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Trinidad and Tobago: Challenging Racism
When one talks about racism, it is important to understand the context. Clearly the way that racism is expressed and understood in the United States is very different from that in Trinidad andTobago. That the two situations are so different is because of the fact that the history is different.
The dominant racial ideology in the United States dating from the period of slavery is such, that one is either black or white. And black is defined as anyone with any amount of non-white heritage. To my mind, the combined effect of Spanish, French and British colonial racial ideologies in Trinidad and Tobago, created what has been described as a colour hierarchy which largely corresponded with class distinctions and where the small number of whites control the vast majority of power and money.
What makes the Trinidad and Tobago situation markedly different from that of the United States is the introduction of indentured labour, first from China, then India, thereby introducing two additional non-western cultures which stood largely outside the creolization-process that occurred between the European and African population. In large parts, the stereotypes that exist today about Africans and Indians in Trinidad and Tobago date from the colonial period. That these stereotypes are still operative today is a legacy of colonial rule.
In the anti-racism workshops they conducted for the feminist group, Women Working for Social Progress, Waveney Richards and Gillian Goddard pointed out that racism is an idea born out of colonial rule where white colonizers perpetuated myths about non-white people. That there exists tension and racism between people of Indian and African descent in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago is a result of the internalization of these myths and racist ideas. To ensure that Africans and Indians did not unite, the colonizers put in place very specific and deliberate policies that created barriers to the integration of...