RACISM IS A GLOBAL HUMAN PROBLEM IN TRUTH AND IN FACT, IT IS NOT A CASE OF 'WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE ONLY ONES GUILTY OF THIS.
European colonialism did a tremendous job of spreading this false way of thinking around the world, but we cannot honestly say Europeans invented racism.
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that 'racism' is a by-product of Socio-Economics more so than anything else....and that is why it is more prevalent among non-indigenous people by and large than it is among indigenous peoples (as the indigenous are generally speaking all roughly at the same socio-economic level, with much less income disparity among them.
However this is why the ones who have the most wealth and therefore power over others - tend to feel that they are superior to the ones who have the least wealth and are powerless against them, and the 'divide them among skin hue lines' WAS also a genuine by-product of chattel slavery in the Americas of African peoples....with well-documented records by Lynch and others, that 'lighter complexion half-white/mulatto slaves should be used as house slaves - and the darker pure black ones should be left as field slaves, and treat the house slaves better so they feel superior to the field slaves and help the planter to control them''.
In school, I had mulatto friends who had one white parent and one black parent - being referred to as 'red niggers' by both black AND white other students when tempers flared.
In the context of societies like Barbados, it is very RARE for a white person to go to jail, even though they are a racial minority, because they still hold most of the economic power (or have a relative who does), and anyone who denies this is a bold-faced liar.
Any poor person (and most poor people in Barbados are black - because blacks make up 95% of the population) found with even 1 unlicensed bullet or 1 marijuana cigarette - WILL be sent to jail, but if your family or you have money or powerful connections, you can be found with volumes of drugs or illegal weapons and you might at worst have your photo in the paper in handcuffs in a police car or walking into Court....but then mysteriously the evidence against you gets 'lost' and you never serve a day in jail.
That photo in the newspaper was just to give the masses of poor people the ILLUSION that Justice is being served....but for people with money and power - it rarely ever is....this is a 'money thing' not a 'race thing'.
BUT ALL CAN NOT BE BLAMED ON OTHERS TODAY:
When you hear a black person using racial slurs against other members of their own race - this is a lingering effect of slavery indeed...but who has the RESPONSIBILITY NOW to end it?
Are white people the ones to stop African American rappers from using the word 'nigger' in reference to other black people morning, noon, and night? Not to mention referring to their own black women as 'bitches and ho's. I say the black rappers are the ones who must accept their responsibility to STOP using this word ALSO...non-black people are never going to understand nor accept that this word is truly 'so hurtful and emotionally damaging and painful to all black people' - yet most black Rappers use it in every song and it's cool'.....many prominent black leaders have ALSO condemned this bad habit within the African American community and called for this word to be de-glamorized and its use ceased by black entertainers who become are role models for many black youths in the ghettos.
Getting back to my point that 'lighter skin preference racism' is not a European invention, we need only look to India, long before it was ever an English colony, and long before any white European ever set foot in India, even before any Englishman learned to read or write, it was a long-established bad cultural trait/habit in India due to the 'caste system' for the accumulation of material wealth to be equated with 'spiritual superiority' and for lighter skin hues to be considered 'prettier and more desirable' than darker skin complexions....you can go to India today and find 'upper caste' Indians (many of whom are light-skinned) who would not even allow a darker 'lower caste' Indian touch them because they consider it to be spiritual contamination. So we cannot honestly blame skin color-based racism in India or even in the Arab world - on white Europeans.
In 1982 a local blond-haired white Barbadian boy called Zed Layson became the FIRST white boy to enter the Garrison government-run free Secondary School, Zed did not grow up rich, and his ancestors never owned slaves (you ever met a black person with the surname Layson? No, because no Layson ever owned slaves in the history of Barbados), furthermore Zed grew up always having black and brown friends - with my brown family being one of them, he's been a brother to me all my life and a supporter of indigenous rights causes for almost 3 decades.....yet there he was, a lonely little 11 year old white boy entering an all-black school...and having to experience the ENTIRE school line up at ground level and the second floor pointing at him laughing and shouting ''HONKY-HONKY-HONKY!''....this was neither warranted nor justified, and it takes a very ignorant mentality of person to believe that because some white people enslaved their ancestors - therefore ALL white people must pay the price for it.
The SYSTEM created by racists is the enemy, NOT all members of the race from whom those individuals came from. In my time at Secondary school in Barbados, because of my brown skin and straight black hair - I was the recipient of racist slurs from both white AND black Barbadian individuals - who thought I was from India (because they thought all Amerindians were extinct and only footnotes in their history books) and called me a 'Coolie cunt', but I had far more white AND black friends who never did this, so why should I harbor any ignorant hatred for 'all white people' or 'all black people'?
At least it showed me that RACISM against people from INDIA was also a real thing, just like racism against black people and racism against white people, and racism against Oriental people, etc...as I was also in groups of whites who talked about 'send their black asses back to Africa'....and I was in groups of black people who said 'they hate every white shite'....then when I began going to Dominica and Guyana and living among Amerindian peoples since 1992, I witnessed on multiple occasions Afro Dominicans in Dominica hurling racial slurs against Kalinagos, and Kalinagos retaliating by throwing racial slurs back at the Afro Dominicans.
Likewise in Guyana, I have witnessed on multiple occasions Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese hurling racial slurs against Amerindians in the cities, calling them 'stupid Buck people', but the Amerindians are outnumbered in the cities so they just take their abuse in silence 99% of the time, and wait till they return to the safety of their tribal territories to complain about their treatment in safety, as I've seen a few bold Amerindian men who dared to speak back - get set upon and physically beaten by Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese thugs (even ones in Police and Army uniforms) in the cities.
In my adult life as a human rights activist that was volunteering at the Organization of American States/OAS since 2000, I recall the first time I visited Roraima State in Brazil, north of the Amazon river, I was invited to have dinner with the Mayor of one the towns, because I had a letter from the Brazil Embassy in Barbados that no one else had ever obtained and the Mayor and the Federal Police Chief and others found it fascinating and wanted to meet me, the letter from the then Brazil Ambassador in Barbados referred to me as an Amerindian Historian and informed the Federal Police that I had been granted permission by the Embassy of Brazil in Barbados - to enter the territory of Brazil (at ANY point along its thousands of miles of border) without any need for a VISA.
At the dinner, I noticed that he was treating his Amerindian household staff like dogs, even though the Mayor and the Police Chief were themselves not white - but were mixed-race half Amerindians, and it is very common in Latin America for mixed-race Amerindians to PRETEND their Amerindian half does not exist - and ACT as though they are Europeans, they only talk about their European ancestors and only display evidence of their European part heritage in their homes...and this 'wanna-be white' attitude is ALSO a lingering effect of Colonialism.
So I have no illusion or intention to pretend that 'only white people are guilty of racism'...I prefer to say more intelligently - IGNORANT PEOPLE ARE GUILTY OF RACISM...and every other intelligent person will know that there are ignorant people in every race on Earth. POLICE BRUTALITY is not only committed by white cops against black people, even though in the USA it is happening far more than anywhere else but if you check your facts the percentage of native Americans jailed and murdered by policemen in the USA is actually higher than the rate for black Americans, in terms of the size of each population and its percentage of incarcerations and police killings.
However that did not stop me from taking my Amerindian daughters to the BLM protest outside the USA embassy in Barbados a few weeks ago....because it's not a competition to see who suffers the most statistically, it's about INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM in colonial and Neo-Colonial societies (like the USA and Barbados, etc.) and POLICE BRUTALITY that I believe is a symptom of it...and the NEED TO END THESE KINDS OF INJUSTICES AS SWIFTLY AS POSSIBLE for the betterment of ALL humanity.
My mother and father did not raise me to hate entire races of people, not even to hate single individuals, mum and dad repeated the same advice Jesus uttered by saying...'' forgive them for they know not what they do''...my parents just added '''because they are ignorant individuals - and you can find them everywhere''
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