Authors such as Aimé Césaire and Albert Memmi, writing in the 1950s, argued that there was no real human encounter in colonialism, only thingification, an objectification of the colonized that justifies violence and racism. The colonized were forced to occupy a place in which their culture and the culture of the colonizer were constantly in conflict and in which they not only suffered subjugation but came to accept it as a natural social order (although theorists such as Memmi have always seen in this opportunities for creation, not just destruction).

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 262