Racism

[den]

Today I was accused of Racism. I discovered I was a racist when I got into the express checkout line ahead of someone, and she said: "You racist white cunt!"

So there you go. Racist.

Comments

Re: hee! thanks.

[kuangning]

It's a West Indian thing, and maybe (but not probably) even a specifically Trinidad-and-Tobago thing; our relatively brief period (roughly 1783, when the Spanish offered incentives to settle there and bring slave, to 1838, when the last attempts to keep the former slaves in service were formally given up) of slavery was succeeded by a somewhat-less-brief time of (mostly East Indian) indentured labor, from the late 1830s to 1917.

The two groups did a lot of mingling. My mother is a dougla, my father somewhat more mixed than that; I have Chinese cousins and white ones as well. It's a very interesting little country. Racial tension exists, but it's more likely to be black-vs-Indian than white-vs-anything, and it's more because of the way the two groups treated each other in settling the land after the whites had retreated. Indentured servants felt they were superior to the former slaves, while former slaves felt that they, having been there first and under harsher terms, should not have to give way to this new wave of interlopers.

It doesn't hurt, either, that whites had so brief a time of real power. Fifty-some years of slavery and seventy-odd of indentured service -- one average lifetime, and a man who was himself a slave at birth didn't have to watch his grandchildren grow up slaves too -- just doesn't breed generation upon generation of rancor the same way.

< /lecture> ;)

Re: hee! thanks.

[jim-lane.livejournal.com]

Thank you, dear lady, for insight (it was NOT a "lecture") into a piece of history of which I was sadly (and inexcusably) ignorant.