Not Your Victim

How our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us

Marie Kawthar Daouda

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781509571697
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509571710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Colonialismo y poscolonialismo

Empire and race have become the most discussed – and most problematic – subjects in political and historical discourse. It is now an unquestionable orthodoxy both in academia and in progressive political discourse that European colonial empires – particularly the British – were uniquely evil, the West's 'original sin', and that their legacy continues to underpin systemic racism, injustice, and oppression.

Marie Kawthar Daouda, a Moroccan and French academic who now lives in Britain, argues that this narrative is dangerously wrong. Weaving her personal experience with erudite reflection on history, literature, and politics, she argues that we are all heirs of complex waves of immigration, conquest, and colonization. A closer look at French and British history belies a simplistic worldview wherein all the evil in the world is the result of the peculiarly vicious nature of white, Western colonizers. Indeed, she argues, such a perspective nurtures the very prejudices it claims to fight by valorizing victimhood above individual or collective agency and by denying ethnic minorities any sense of responsibility.

A coruscating attack on the perverse solipsism, moral blindness, and historical illiteracy of 'decolonizing' progressive elites, this book upends our tired debates over colonialism, empire, and immigration. It offers a more nuanced, hopeful vision of our historical self-understanding.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Quotations
• Introduction: A strange island
• 1 Where are you really from?
• 2 The Noble Savage, the French Revolution, and Mrs Jellyby
• 3 Places with no statues
• 4 Iconoclasm, old and new
• 5 Must Rhodes fall?
• 6 Tolerance, diversity, and neo-orientalism
• 7 Cultural appropriation and cultural gatekeeping
• 8 The racism of cultural suicide
• 9 The triumph of the victim and the rise of ‘empowerment’
• 10 Equality: The tyranny of low expectations
• 11 Western roots
• 12 A Christian identity
• Conclusion: Growing roots
• Acknowledgements
• End User License Agreement