Racial Difference

Since my arrival in Jamaica I have been swallowed up in the irreversible and hurricanic dynamic of racial qualification, the juggernaut of a history so contorted, so absurd, so banal and so cruel and wretched, that I am still reeling from the crush of the sacrifice, dimmed by the hysteria of its religion. And I am in the camp of the oppressor. That is due to the colour of my skin, my physiognomy, my social and financial status. The visibility of the accidents of my birth have caused me to lose control over my destiny. I have become mixed up within the hopeless folly of one of the most ridiculous and most horribly real features of our intellectual childhood: racism. It was inevitable. Understand me well, not the racism of overt discrimination. That too but that is not really important to me. that is merly the abscess of a deeper cause: the habit of the everyday. It is the racism that pervades the everyday, that penetrates the smallest gestures and positionings, that looms in the simple awareness of difference, whereby normal neutral behaviour becomes charged by that difference.