A call was made for Caribbean leaders to apologize for injustices perpetrated internally against African and indigenous people, post-independence. The issue came up as regional scholars observed inaugural Reparations Week.
00:00Caribbean populations are still confronted with the legacy of colonialism and white supremacy.
00:07European colonialism and white supremacy are the same side of the same coin, yes, that's what I want to say, not different sides.
00:15It is a system of extreme violence, and as Frantz Fanon expressed it, violence in its natural state.
00:23The Caribbean was the earliest crime scene of this colonial violence in the Western Hemisphere, the trauma of which is still with us today.
00:35European colonialism was built on human trafficking and enslavement of Africans and indigenous peoples.
00:43The vast majority of the enslaved included young men, young women and children as young as six years old were made to work in the fields.
00:53The physical scars may have healed, but the mental and emotional wounds persist.
00:58Reparations offers a weight of healing of these wounds, restoring dignity and creating opportunities for communities to thrive.
01:07There are means to address systemic inequities and to invest in holistic well-being of our people.
01:14Many of the Caribbean's contemporary challenges are somehow linked to slavery.
01:19Colonialism has created a world of unequal relations between countries, where if you are born in a certain part of the world, you are condemned to a life of poverty and struggle.
01:28To overcome this, we have to think globally, addressing the continuance of empire in all its manifestations.
01:34We must think about climate change as part of any discussion on reparation.
01:37It would be Dr. Taihimbe Salandi, sociologist with the University of the West Indies, to point out that the oppression did not end with abolition.
01:48Post-independence leaders and post-independence structures have been guilty of violence against its own citizens.
01:59So in many ways, Caribbean leaders themselves owe apologies and owe reparations to their own internal citizens.
02:09And they have not yet, most of them, done and made proper efforts to dismantle systems of injustice coming from the colonial period that filter into the present.
02:22So according to a 2022 inequality report, less than 10 percent of the population in the Caribbean own more than 80 percent of the wealth.
02:33They too, he says, must own up for their injustices.
02:37Salandi is not convinced those at the forefront of reparation in the Caribbean really mean it.
02:43Governments fighting against the young people who are articulating ideas about black power,
02:50not including the history of the black power movement on the curriculum,
02:55having committees to actually weed out alternative forms of knowledge and what they termed subversive elements within the trade union movement,
03:09and even banning persons such as Kwame Ture.
03:13The presentations were made during the virtual regional youth conference on reparations.
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