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Caribbean people, we need to talk about race. And by that I mean, talk about the complex history of racism in our region. The origins of racism in the Caribbean is not as linear as "A long time ago X attacked Y and, watch now nuh? Set of confusion" Nah, it's far more complex.
There were many economic, social, military and political factors that fueled our racism from WAAAY back when Columbus and his boys dem roll up on we islands thinking they find India (stupidity that lead to the most brutal racist acts in the world's history) to this very moment.
But before I go on, I wanna issue 3 caveats:
(1) I am not a historian. I'm a Communications Studies student who just liked Guyanese history
(2) I can only speak about Guyana, and during the pre-1850 era but others can pitch in about their own histories.
(1) I am not a historian. I'm a Communications Studies student who just liked Guyanese history
(2) I can only speak about Guyana, and during the pre-1850 era but others can pitch in about their own histories.
(3) A critique that I have seen about people who are quoting misguiding 'facts' about racial history in Guyana is that they haven't gone to school and haven't read. I went to school, paid attention, read a lot and didn't learn about ANY of this until university.
(3.5) Which means either I just had a terrible social studies education (I did) or the Guyana has failed to integrate our racial history into our curriculum to show the complexity of our issues early to prevent us from moving forward from a place of ignorance (it has).
That said, I acknowledge the limitations of Twitter as a medium to talk about complex issues like this, and I am ignorant about the full history of racism in other parts of the Caribbean and even in Guyana. However, I hope that this Cliff's Notes version can at least help some.
So, like I said, racism in Guyana is complex. It's a system that has been designed deliberately to distract us - as the late Toni Morrison said - and through this distraction take advantage of our labour and energy. And racism is old and often deliberately engineered.
The ethnic tensions between Guyana's Amerindian peoples was a pre-Columbian thing. But when the Dutch rolled up here wanting to plant cotton, they found themselves short on labour and military support from The Netherlands.
Long story short, they looked at the tensions between these two peoples and were like "Hey, we could take advantage of this!" and they used the Caribs as a militia to enslave other tribes in the area and protect themselves from Spanish and Portuguese incursion.
Amerindian slavery didn't quite work as they wanted, so when chattel started rolling in, various Amerindian peoples were used as militia forces to (1) prevent grande and petit maronage - slaves running away to Venezuela for hope of some solace from Dutch brutality
and (2) they were used as a militia to help the Dutch push back the Portuguese and Spanish from Brazil and Venezuela trying to weedle their way into the Dutch's territory.
So you can see how this pretty much increased racial tensions among Amerindians, and between
So you can see how this pretty much increased racial tensions among Amerindians, and between
So you can see how increased tensions among Amerindian people and between Amerindians and Black people. But, it also made those people dependant on Dutch military action for a lot of their income at one point according to the history that I read.
So, fast forward to the pre-Emancipation. There was already an established tension between them, white Europeans and Black people. As tensions began to rise around the time of our rebellions, Europeans began to see just how outnumbered they were.
So as they began to transition into Apprenticeship - the period before Emancipation - the British started to bring in new groups. They brought in poor whites from Portugal, Germany, Poland etc to kinda up the white count to hopefully outnumber the black population.
But here's the thing. You ever wonder why Guyana separates Portuguese and European? It's because the British never gave the Portuguese the status of 'white' in order to separate them from the plantocracy. They were 'othered' by the system so the British could use them as pawns.
A little later, the British began to bring in East Indians, Chinese and recaptured Black people from French or American slave ships to act as indentured labour here. At that time, Black people were both pushing for FULL Emancipation AND labour rights.
So when black people began to strike to demand better pay back in 1840, the planters kinda had to give in and raise the wages because there were not as many Indian and Portuguese people there to take off the amount of labour they needed on the states.
But from 1842 and beyond, there were enough and the British were able to use these two groups against the Black people to force them to give in. Portuguese had set up shop where Black people could get credit for goods and they were encouraged to deny Black people their goods.
Black people leaving the estate to try on their own in the villages? No problem! We got more Indian people coming in anyway and they would work for cheap! Let them take over the sugar estate labour! And so the seeds of prejudice were being sewn. Various riots would follow.
So I'll stick a pin here because after the 1850s, my knowledge with our tensions gets a bit shaky cause my UG course kinda petered out a bit around then. But note that a lot of the racism in our history didn't come from nowhere. And it's not just an X vs Y thing.
Racism in Guyana was engineered as a distraction. If the peoples you want to oppress are fighting against themselves, then they will be too distracted to notice that you're exploiting them and stealing the resources from under their nose.
Sadly, because many of us don't know this - because of our failure to teach it properly and from the prejudices we continue to harbour for each other from generations of pain and stories of pain, we aren't moving forward. And this lack of a more rounded perspective is dangerous.
And mind you, this is just what I could remember to put in a Twitter thread, but our history is much more complex than what I have presented here. And a lot of the references are trapped in libraries' reserved sections or are expensive texts.
So I hope that this thread could give some people the BEGINNING of an idea of where and how our racial tensions were set up. It got MUCH worse after the 1850s with the riots and such and that's a whole other complex issue. But the catch is that it all started with exploitation.
And of course I know that I may have made mistakes here and may have misrepresented something so if @derwaynewills or @KSansculotteG see any inconsistencies or omissions here, please untangle my thread! I'm still learning, too.
