• Promoting “decolonial” or “postcolonial” movements that are just racist, nationalist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, chauvinistic, fascist, religious fundamentalist, reactionary, intolerant tripe that merely mirrors former colonisers’ crimes. Or if they’re not regressive right-wing juntas, they’re capitalist, “reformist” states that sell the country out to the highest imperialist bidder, as long as that imperialist isn’t one that they were recently ruled by. And, of course, some countries can exemplify both these tendencies. (America, Burma, Jamaica, Ukraine, Nigeria, Israel and Palestine, I’m looking at all of you.)
  • Related to the earlier point, promoting a “decolonial” (I actually hate this expression) approach that comes primarily from highly educated, upper-middle-class or upper-class members of colonised cultures. (Uh, like me. Just the highly educated part, though—I grew up working class and am now part of the squeezed middle-middle class.)
  • Thinking that all social injustices can be solved by voting in the right politicians.
  • Refusing to vote when one candidate is a milquetoast liberal and the other one is a borderline fascist. I don’t like centrist Democrats either, but Donald Trump was and is more dangerous. This kind of voting is harm reduction. (Unfortunately, it’s practically impossible to do foreign-policy harm reduction in American electoral politics—this needs to be a long-term project—but at least you can do something about domestic policy.)
  • Stringing together a lot of jargonistic terms that cause people to shut down. It feels as though I’m being hit over the head with words like bourgeois, settler-colonialist, base and superstructure, decolonial, carceral, cisheteropatriarchy, kyriarchy. You shouldn’t need a master’s degree in women’s & gender studies or political science to get involved with activism. I hate cops as much as the next leftist, but you should be clearer.
  • Repeating terms like neoliberal and bourgeois as though it were self-evident what they meant. (Admittedly, I have referred to neoliberalism here, and I probably shouldn’t have, since it’s vague.)