I think the first instinct of white people when we speak about colonialism - specifically the version we have now as a white ideology - is defensiveness, and I understand. I went through a primarily white and Western education system where white people are rarely referred to as a group, and have been coddled into expecting that when they are, it will be positive: bringers of modernity, civilisation, enlightenment. Often this is said indirectly too, because when you say Western or European people understand you mean white people.
Then comes the most common defensive move: the Arabs did it, the Turks did it, the Romans did it, the Aztecs did it, the Egyptians did it - why single us out. The answer is that when we talk about settler colonialism in the world we live in now, we are talking about a specific historical period whose consequences shape the present.
If you think we are not living inside the imagination of 19th century white settler colonialists, look at how maps are drawn outside Europe. Look at the jagged, inorganic borders that cut across cultures and religions and languages, usually along lines of extractable resources carved by Western states.
Here is the difference with the Ottoman Empire, the Sasanian Empire, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Kingdom of Mali. None of those exist as geopolitical entities today. There is no embassy of the Kingdom of Meroe in Paris or Washington or London. But the countries that profited from extraction and the violence that enforced it - of minerals, oil, land, and people - still exist and still dominate: the UK, Portugal, France, Spain, Belgium, and their white majority settler colonies like New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Brazil.
That is why we keep naming them. They are the winners of history. People oppressed by whiteness from Palestine to Angola did not invent whiteness. They live with its afterlives.
