Orwell’s “Shooting the “Elephant inhabits an uncomfortable space in the historical record in that it is both an admission of guilt and complicity in imperialistic violence by a figure who would ultimately be renowned as a critic of the violent injustice he participated in. and a self-aware but nevertheless persistent document of the racism on which imperial Britain was built. That self-awareness is key, in that it is an honest account of the nature of imperial power by one who might object to its principles but is resigned to his place in enforcing both it and the white supremacy it depends on. Orwell’s account reveals that the authoritarian power the British exert with their degradation of the indigenous peoples only goes so far in maintaining the imperialist objective. While the British likely posses the capacity to crush any insurrection, the imperialist narrative would prefer to justify itself by not having their moral authority subverted in the first place, specifically by “not being laughed at” (Orwell 3). That Orwell feels compelled to shoot the elephant to maintain an illusion of dignified governance (regardless of whether that illusion is maintained in any context other than the immediate one) is not, in fact, a display of power in any meaningful sense by the people the British Empire seeks to control but an inconvenience for an agent of their violence who cannot keep his hands or his moral conscience clean in the way he would like too without outwardly turning in some way against the system that employs him.