Unpaid | Us and Them: Part Eight
In Part Eight of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen addresses the people who thought this lecture wasn't about them — the descendants of the colonized, the children of enslaved people, the grandchildren of the dispossessed who have spent generations inside the Western system. He names what they have become: unpaid whites. Doing the job of maintaining and perpetuating the Western social order, defending its institutions, believing its mythology, reproducing its frameworks — without receiving the status that the originators promised as payment. The actual descendants of Europe are disappearing demographically. Their birth rates have collapsed. But the civilization survives because the colonized absorbed it and are now carrying it forward. This is not an accident. A colonized mind does not need an army to maintain itself — it reproduces voluntarily, enthusiastically, generationally. It turns into aspiration. It turns into identity. It turns into the reflex that makes you defend the system the moment anyone challenges it, not because you were ordered to, but because the framework has become you. Your grandparents held onto something. Your parents held onto pieces. By the time it reaches you, what's left is costumes without content. And meanwhile, the real question — the one most of you have spent your whole life avoiding — is not whether the system failed you. It is whether you, in fact, are the system.
In Part Eight of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen addresses the people who thought this lecture wasn't about them — the descendants of the colonized, the children of enslaved people, the grandchildren of the dispossessed who have spent generations inside the Western system. He names what they have become: unpaid whites. Doing the job of maintaining and perpetuating the Western social order, defending its institutions, believing its mythology, reproducing its frameworks — without receiving the status that the originators promised as payment. The actual descendants of Europe are disappearing demographically. Their birth rates have collapsed. But the civilization survives because the colonized absorbed it and are now carrying it forward. This is not an accident. A colonized mind does not need an army to maintain itself — it reproduces voluntarily, enthusiastically, generationally. It turns into aspiration. It turns into identity. It turns into the reflex that makes you defend the system the moment anyone challenges it, not because you were ordered to, but because the framework has become you. Your grandparents held onto something. Your parents held onto pieces. By the time it reaches you, what's left is costumes without content. And meanwhile, the real question — the one most of you have spent your whole life avoiding — is not whether the system failed you. It is whether you, in fact, are the system.