What Do We Mean By Decolonising Our Thinking?

You’ll often hear us talk about decolonising our thinking at Mission Equality, but what do we mean by that?

Here’s an excerpt from our Black Paper on Equalism:

The fact that our modus operandi to date hasn’t resulted in anything near equality means that understanding our own needs and the requirements to design and move to a world based on Equalism requires us to think about everything differently… VERY differently! 

A word we use often at Mission Equality for this process of thinking differently is “decolonise”. 

The process of decolonising means UNlearning what we have consciously and unconsciously learned, and then RElearning a new way of thinking, being and doing that is intentional and directional…

• It means questioning the foundations upon which we’ve built everything and asking if what we have is really working for us, as individuals and as a species.

• It’s a willingness to see where our assumptions, policies, practices, and processes remain based upon colonised thinking and paradigms that we’ve rarely questioned and have accepted as unchallenged defaults.

• It means acknowledging that what we’ve been taught and continue to be taught is no longer serving us at any level, and that reimagining education is one of the most urgent tasks we face.

• It’s an unyielding drive to be growth-oriented in mindset and challenge ourselves to think beyond what is, to imagine what could be, and to do the work to get there.

Rather than fitting ourselves badly into boxes that will never be a fit for most of us, we need to create new boxes that can endlessly adapt to the way we are. 

We need to first think differently, so that we can do differently and finally exist differently…to move beyond surviving into a world where we can ALL thrive.

How does this land with you? How are you starting to think differently so we can create an equal world?

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