Coloniality

Unlivable societies: on coloniality, whiteness and transgression

On June 29, 2026 by sarmientoverano

^{Featured photo credit: Clay LeConey}

By: Lucia Sarmiento Verano

INTRODUCTION

This is for all my Global South siblings. I am speaking from my experience of growing up in Peru, but I do suspect aspects of this experience of a formerly colonised country will speak to people across the world. I am increasingly convinced of the need to understand our experiences exclusively from our own perspectives, reading and reflecting with thinkers who also live these realities and not wasting time with people who will impose frameworks of thought coming from the North, an intrinsically different reality. Additionally, some of these reflections might prove helpful to communities anywhere that have had to develop an identity and sense of self under the crushing gaze of a dominant culture.

Today I am writing about transgressions, the kinds of widespread and repeated behaviours that make our Global South societies seem chaotic from the outside, that render life difficult at times and enact violence against others on a micro and macro scale. The most visible of which is widespread and visible corruption at all tiers of our governments and institutions, and bleeds into every corner of social life, including private spheres. And when talking about corruption from our experiences of life, I am sure you’ve had some responses from Europeans who will assure you they understand, “we have that here too”. Forgive them for their ignorance (or not) and blatant dismissal of your particular experience, they simply have absolutely not the slightest idea… how could they?

Let me paint you the picture:

Back home, videos of politicians being paid by their corporate overlords are published in the press. The same people are proven to steal money from public services and projects while in service. News of prostitution inside parliament buildings, entire police stations running human trafficking and sex ring operations, the military involved in arms trafficking… today you watch the news and see that a certain someone’s nephew ran over a person with his car, killing him. It’s on video for everyone to see, and he’s not being arrested because some judge and the police have been paid off. The municipal police are at it again, confiscating the products or someone selling fruit on the street, their only means of subsistence in an informal economy. They will benefit from stealing his products personally.  You witness it and you feel rage, but cannot do anything about it.

Meanwhile another five women have been assaulted and killed horrifically since the weekend and nobody seems to react. Mothers weeping in the streets. The perpetrators are known, but the justice system is probably also in on it. Another suspected thief is publicly lynched because neighbours know the police won’t do anything about insecurity. You hear that your cousin has had the terrain he inherited in another province occupied and stolen by a group of hired mercenaries. He doesn’t know who to go to for help, probably the local authorities are in on it too. It will be sold off “legally” to a large land owner, local officials pocketing the money.

Perhaps a friend has been trying to start a business in the city, but cannot get the paperwork done with the municipality to set up shop, not without some payment under the table to “speed up” the process which seems to have been deliberately stopped by someone. She doesn’t have the extra money for it. She was scammed out of her savings by her would-be business partner last month with the help of a bank clerk. Perhaps you also hear of a coworker whose mum broke her leg and could not access medical care since she’s never been part of the formal economy. She’s now stuck in bed, unable to go out and work, and your colleague is trying her best to care for her while putting her own job at risk due to poor attendance. She’s the main breadwinner in her household.

Yesterday was a bad day overall. Electricity went out all evening without notice and you couldn’t finish that important piece of work. Now you have to check on what’s in the freezer in case anything got spoiled because of this. Next week you’ll need to time your showers and washing because the water service will be reduced. And you also got pulled over by the police in an empty street while no one was looking. You didn’t do anything wrong, but the officer feels like eating roast chicken tonight. Or alternatively, you did do something wrong, and now you are telling the officer it‘s a good idea to go and buy his family roast chicken tonight… if only he accepted this generous donation for being an understanding person. It’s fine, what you did wasn’t so bad anyway, no one got hurt, and you’re doing him a favour. After all, he’s probably paid miserably.

The city has bigger problems anyway. Apparently now people’s first and last worry during commute is not to run into a gang “doing business”. They seem to have taken hold of some large urban areas and they attack small business owners, extort them for “protection”, and fight each other. People only hope they can go to work without catching a stray bullet in order to take home a pay check that won’t feed half the family.

If this reality feels familiar to you, you have lived or are living in an unlivable society. Yes, not all is negative. In such societies we do see a lot of communities pulling together and surviving the hostility of the system collectively. If it weren’t for solidarity, many more would be dead by now. Still, people die every day because of this. Sometimes, when I feel I have the bandwidth to speak to Europeans about these things, I need to tell them that in many places, reality surpasses fiction in many ways, almost always negative. But I must confess, I have now stopped speaking…

I find a strange feeling comes up about these things. Realisation of the life we have to live and the realities that make it difficult to thrive in such places, otherwise beautiful, bring up a mix of grief, rage, pride in our resilience and… shame.

Let’s reflect for a second on that shame. It is, of course, part of that cultural shame I ‘ve already mentioned in the past. And also, this disconcerting chaos that seemingly is just coming from our own nature as a people, now that we are “independent” (and have been for a while). We can only blame ourselves. Why can’t we just be a functioning society? Why can’t we JUST be CIVILISED? Why does everything here need to be so informal and chaotic? So corrupted and violent?

I am saying these words in full understanding that these judgments come from white supremacy and the mystification of European culture as THE apex of civilisation. However, completely dismissing these judgements as whiteness would amount to a denial of our lived realities in societies that we can experience as unlivable. It is true that, despite our wonderful cultures and immense resilience in the face of domination, our countries are exceedingly violent, our institutions and their people seem incapable of ever working for the collective good, and dishonesty and mistrust are guiding principles of survival. These are not moral judgements; these are just facts.

Shame in this case comes from both an internal and an external locus of evaluation. Shame because the societies we live in and we have to navigate function in ways contrary to our innermost values. This discrepancy causes distress, and with reason. Also, shame because of the gaze and judgment that may come from outside, about how things function in our countries. I have, for years, observed how when a new scandal breaks out in our politics or new and shocking violent events are in the news, many Limenians will react by worrying about the image our country will have internationally. This, at least in white and mestizo middle-classes, I can attest. “What will people think? How shameful. We look uncivilised.”

---

ASPIRATIONS TO WHITENESS

All of this is something I’ve been quietly reflecting on for years, especially since moving to Europe. I’ve grappled with ever evolving feelings of shame, rage, resentment, hopelessness about our situation. Internally wondering “why are we like this as a society?”, knowing there are many of these thoughts I cannot express, simply because they will be misunderstood. The experiences are just too alien, and there is either an expectation to love your country no matter what and dismiss these questions as white supremacy… or to condemn it wholeheartedly, blaming the colonised for their failures, and actually adopt a white supremacist discourse.

Nonetheless, I have questions. Knowing the violence and corruption that inhabit our societies are not all there is to them, knowing they come from somewhere, they are not innate in us but we have also become actors in our own dysfunction. And then I stumbled upon this section of The Wretched of the Earth:

“On the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be considered by the native as a gentle, loving mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology and its own unhappiness which is its very essence” (Fanon, 2001, p. 169)

This fits the narrative of colonialism coming to “lighten the darkness” of “primitive” peoples. Convincing colonised people that if the settlers were to leave, they would fall back into barbarism, bestiality, degradation, chaos. The same barbarism, degradation and chaos we see as such when condemn the way our societies’ function. In a way, the projection of corruption received from the coloniser became internalised, and with time, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Shame for being who we are is at the base of this, injected forcefully by colonial education and the rewriting of history. One thing that I want to make clear before I continue is that, as Fanon puts it in Black Skin, White Masks, not everyone will see themselves reflected in this piece: “I am speaking here on the one hand of alienated (mystified) Blacks, and on the other of no less alienated (mystifying and mystified) Whites.” (2021, p.12)

He is clear in his texts that the population that will feel the most inferior and ashamed will generally be the one that is in proximity to whiteness: the ones he calls the educated black men in Blask Skin, White Masks, or the national intellectuals (and part of the elite) in The Wretched of The Earth. This is important to understand what follows. I am writing from a Latin American, and in particular Peruvian, point of view. Back home, what Fanon describes can be equated to the feelings and behaviours of Peruvian criollos (whites) and also the mestizos (mixed race) who are in proximity or assimilated into whiteness culturally and mentally speaking. I am sure that, if your country has been colonised, you will be able to identify the groups of people this describes too.

What Fanon described from a psychosocial perspective, Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano traces from a structural and historical one. In his text Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality (2024), he described the European paradigm of rational knowledge which is based on the Cartesian idea of the Subject, bearer of reason, producing knowledge about an “object of study” which is external and not rational.  This paradigm was elaborated, he says, as part of the colonial power structure that positions European cultures as rational, containing subjects capable of studying an external Other (from Other cultures), objectified, only capable of becoming an object of study.

In this structure, colonisers “imposed a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning” then used as a means of social and cultural control. At first completely excluded from the means of knowledge production in society, the dominated started to be included in partial and selective ways, co-opted into these institutions:

“The European culture was made seductive: it gave access to power. After all, beyond repression, the main instrument of all power is its seduction. Cultural Europeanisation was transformed into aspiration. It was a way of participating and later to reach the same material benefits and the same power as the Europeans.” (2024, p.75)

We are talking here about the power of whiteness: its reputational value, power to exclude, the right to use and enjoyment (Harris, 1993). The access it gives to accumulation of social, economic and cultural capital for personal safety, comfort or enjoyment. Who wouldn’t want that in a world where, otherwise, you are at risk of being the target of domination, exploitation, extractivism and death?

Quijano then continues: “European culture then became a universal cultural model. The imaginary in the non-European cultures could hardly exist today and, above all, reproduce itself outside of these relations. […] Latin America is, without doubt, the most extreme case of cultural colonisation by Europe”. (2024, p.75)

This last line stings due to its accuracy. And he speaks from the Latin American (and specifically the Peruvian) perspective.

I believe, like stated above, he is also talking here mainly of criollo (white) and assimilated mestizo (mixed) communities in Latin America, and not necessarily of Indigenous or Black groups who have retained their culture and agency through centuries of survival and resistance under such system. By assimilated I mean fully, or almost fully ascribing to whiteness as the aspirational cultural model.

A fitting example of the mystifying power of “European knowledge” on the élite or the assimilated, is the one Fanon describes in Algerian doctors “who are graduates of the faculty of Algiers are obliged to hear and learn that the Algerian is born a criminal” (1967, p.241), some of them believing this because it had been “scientifically established”. As for Peruvian elites, this internalisation of white perspectives, the contempt for the colonised, and of the shame it brings us, is how we come to participate in whiteness, how we enter circles of power, how we whiten ourselves.

Now, having talked about how whiteness became aspirational for these populations, how do we go from here to understanding unlivable societies? As stated at the beginning of this section, we may look at this from the perspective of colonial projections. The mystification of whiteness as culture was formed through the opposition of “primitive, barbarous, chaotic” societies to a “rational, modern, efficient” one. Projections may become internalised, and oh, how well are we living up to the expectations at times! But we may go further in trying to understand what lies behind these mechanisms. Just speaking of projections and internalisation of these negative images, or reenactments seems quite simplistic and denies the agency of the colonised. After all, it is us who have taken these images and made them ours.

As with most things, we will see this can be a complex interplay of subjection, oppression, agency and resistance, resulting in societies that seem to function based on dysfunction. Again, under white supremacy, accusations are usually confessions… or from a psychosocial perspective, they are projections of what is disavowed in the self. We will now see how colonial structures may have created the spirit of transgression that has bled onto most layers of colonised societies, becoming a dysfunctional and at times, destructive force in our collective experiences.

---

TRANSGRESSION AND SUBJECTIVITY

First of all, presented with the existing power structure and when there is still an impossibility of thinking outside of it or of imagining life-affirming alternatives, the colonised (whatever their position in the hierarchy), have only two choices: to assimilate to the system and fight tooth and nails to become as white or as whitened as it will allow them to be (while judging and accusing everyone who doesn’t do it of being uncivilised), or to completely rebel and go the opposite way, quite literally. For or against the existing order, in any case, it means they remain within it and reproduce it.

Let’s reflect on a simple example, before complicating it. The myth of the lazy latino was dismantled by Ignacio Martin-Baro in his explorations of Latin American fatalism (1994). Building on Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon’s work, he reminds us that in Latin America, most people are deprived of the resources to shape their lives under the current social structure. As such, fatalism, powerlessness, and the passivity that ensues (from the coloniser’s perspective) are an internalisation social domination. This serves the reproduction of the current social order as it keeps people trapped in the belief that nothing can be changed.

Frantz Fanon explores attitudes to work and morality in the Wretched of the Earth (1967), and adds a different perspective. For him, the image of laziness, and attitudes disinvested from work are usual transgressions to the colonial order by means of non-cooperation or minimum cooperation with the oppressors. Under colonialism, he adds, concepts of honour, gratitude or sincerity become empty and this is also visible in the relations between the colonised and their work, or their respect for the coloniser’s laws.

Because of the oppression they face, for the colonised, to live is not to “embody moral values” or “to take their place in the coherent and fruitful development of the world. To live means to keep on existing. Every date is a victory: not the result of work but a victory felt as a triumph for life.” (1967, p.249) I will leave you with another powerful quote to ponder in light of the situations described at the beginning of this piece:

“There is, first of all, the fact that the colonized person, who in this respect is like men in underdeveloped countries or the disinherited in all parts of the world, perceives life not as a flowering or a development of an essential productiveness, but as a permanent struggle against an omnipresent death. This ever-menacing death is experienced as endemic famine, unemployment, a high death rate, an inferiority complex and the absence of any hope for the future. All this gnawing at the existence of the colonized tends to make of life something resembling an incomplete death.” (Fanon, 1965, p.128; See also Fanon, 1988, p.13).

Let’s now complicate the binary assimilated/transgressor.

Peruvian sociologist Gonzalo Portocarrero has reflected on the presence of transgression as a specific mode of enjoyment in criollo (white) communities (2004). He links todays seemingly lawless and chaotic attitudes and structures of Peruvian society (and its propensity for transgression) to the functioning of Limenian society during the colony, in which American born whites would defy the Spanish crown orders for personal gain and to consolidate local power.

I have lost count of how many times I read the chapter of his book that inspired this piece. It is named “transgression as a specific mode of enjoyment in the criollo world”. It helped me reflect on things. But the depth of what Portocarrero was describing did not hit me fully until I paired his writings with what Fanon and Quijano were saying.

It’s in this reading that I see the depth of the psychosocial mechanisms at play: belittled by the European metropolis, the whites born in the colony were considered bastards, tainted by their proximity with Indigeneity, unwanted. Their reaction, historically, was to claim colonial violence as theirs to enact against others, and at the same time subvert and transgress colonial laws for their own benefit (corruption).

Colonial society viewed from Europe is like what Fanon described in the above quote: chaotic, indolent, uneducated, without values and sensualised. Criollos and assimilated mestizos, who do not know any other viewpoint than the European (as described by Quijano), are ashamed of their own worlds in front of the coloniser. Compensation for this shame is visible in both: the unmeasured aspirations to whiteness and subjection to Europe, and at the same time, a quiet but systematic transgression of European rules. These transgressions mostly come when it is personally benefiting them, and they are usually carried to the detriment of others more marginalised in their society. A quiet pride comes from such transgressions, a feeling of freedom from imposed rules and the false promise of whiteness. Lastly, but no less important, there is also an enjoyment in cruelty or sadism, and in feeling superior in a society where they were invited to be like gods in front of dominated communities.

From being unwanted, tainted children trying to fit the parent’s model (aspiration to whiteness) or trying to reject it by transgressing it, the reality is that assimilated mestizos and whites conform to the projection and image given to them by the European coloniser: they are perverse. They also project this onto the marginalised communities, mostly Indigenous and Black, and become internal colonisers, maintaining the status quo and their own power.

It is as Fanon said: aspirations to whiteness and the violence that ensues are always worse or more visible in the elites and assimilated intellectuals of colonised territories. In turn, our societies seem trapped into a violence spiral, where corruption is widespread, starting at top levels and trickling down all layers of society as everyone wants a piece of the cake to the detriment of others.

This perspective proves clarifying to me. However, it is important to remember that criollos and assimilated mestizos are anything but victims. They are perpetrators twisted by their own experiences of humiliation and turning to social violence to feel better about themselves, or bystanders and witnesses in a system that continues crushing the most marginalised. Within this framework, transgression is both a form of self-affirmation and a form of domination at the same time. Portocarrero does not shy away from talking of both the humiliation of criollo and mestizes, AND their own violence, the sadistic enjoyment found in crushing others for their own benefit and in feeling superior to someone else.

Portocarrero cites this self-esteem issue:

“not being able to accept who we are, being trapped by the rejection of the Spanish crown, and its wish for the criollo to disappear, to not exist. We are trapped in the sense that we do not accept this wish, but we also cannot free ourselves from it. This wish works as a voice that repeatedly tells us, like a consolation, that we are very small, and very big are our failures” (2004, p.24)

… our failure to be white, reach complete and pure whiteness.

Assimilated people in the Global South are still defined by the othering of the coloniser. They actively participate in the Othering of marginalised peoples in their countries, and the upholding of the colonial and neo-colonial order that continues to extract, torture and exterminate. The structural issues we face also exist because such assimilated people, through their co-optation into whiteness as Quijano described, accessed some form of power and are desperately clinging to it through any means necessary.

---

Concluding thoughts

I wrote this on a whim, after reading those three texts in quick succession. The motivation, I believe came from the immensity of my grief. I would like nothing more than to be home. However, I cannot go back, because I want to live in a society where I can thrive. We all deserve at least that. The saddest thought I have had for years is that I will most likely end up like my father. Living and ultimately dying far away from the place that should be home, against my will. Having my ashes flown to Peru, the only place I can ever imagine choosing for my final resting place.

I know many migrants, and many of my friends are also migrants from the Global South. We are the ones who got out, and probably won’t make it back. We just don’t make the space to name these things. And I’ve been quietly sitting in a corner trying to make sense… quiet, with burning despair. I just want a livable society for my people. I just want livable societies for all.

---

REFERENCES

Fanon, F. (1965) A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, F. (1988) Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press

Fanon, F. (2001) The wretched of the earth. London: Penguin. (original work published 1961).

Fanon, F. (2021) Black Skin, White Masks. London: Penguin. (original work published 1952).

Harris, C. (1993) Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review, 106(8), pp. 1707-1791

Martin-Baro I. (1994) Writings for a liberation psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Quijano, A. (2024) Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. In Mignolo, W., Segato, R., & Walsh, C. (eds.) Anibal Quijano, Foundational Essays on the Coloniality of Power. Durham: Duke University Press. (original work published 1992).

Portocarrero, G. (2004) Rostros criollos del mal. Cultura y transgresión en la sociedad peruana. Lima: Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú