians who embarked on a genocide pilgrimage to the occupied lands, signing off on bombs destined to be dropped on innocent Palestinians.

What do you want from us? When will your blood thirst be satiated? What must occur for you to stand up and speak against this genocide?

I need you to pause and ask yourself: Why are you not engaging? What needs to happen for you to talk, post, boycott, divest, and condemn? Are we that dehumanised and is your heart so dead that you cannot even question your inaction?

Reject the invisible, soft shackles of detachment; challenge yourself to confront the truth—even when it wounds you deeply. Especially when it wounds you.

Engage: post, boycott, condemn, share, and listen to the testimonies.

And yet, in light of all this, a celebrity casually holding the Palestinian flag is hailed as a hero. Really? To hell with celebrity endorsements! In a world where we continue to idolise vacuous celebrities and influencers—whose manufactured lives are designed to evoke envy and awe while distracting us from the power we hold—imagine if everyone unfollowed and blocked them. Imagine if we no longer looked up to or idolised these people.

What would the world look like then?

The editorial cartoon "'The White Man's Burden' (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)" shows John Bull (Britain) and Uncle Sam (U.S.) delivering the world's people of colour to civilisation (Victor Gillam, Judge magazine, 1 April 1899). The people in the basket carried by Uncle Sam are labelled Cuba, Hawaii, Samoa, "Porto Rico", and the Philippines, while the people in the basket carried by John Bull are labelled Zulu, China, India, "Soudan", and Egypt.