BLACK LIVES MATTER AND CONFRONTING POWER IN THE CARIBBEAN
Tags: Gender Equality, Writing, Racism, BlackLivesMatter, Perspective

George Floyd was executed in the streets of Minneapolis. Young women and men throughout the state and country protested, under the banner “Black Lives Matter.” They braved the pandemic of COVID-19 to resist a more historical, institutionally set, and barbaric pandemic of racism. Black people suffer disproportionately from police violence. In the US, Black people are three times as likely to be killed by the police than white people. The 2018 murder of twenty-six-year-old St. Lucian, Botham Shem Jean, in his own home by an off-duty police officer served as a stark reminder to Caribbean people that tragedy in the United States might mean death while eating ice cream in your apartment living room.

Globally, youth responded to the killing of George Floyd in marches and mobilisations of solidarity to speak out against racism and police violence against Black people. In the Caribbean, the protests not only demanded dignity for the lives of Black people but also justice for the lives of poor Black people. While the countries in the Caribbean may be governed by sections of the Black community, social changes still have a long way to go to replace the colonial order of values which sustain discrimination and violence against non-white peoples. The stigma against “little black boys” (young Black men) makes them persistent targets of police harassment and violence, class condescension, and public shame.

Black Lives Matter is a movement based in the United States, however, the movement to defend the dignity of Black lives has always been a global struggle. Commentators that frame the issue only in black and white terms fail to include the relations of class, gender, and geography that influence the problems of people in the Black community and their politics which seeks to transform those problems in their community.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the project of the “New World” and the “West Indies” through colonies constructed an economic and social order in the interest of European colonial powers. The development of the plantation economies of the Caribbean saw the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. In the region, the labour required for plantation economies was placed squarely on the backs of enslaved Africans, after indigenous peoples and their civilisation were ravaged by the encomienda system. The labour of enslaved African men was central to the establishment of plantation economies in the early period of slavery.

Caribbean society was fundamentally the monopoly of white men and their organisation of power and people through a rigid and racist economic and social order. This set up a dynamic of competing constructs of patriarchal power in the region: the socially privileged white masculinity of a minority group and the subordinated Black masculinity of a majority group. It was in the racist imagination of colonisers that Black men were constructed as inherently violent, considered to be intellectually inferior, and rendered as dependent on the welfare of plantation owners. Notably, women’s bodies were also conscribed into this exploitative economic model, for it was their reproductive capacities that became the site of the perpetuation of the plantation economy through a culture of rape. White ideological expressions of patriarchal power and control along with Black men’s expression of authority and sexual domination doubly oppressed Black women. For this reason, struggles for dignity must draw on an imagination free of the economic logics that enabled institutional slavery and patriarchal power. It was not only economies of the Caribbean but Caribbean society itself that was constructed upon the foundations of economic exploitation and oppression. Even as political independence has transferred symbolic and material recognition to Black women and men in the Caribbean, proximity to white colonial values of respectability, social achievement, and wealth continue to shape the ways Black women and men are disciplined and excluded.

The Black Lives Matter gives us a moment, not for prophecy and political management, but a moment to point to social and economic inequalities that undermine and disadvantage Black people throughout the world. The moment also requires us to see how capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy created regimes of power and privilege that have no place in a politics of justice in the present and future.