Decolonizing the Caribbean mind

Now that we are on the tail end of celebrating Black history month, there is no better time to open up about the effects of white supremacy and decolonizing the minds of our people. Rihanna did us proud at the NAACP awards by speaking up for the umbrella under which all of humanity stands. Fighting the forces of oppression must rest on all of our shoulders regardless of race, gender, class or sexual orientation. The scars and displacement left by colonization emerge as a scourge on both sides – for the colonizers as well as the colonized.

As a Caribbean people, in spite of our colonial past, we occupy a position of privilege, strength and resilience. Being African descendants of enslaved people, we now can afford a narrative that is self-made, restorative and consciously fuses the best of all worlds. We are the dominant group in most of our Caribbean territories, which bears with it a great responsibility. Our lives are testament to our capacity to craft new languages, spirituality and knowledge in spite of the debilitating, dominant colonial forces that sought to annihilate us.

However, we must not fall asleep or be seduced by complacency or apathy. White supremacist forces are real. Our governance and people must be relentlessly vigilant in sifting through the motives of those who seek to re-colonize us in the most subtle ways – through social media, financial structures, or even education. What was stripped away through the power structures of the Western world will never be replaced by schools and the schooling of the Western world.

Our African indigenous wisdom was our window to the universe and into the melting pot of the African cultures stretching from the Western to the Central African coasts. Take a moment to take in the vastness of that prospect. The numerous ethnic groups, multiple historical traditions, languages and worldviews are now woefully foggy in our memories.

We are the people who came. There is something unsettling about how our best relationship to and with this land was forged on someone else’s terms. How its centuries-laden stories of exploitation, terror and domination still sit and reverberate in our consciousness as a people of colour. We existed to support European agricultural empires. No wonder our disconnect with agriculture runs so deeply. The land and our bodies, our toil existed only in service of a larger economic system aimed at dismantling ownership over self and environment. The concept of here but not here is made even more pressing in the current economic and environmental state of things in the Caribbean.

Against a backdrop of imposing international political powers, we mightily must stand. Like the people who came before us, we must eke out ways to chart our own course. Our knowledge and wisdom must continue to fuse all the impulses of the world within and outside of us. Just as our ancestors knew that their survival meant a hybridization and transformation of old and new traditions, we too must anchor ourselves in the strengths and subtleties of this process. We must foster an understanding of how we educate our people.

As a people of colour, we intrinsically know that true education lies beyond the classroom. It is in the healing of the past traumas of our enslavement; it is about kinship, community, connection to spirit and nature. Henderson (2019) makes a significant point by explaining that we are not always explicitly taught the majority of what we learn. There is learning to be taken from observing, listening, practicing, imitating, being inspired and even failing. In essence, the education of our Black race must not solely take place in the Western model of schooling.

A call that we all must heed is restoration and healing. It is sorely needed in our families, schools, communities and governments. There are lessons to be taken forward from our past, of how humanity should treat those who are being oppressed in our societies. We can see that the violence of domination can only serve to create more violence and loss of vital knowledge – spiritual/religious, educational and environmental sustainability practices – that we need to collectively move forward.

Cherith Pedersen

Clinical Mental Health Counsellor & Expressive Arts therapist

Gaia Creative Arts Counselling