Why Divide and Conquer–a centuries-old colonial strategy–Matters Now

For my own self-care, I have a plan for the inauguration of America’s next president on January 20. I’ll be taking the day off work to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and attempting to find glimmers.

Glimmers are micro-moments of joy that help calm the nervous system–they're small, "everyday" joys that can help us feel grateful and joyous.

Planned glimmers for Monday: I’ll go for a long walk, as it’s supposed to be sunny where I live. I plan to start the morning with my meditation and yoga flow. I'll nourish my body with warm food. Most of all, I'm looking forward to spending time with my loved ones: my 8-year-old, husband and I are still doing game nights--between Poker, Monopoly, Uno and Exploding Kittens, there's raucous excitement most evenings in my household.

I generally stay away from writing explicitly about political candidates in a public forum–for my own mental and spiritual health, but also because I believe everything is political, not just politicians.

But–as has always been the case–but in a pronounced, explicit fashion now, my work and livelihood is tied up in what’s happening politically. Even if you’ve been living under a rock, the last few years of quiet-initially, then altogether-rapid pushback against corporate DEI initiatives, the harmful Supreme Court decisions and emboldened racist, xenophobic and sexist rhetoric has impacted all our lives.

To be clear, this is terrifying and painful to witness and live through.

But there’s another insidious byproduct that happens when regimes designed to tear people apart consolidates power–Divide and Conquer begins to strengthen (also known as Divide and Rule).

This hundreds-year-old colonial strategy to pit people with similar identities, challenges and interlinked liberation works exceedingly well. In short: It weaponizes one oppressed group to believe another oppressed group has it better than them, so they turn their attention at tearing that group down, rather than uniting to resist the oppressors.

There are a number of historical examples: the Partition of India and Pakistan, the Rwandan genocide, the Model Minority Myth in the United States as an anti-Black strategy…and so on.

I've faced criticism from some fellow social justice advocates for expressing my dismay about (yet another) anti-DEI news event in a way that was different than they expected. I was criticized for expressing surprise and was told I should have instead, talked about how this news event was a continuation of a larger rollback of DEI initiatives.

I’m a writer and words matter. I think it’s also ok to not have perfect words to express how traumatized we are right now–when children are being massacred, when people are fleeing their homes because of unprecedented climate disaster, when people are seeing their jobs and life’s work dedicated to creating equitable workplaces wiped out because yet another business leader wants to curry favor with an authoritarian president.

To call out people who are working on similar issues but taking issue with the way they’re saying something is how divisions are sown between people who should have shared solidarity. Rather than building solidarity so people are stronger together to resist their oppressors, they begin to infight and tear each other down. Starts with words, then moves to so many other areas.

So for the oppressors, the weakened factions are easier to conquer. When people fight for crumbs, the oppressors get to keep on keeping the cake.

I've used one example, a fairly benign one in the grand scheme of things. But there are so, so many - like when immigrants oppose immigration and how anti-Blackness shows up in so many non-Black communities of color. It's sadly common to turn against people with similar interests, in (an even unrecognized, subconscious) bid for power, or proximity to power.

We have to be extremely vigilant about this in moments when oppression turns mainstream. It becomes easy to turn against each other, to blame each other and to separate and isolate ourselves. To lose empathy for our shared struggles and work towards our collective liberation.

Tearing each other down might feel like a temporary solution to dealing with the stress and trauma of these times, but it only weakens us in the long run. Instead, we must turn our anger and devastation to resisting those who are going to make things so much harder for the maximum number of us. Social media posting isn’t activism, but it is a powerful way to build coalitions that can make change–from organizing marches, to petitions, to building awareness and countering misinformation.

We are strongest in solidarity and weakened when we turn on each other.

This is how oppressors win. Don’t let them.

Side note: I've eradicated "Divide and Conquer" from my lexicon. Having family members painful displaced in the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, I know all to well how effective and brutal this strategy is.

In solidarity,

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