I’M COMMITTED TO being an antiracist. It’s something I choose to do. So I’m looking critically at racism in myself.

Because I live on the Caribbean island of Saba, I’ve been researching the history of the people who first lived here and what happened to them.

Land acknowledgment is a custom dating back centuries. It’s a powerful way of showing respect to the Indigenous Peoples of the land on which we work and live, a simple way of telling the truth and resisting the erasure of Indigenous histories and working towards honoring different cultures and rituals.

The Ciboney people (1100 BC) from Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic and the Arawak people (800 BC) from South America were the first people to live on Saba.

Wikipedia states that large sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean imported slaves for Africa to work on the plantations.

I was astounded at the casual way words are used about the oppression of black people. They were not ’imported’;
they were kidnapped, violently treated, sold into slavery, and forced to work on these plantations under deplorable, inhuman conditions!

It’s colonialism – domination and exploitation of a people or area by a foreign state or nation to maintain a nation’s political and economic control.

It’s white supremacy – the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups, particularly Black or Jewish people.

The words we use should tell the truth.

We must each hold ourselves accountable for our thoughts, words and actions.

Thanks – Michael (he, him)

Please share this Daily.
I think this also matters – Your Choice – Respect or Contempt.

#715 (photo – Slave Memorial in Zanzibar)