Yes! So many similar thoughts here - plus the vampire metaphor of drinking people’s blood … and the long discussion about inviting the vampire into their space almost seems like a comment on civility politics maybe?

And yeah as you say, the loss of identity and thereby a loss of connection to the past and future, due to an extractive and homogenizing mode of integration.

To me (and again, my understanding of Fanon is SUPER limited so I could be getting this entirely wrong!) this seems like it draws on Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, where true recognition of the oppressed in the master’s/colonizer’s system is impossible due to racial politics, and the only viable option is the overthrow of that system.

The other bit that stuck with me was the part about having been truly free during those evening hours - where there really did appear to be mutual recognition of each other’s personhood, even the wooden nickels were ultimately accepted as a worthy substitute to the US Dollars that Stack would have initially preferred.