Hello {{ first name | friends}},
I was having a conversation with a friend a while ago and they said: “I thought that because most people here were Global Majority I wouldn’t experience racism”. My somewhat jaded and cynical reply was: “Racism is everywhere.”
I should know. I live in Barbados, a former British colony that has been independent since 1966 and a republic since 2021. As a colony, it was a central part of the trade in enslaved people. It had a society built on a typical plantocracy pillar with white-identifying people at the top and the others below them in descending order of skin shade, with the darkest skin at the bottom. And while it’s not quite as stratified as that today, you don’t escape the effects of centuries of individual, cultural and societal programming in just a few decades. You just don’t.
Colonial programming - it's everywhere you look
That programming is evident in experiences like: