What is the Caribbean?

• What it is not:
  Not simply “a group of islands surrounded by the Caribbean Sea.”
  That colonial compass would erase Belize, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.
  The Caribbean is not just geography — it’s history, identity, and ideology.

• A Construct, An Invention:
  Ian Meeks and Norman Girvan argue the Caribbean is an invention, molded by the European gaze since 1492.
  The so-called “discovery” was really colonial construction — cultural erasure dressed as exploration.

• The Socio-Political Caribbean:
  Social scientists ask: In whose interest is society designed?
  Whose narrative dominates?
  Often, the Caribbean's story has been told through the lens of its colonizers — not its people.

• Economic Caribbean – A Dependent Capitalist Model:
  According to Neoliberalism (2021) and the "Washington Consensus", Caribbean economies were shaped to serve external interests.
  Ramesh Ramsaran: Structural Adjustment transferred power from local to global hands — a feature of life in the Global South.
  These are the legacies of debt, austerity, and manufactured dependency.

• Global South vs Global North:
  New language, same old hierarchies.
  The “Global South” replaces “Third World” — a more palatable term, but still denotes marginalization.

• The Problem of the Caribbean is the Problem of the Black and Brown Position
  Wherever Black or Brown bodies are found — so too is systemic exclusion.
  Not due to essence, but to constructed inferiority.

• Colonization as Psychological Violence:
  Fanon: Colonization turns man against himself.
  Du Bois: The Black soul peers through a veil, always asking: “Am I enough?”
  Morrison: We are told to strive toward whiteness — only to find we can never truly arrive.

• Depersonalization & Loss of Agency:
  Colonialism stripped humanity. The enslaved weren’t just shackled in body — but in being.
  This leads to malady: acting against our own interests.

• Afrocentricity vs Eurocentricity:
  Afrocentricity: a way of seeing.
  Eurocentricity: the only way of seeing.
  The former offers liberation. The latter demands assimilation.

• Diaspora Realities:
  Caribbean immigrants are often seen as threats cloaked in exoticism — "two sharp teeth," as you wrote.
  Their potential is feared, their labor exploited.

• Kenneth Clark’s “Dark Ghettoes”:
  Ghettoes aren’t just places — they are conditions.
  Whether in Philly or Kingston, Harlem or Port of Spain, these spaces reflect economic colonization.
  Externally: Poor housing, crime, disease.
  Internally: Apathy, self-loathing, compensatory bravado.

• Postcolonial ≠ Post-Colonization
  Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks: Black and White locked in a tragic performance — each role scripted by Empire.
  In Wretched of the Earth: Freedom is radical; it requires rupture, not reform.

• The Paradox of Independence:
  Haiti and Cuba led revolutions — and were punished for their audacity.
  Independence does not equal inclusion.

• Homi Bhabha’s Lens:
  The center is the mainstream — the dominant culture, the "norm."
  The periphery is where African spirituality, literature, and lifeways have been cast.
  In the Caribbean, this leads to self-scorn: bleaching skin, abandoning roots, ridiculing Revivalists or Rastafari.

• Advocating a position of pre-colonial victory and agency.

• Reframes the narrative of discovery with African presence before 1492.

• CLR James (a Trini) told the story of Haitian revolutionaries, but through a European framework.

• His education gave him tools, but not always the right lens.

• We question: Was this truly “history from below?”

We must not be content with being “included” in someone else’s story.
We must write our own — in our tongues, through our eyes, from our depths.
As Toni Morrison said: “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”

Let us reclaim that power.

End or Part 1.

Rev. Renaldo McKenzie is Professor of Caribbean Thought and Author of Neoliberalism.

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