Understanding Ourselves: Confronting Shame, Blame and Internalised Racisms: Reimagining the Future?

Part II

Rhoda Reddock is emerita Professor of Gender, Social Change, and Development at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus. She also served as deputy Principal and first head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies. Active in the national and Caribbean Women’s Movement and other social causes. Prof. Reddock is currently an executive member of the International Sociological Association (2018-2022) and an elected expert of the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (2019 2023).

This week’s column (Part One was published last week) was first presented at A Time for Healing: Understanding and Reconciling Race Relations in Trinidad and Tobago, a joint national symposium organised by The Faculty of Law, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus and the Catholic Commission for Social Justice (CCSJ), 30 August, 2020. Responding to the racial tensions during and after the 2020 Trinidad and Tobago elections, the symposium was described as an attempt to facilitate a “national conversation, focusing on understanding and healing…in an empathetic, balanced and objective environment. “

Last week’s column pointed to the dangerous myths and stereotypes about race in Trinidad and Tobago – dangerous because they have real consequences for society and for our everyday lives and relations across difference - and suggested that these myths generate little real understanding of the legacy of historical socio-economic and cultural forces at work. As I noted, racialized experiences in Trinidad and Tobago are shaped by a number of intersecting frames: Colourism and anti-Blackness; competing victimhoods; ethnic dualism; hybridity and mixedness. Let us look at the first two.

1. Anti-Blackness/Colourism

In 1970, like many of my generation I was influenced by the Black Power Movement. At my prestigious Anglican Girls High School, White girls began to acknowledge their African ancestors, Black girls were forced to confront the internalised racism that existed within themselves and to become proud of their colour and hair finally. I do know that the leaders of the movement spoke of the Unity of all “Black” people with the slogan “Africans and Indians Unite.” I also recall in 1990 when an Indo-Trini colleague said to me – Rhoda, I think there should be a 20 year commemoration of the 1970 Black Power revolution. “Why do you think so,” I asked. “Because,” he said, “that was an important turning point in my life. After that I was able to take my Indian food to school without feeling ashamed. It made us appreciate who we are”. Yet I am also aware of colleagues who sought to distance the Black power movement from Indians, reducing its national significance for the entire society.

The racist and colour systems of the colonial plantation era established a hierarchy of colour and phenotype and hegemony of “whiteness.” All groups were evaluated in terms of their closeness to Europeans in colour, phenotype and culture. It took a revolution to make Afro-Trinidadians challenge the internalised racism of our own anti-Blackness and to de-negativise notions of blackness, African practices, belief systems, and even the continent of Africa. Despite this, colour and phenotype continue to be visible markers of difference, and of class and ethnic stigmatisation. For Tobagonians, their dark skin colour was an additional factor contributing to the tensions with Trinidad.

Colleague and friend, Indian human rights activist and feminist, Kalpana Kannabiran would remind me during her visit to Trinidad in 1995, the year which marked 150 years of Indian arrival in Trinidad and Tobago, that colonial negativisation of blackness would have reinforced already existing negative notions of blackness brought to the region from South Asia. She would remind me that colour has also been an important signifier of status and difference in Indian society which no doubt, influenced Indian immigrants’ relationships with African descendants in the region and antipathy towards ‘blackness.’

This would have been compounded by the fear by Indo-Trinidadians of being invisibilised or losing their distinctiveness within an Afro-dominated Caribbean (i.e. ‘Black’) space. Although numerically well-represented in Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago, Indians are deeply concerned about biological and cultural assimilation and disappearance into the Afro-Caribbean (i.e. Black) majority of the region.

Today, as Caribbean people, we continue to have this ambivalent relationship with ‘whiteness’ – a continued mistrust of ‘white people’ alongside an internalised acceptance of the superiority of ‘whiteness’; hence the sayings – ‘he feel he white’ or ‘she playing white’

(This is one of a series of weekly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)