When the Rainbow Is Not Enough: Using African American Literature to Demystify Race in a Caribbean Tertiary Environment

Abstract

Teaching African American Women’s writing within a Caribbean tertiary context is rich in challenges and potentialities. The Caribbean island states were founded on the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants, forced transportation, the trauma of African slavery, and the only minimally less disruptive Indian indentureship. White supremacy, imperialism’s henchman, was an undergirding rationale for these mass worker migrations. The injustice in terms of the labour exploitation was exceeded only by the immorality of reifying the human person through race ideology, in the interest of producing acquiescent, labouring bodies. The location of racism at the foundation of the modern Caribbean has generated an unfortunate legacy — the entrenchment of racial animosity between the demographically dominant Africans and Indians, as an outgrowth of colonial divide and rule strategies. By the mid-nineteenth century, ethnicity was instituted as a “critical variable” which practically “determined one’s access to the means of production, wealth, political power and prestige” (Yelvington 1993, 1). Trinidad and Tobago’s historical background has left its contemporary population tenuously poised between a functional “rainbow” ethnic harmony and predominantly African/Indian racism, with acute attendant anxiety over ethnic and national belonging.