Today I had the worst class in the entire duration of my UG life.

We had an assignment to do an ad to educate people about an aspect of COVID. I have a great friend in this class who's an amazing talent. He does voice overs, video editing, sound mixing: ask him and he does it.

And he does it at an international standard too. He's great and I love him.

But you know what the feedback on his work was today?

He was too foreign. His work should have been marked harder than anyone else because he used animation The animation had too many words.

And the worst comment was "The people didn't look Guyanese enough because they're not wearing cultural clothing and they weren't brown enough" (mind you my friend is a mixed Guyanese whose pale and the characters he used were brown like him).

This is not the first time that I have seen UG lecturers look at quality work and decided it was 'bad' because it didn't adhere to a standard they set. My own creativity has been squashed by UG before and seeing this happen to another creative was heartbreaking.

Like I'm so tired of my lecturers saying that because my work isn't entirely in creole, that it's not Guyanese. I'm tired of my lecturers telling me that if I don't adhere to the stereotypes around Guyanese then I'm not "authentic".

There are so many levels to being Guyanese because we are a mixed society in both classes and ethnicities. Not because my experience isn't your experience means that it's not authentic. I'm so sick of this.

And right now they're laughing about my friend being upset about it. Like...Why are we like this?!