Racism Term Analysis

We thought these people were so ill-mannered and we were so surprised by this […] We thought they were un-Christian-like; we thought they were small-minded; we thought they were like animals, a bit below human standards as we understood those standards to be. We felt superior to all these people; we thought that perhaps the English among them who behaved this way weren’t English after all, for the English were supposed to be civilized, and this behaviour was so much like that of an animal, the thing we were before the English rescued us, that maybe they weren’t from the real England […] We felt superior, for we were so much better behaved […] (Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children.)

Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all people like me seem to have learned from you is how to imprison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts? Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? You will have to accept that it is mostly your fault. Let me just show you how things looked to us. You came. You took things that were not yours, and you did not even, for appearances’ sake, ask first […] You murdered people. You imprisoned people. You robbed people. You opened your own banks and put our money in them. The accounts were in your name. The banks were in your name.

Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, it’s because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were the commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this is so strong, the experience so recent, that we can’t quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.

I then went to see a woman whose family had helped to establish the Mill Reef Club […] who was very active in getting the old library restored […] After I mentioned the library to her, the first thing she told me was that she always encouraged her girls and her girls’ children to use the library, and by her girls she meant grownup Antiguan women (not unlike me) who work in her gift shop as seamstresses and saleswomen. She said to me then what everybody in Antigua says sooner or later: The government is for sale; anybody from anywhere can come to Antigua and for a sum of money can get what he wants […] I could see the pleasure she took in pointing out to me the gutter into which a self-governing—black—Antigua had placed itself.

Once there was a scandal about stamps issued for Redonda. A lot of money was made on these stamps, but no one seems to know who got the money or where the stamps actually ended up. Where do all these stamps, in all their colourfulness, where do they come from? I mean, whose idea is it? I mean, Antigua has no stamp designer on the government payroll; there is no building that houses the dyes and the paper on which the stamps are printed; there is no Department of Printing. So who decides to print stamps celebrating the Queen of England’s birthday? Who decides to celebrate Mickey Mouse’s birthday? Who decides that stamps from this part of the world should be colourful and bright and not sedate and subdued, like, say, a stamp from Canada?