Hello {{ first name | friends}},
There's a thing that used to happen when I lived in the UK, when I was in a conversation with people racialised as white. Everything would be going fine, then someone would ask if we had something that I considered to be a fairly basic and every day item in our country. Perhaps not a bad question on the face of it, but somewhat activating when you consider the assumption that lay behind it. And the fact that thanks to settler colonialism, enslavement, capitalism and globalisation there are actually very few countries I believe where you can't get hold of most items manufactured in or imported from the Global North. Countries in the midst of warfare are the obvious exception.
When I lived in France, the question was often about the type of houses we lived in, and occasionally certain basic foods. But the first time I remember being asked the question in the UK, I was working with a group of young colleagues (I was one of the oldest at 26). They were intrigued by the fact that I had been living in Barbados, as many of them had never come across people from outside the small area where they lived. Naturally, they were curious - no issue there - and they drew on their memories of media portrayals of the Caribbean and other islands for what they thought life might be like. Given what you know about poor representation, you can imagine how little information they had, which wasn't really their fault, I suppose.
Floored by an Assumption
One of the first questions that came up was whether we had access to planes, to air travel, in Barbados. That seemed an odd question given that I was sitting in the same office and that travel by ship was no longer the norm. And admittedly I was probably the wrong person to ask having first stepped on a plane at the age of five. My childhood was full of air travel to different parts of the Caribbean to visit relatives and family friends, and there were always people from different countries in our home. During my childhood and young adulthood, the Caribbean had two airlines of its own, plus access to all the European and American ones that came to the region.
Honestly, I just took air travel for granted, which is probably why the question threw me.
But there was worse to come.
