The word decolonisation is often thrown around by highbrow people. As if without realising that actual decolonisation (as in, dismantling the actual colonies) is far from complete, it is applied instead to things as innocuous as language.
The Western lifestyle, including the phone you may be using right now, is still dependent on exploiting colonised nations and preventing their development. Right now.
Child labour is still rampant in many parts of the world. Countries are still prey to exploitative Western multinational corporations that extract their rich mineral resources, returning very little to the people of the land. Despite this being a familiar trope in movies such as Avatar, it is very much a reality and those who tout their progressive leanings when they take power are doing nothing about it.
Hyper-aggressions of global exploitation
Western governments place sanctions on uncompetitive countries - a clear exercise of the vestiges of their colonial might when it comes to trade. Far from doing anything about this racism, self-styled liberals and prominent proponents of inclusivity who reach positions of power in government become complicit in the oppression.
While racial "micro-aggressions" are complained about in Western workplaces, the racial hyper-aggressions of those who exploit the African continent are what make those privileged workplaces possible at all. To strip countries of their mineral wealth is to steal from under the feet of colonised peoples, inflicting grave hardships upon them for the sake of our own comfort.
Ongoing struggles
Let us focus on the French, since they are probably the most blatant of the Europeans in their neocolonialism and seek to aggressively assimilate those who belong to other cultures.
In the Pacific overseas collectivity of New Caledonia, the French viciously hold the whole territory against the wishes of the indigenous Kanak people, as the local colonial French population serves to counter their repeated referendums for national independence. The desire to be a recognised sovereign nation was expressed by the Kanaks in a 2020 referendum, followed by another marred referendum in 2021 that was boycotted by many of them. France keeps the territory so its companies can rob the abundant nickel available there, ten percent of the world's total, with the mineral having electronic and military applications that serve to bolster France's retained imperial military might.
America is equally at fault. Elon Musk covets the nickel in New Caledonia for the production of electric cars. The same Elon Musk who openly expressed smug approval of the American-backed coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so as to reach the country's rich lithium deposits. Like nickel, lithium is key to the batteries that make electric cars viable. Such interference at the expense of colonised people suggests a pattern of behaviour that could end up washing Western environmentalists eventually in neocolonial bloodshed.
In Mali, the the French showed an eagerness to maintain a military presence ostensibly to fight against terrorism, and later issued harsh criticisms of the government, but many suspect their real motives lie in their desire to control its rich uranium. A country where that is certainly the case is Niger, where, despite continued poverty, the country's uranium is shipped to France.
The UK's neocolonialism is not quite so blatant, as the UK is invested in the United States as a successor to the British Empire and consequently tends to just interfere wherever the United States interferes and join it as its lackey. While it is rarely talked about in any formal sense, this is understood to include secretly undermining certain fellow Commonwealth countries where the US has an interest in destabilisation and disorder, and this includes Pakistan.
Unequal exchange
As well as plundering lands of the resources that are the God-given property of the colonised people, the economic core located in Western countries and societies prospers at the expense of poorer nations through unequal exchange. Expensive products are created in the economic core in Western countries and societies, whereas the mineral resources that go into them are merely extracted in the impoverished periphery or Global South.
The maintenance of the economic core at the expense of the economic periphery is the very reason we have the lifestyle we maintain, so there is no incentive to change it. And it is directly the result of colonialism, which turned these nations in Africa into mere mines and sources of raw materials that often offer little of any competitive nature compared with the finished products created in the West. The resulting trade, in which undeveloped countries merely produce coffee beans, fruit or raw materials and ship them off to the West, while the developed core is able to sell cars and electronic goods, is unfair and perpetually sustains the place of one side as exploited while the other is the exploiter.
Western leaders are unable to extend condemnation of racism or colonialism to include the injustice on the international and economic levels today, because the very prominence and strategic military advantage that allows them to exercise dominance over other states is derived from it. Even as they speak of aiding other nations selflessly from their podiums, they are nothing without this vestige of racist exploitation and slavery.
If we are to be opposed to racism, this cannot be separated from supporting all those who resist Western government and corporate theft of other countries' resources. It cannot be separated from resistance to the warmongers and interventionists, who have the same moral character as racists.
