We have always been here. At the university that mobilizes the police to persecute anti-colonial thought. At the suspension and “instructing” of anti-colonial professors, at the arrest of dissidents on grounds of conscience, at the rehashing of anti-racist concepts to put them at the service of colonial violence. At the appropriation of the struggle against anti-Semitism, forged from Warsaw to Crown Heights, to make it a human shield for settler conquest, so that even the political party full of Holocaust deniers who yesterday were spreading panic about George Soros, “Jewish lasers” and the “banking elite” can be seamlessly converted into crusaders against anti-Semitism.

It doesn't surprise me that my alma mater is, as they say, a central site in the struggle between universities and protests. Nor am it surprising that my mentors and doctoral supervisors remain in the crosshairs of the settlers.

Like many others, I chose Columbia University for graduate school not because of its prestige as an Ivy League university or its stellar reputation, and certainly not because of its legacy admissions. I knew little about these things.

I chose the school with the most dangerous academic record, according to a list by famous “right-winger” David Horowitz, which I inverted and used as a “guide to the best US colleges.”

If the man who later denounced the “I Can't Breathe” protests as a “racist lie” thought a professor or school was “dangerous” to his cause, I was in. Which academic programs were most hated by those who trivialize our lynchings? I'm in. Who were his most hated professors in the MA and PhD programs? I sought them out as my advisors.

This mob, which advocates political and historical illiteracy, which pushes the truth into oblivion, which has punished black students and banned books on plantations, in prisons and before school boards, will always point their pitchforks at our sages.

I am one of the other alumni. One of the second-graders. One of those who cannot threaten to withhold their donations if you do not quickly crush the Soweto uprising. One of the token former members you recruited for the website who, it turns out, are not just faint-hearted smiles that exist only in brochures as evidence of progress on diversity, equity and inclusion. One of those who cannot be appeased by games of “decolonising the curriculum” and see your inclusivity hidden in sheep’s clothing. Who are not the intended recipients of your mass emails assuring everyone that dissent is being contained.

The point of education was never to reap the laurels of an institution, but to be seen as dangerous to those who wanted to portray the brutalization of the colonized as a racist hoax. It was not to toil in thought in order to perhaps one day have the good fortune to be funneled through the institutions in the hope of obtaining a position, an enviable scholarship and a room with a view.

It is not about waiting for the promised security of a permanent position and telling the truth with those emancipation papers in hand. It is not about waiting for flowers from a university administration that would turn out to be indistinguishable from Bull Connor once it turns out that students believe “decolonization is not metaphor“.

The point of education is not just to interpret their world, but to destroy it. To shake its genocidal foundations and the ease with which “the necessary carpet bombing of the native sector” is swallowed by the average citizen. That is, to be what the colonists would call “dangerous.”

There was a deliberate misunderstanding of the colonized student who is ordered back to class by billionaires to stop acting privileged and rebellious in order to Afrikaans textbooks and learn to accept “both sides” of their bombings.

In Columbia 68, France 68, Rhodes Must Fall and elsewhere, the police, politicians and school principals always band together and tell Sarafina's class not to be naughty. Whether it is the 19th-century ethnologists' tales of native docility or the contemporary media's tales of the appropriate docility of peaceful protest that have convinced them that this will keep them quiet, I cannot say.

But these students didn't just read a poem by Nikki Giovanni or Mahmoud Darwish and then become “too woke,” as apartheid apologists claim. We didn't just stumble across Frantz Fanon, Assata Shakur or Edward Said and say, “Wait a minute, maybe that's unfair.”

We are among the people who can be attacked. Who are forced to watch as the racial unrest comes to our block in Tulsa, to Washington, DC, or to our families. Houses in Lydd or Huwaraand we are told that our bloodshed is not the main thing. That our bombings belong in the footnotes. That we must recognize the right of the white man's country to exist. That this is about prudent security operations. That this is about hunting down Mau Mau terrorists. That we should not care about the camps, the victims, the cries of the lynch mob. This is not ethnic cleansing.

But what we are experiencing, from George Floyd to Gaza, is that the colonized are neither intimidated nor cowardly, and in fact, are not colonized. That we have not signed a contract that tells us to say goodbye gently to the good night of our destruction. And that we do not recognize anyone who does this in our name.

What white power doesn't understand is that we don't submit, we don't give up territory. We've all seen Dylann Roofs, Lothar von Trothas and David Ben-Gurions – the natives, the blacks, the undocumented aren't going anywhere.

So that's how we meet. At the predictable climax of this moment of colonizer versus colonized – everywhere. No matter how loudly the colonialist media complains, crocodiles-like, that fascism has reconquered “the West” or that “democracy” has fallen on hard times in the “global South,” we who are not published, who are not asked how we feel, the second-class people, the exiles against whom the anti-racism we invented has, not surprisingly, turned, are still here. Here on the grounds where Selma performances took place, only to become Selma.

We have always been here. Against all pogroms. Against all Kristallnacht, all Nakbas, all Setif bombings, all native prisons, all cornered Trails of Tears. No racist, no puritanical fantasy will ever come to fruition. The future is unhaunted. It is anti-colonial. It belongs to the reserves, the neighborhoods and the native neighborhoods. And every rusted, refreshed, recycled white supremacist ideology will end up where it belongs.

There is no final solution to the colonial problem. Not even DEI.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.