Caribbean Civilisation by Keanu Nichols

The Danger of a Single Story

keanu_nichols — 2017-11-24 00:30:48 UTC

When people think of the Caribbean they normally think of either a tourist destination or typically Jamaica. We however have a rich history filled with a number of struggles due to Colonialism. There is so much more to the Caribbean even though it is haunted by it's Colonial past, we see so many mixing of different cultures to form new cultures where people from places such as Africa, India, China and the locals that were there from the beginning have created a new culture. In it they developed new ways of speaking, different types of food and created new types of instruments. We however are still haunted by our past and this is still present in the modern day where we still believe that people of lighter complexion are of a higher standing. We ourselves in the Caribbean are still spread out between different islands and form a divide between each other, this has slowly begun to erode but we still try to act independently of each other and this has led us to form single stories of other islands such as Barbados only being a tourist destination and Trinidad being a very crime ridden place. These islands however have other stories such as Barbados investing in tech companies such as Bitt as seen in the artifact and looking into things such as block-chain technology and Trinidad looking into tourism to diversify its economgy. This shows us that a place cannot be defined by one single aspect of it but is actually a combination of a number of different aspects that help to make it.

Brain drain

keanu_nichols — 2017-11-27 04:24:12 UTC

Brain drain is a major problem in the Caribbean society. This is due to the fact that a number of people tend to try to work abroad or study abroad and then decide to live there. It hurts the Caribbean because a portion of the highly educated are leaving their respective islands and not helping their homes develop. This may be due to many different reasons but one of them can be said that some people may believe that other countries offer a better education and in some aspects this maybe true however this is not true for all especially in a technological era where information is available at the click of a button however this also requires person to actually go out and research this information. Even in these highly developed countries they still had a foundation that they built on and from their they kept building from there, however some people may perceive other places as being better without having a proper reason for why they believe this to be so. This may stem from the fact that during the colonial era that it was a common thought that the Caribbean itself was just a servant to another country and we were punished for taking pride in ourselves. Another issue as seen in the artifact is that some people also use the funding provided by GATE to acquire and education and then travel to countries outside the Caribbean to work. This hurts the different islands in the Caribbean because the government tries to promote people to acquire and education that will help the country grow. But instead people use it to bolster themselves and leave their home countries.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20160717/news/teelucksingh-gate-cutbacks-to-stem-brain-drain

Free movement within CARICOM

keanu_nichols — 2017-11-28 03:31:18 UTC

As CARICOM is a combination of countries in the Caribbean it's aim is to promote integration and cooperation between the different islands. However due to the different islands being it's own republic's there is still a long way to go in terms of becoming a completely joint body. This can be seen in the artifact given below when Jamaican nationals were rejected entry into Trinidad, as seen in the article it pointed to the fact that with CARICOM one of it's goal is the free movement of people as seen in the next artifact however this was not observed and Jamaica advised that it's citizens complain to the CARICOM community. However Trinidad did give justification as to why it denied these people however the point of the matter is that in order for CARICOM to archive it's goal member states have to be able to allow it's fellow member's entry into the country, if there is a sense of hesitance in this regard then it makes it harder to form a sense of regionalism because it is known that islands are hesitant to accept its fellow members. If we are able to archive a sense of regionalism then it would make it easier for residents of the Caribbean to form a Caribbean identity as opposed to forming an identity related to their home country.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/UPDATE--Trinidad-outlines-reasons-for-de
http://caricom.org/movement-of-people/

Personal Reflection

keanu_nichols — 2017-11-28 03:35:19 UTC

After finishing this course I believe I have learned quite a lot from it and have become more knowledgeable about the place I was born in. Due to things such as revisionism I have begun to question things I have learned in school for example when I learned about the first people to have lived in the Caribbean and we were taught that they were called "Caribs" and "Arwaks". It was only in this course that I begun to understand that they were actually called the Tainos and Kalinagos and that the descriptions that we were given by them by the Colonial masters were quite skewed in the way that they described them. Throughout this course also some ideas that I have had have also been reinforced for example during the course when we spoke about stereotypes and how men are expected to be strong and unemotional and women are expected to be emotional and docile. These are however attributes put on by people of past generations and sometimes were quite forceful of their way of thinking, in some regards it did not allow people to be more expressive of themselves and become who they always wanted to be for example with women become engineers, they were not normally allowed to pursue this career because it was not accepted at the time. In the artifact included we see how it is typical for males to study more technical subjects and for females to study subjects like the humanities or food and nutrition. However overtime more women have attempted to go into fields such as engineering and information technology overtime. There is still a glass ceiling with respect to how much they are paid but overtime this is being broken.
http://uwispace.sta.uwi.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2139/6339/Jeanette%20Morris3.pdf?sequence=1
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20161112/editorial/the-glass-ceiling

Words Cited

keanu_nichols — 2017-11-30 00:38:59 UTC

Coindesk. Bitt Launches Barbados Dollar on Blockchain, Calls for Bitcoin Unity. 24 February 2017. 20 November 2017. <https://www.coindesk.com/bitt-launches-barbados-dollar-on-the-blockchain-calls-for-bitcoin-unity/>

Trinidad Express Newspapers. Teelucksingh: GATE cutbacks to stem brain drain*

. 17 July 2011. 21 November 2017 <http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20160717/news/teelucksingh-gate-cutbacks-to-stem-brain-drain>.

Jamaica Observer. Teelucksingh: UPDATE: Trinidad outlines reasons for denying Jamaicans entry to country. 02 April 2016. 22 November 2017 <http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/UPDATE--Trinidad-outlines-reasons-for-denying-Jamaicans-entry-into-country>.

CARICOM. Movement of People. Accessed 22 Novemeber 2017. <http://caricom.org/movement-of-people/>

Jeanette Morris. "Gender Stereotyping" Accessed 22 November 2017.<http://uwispace.sta.uwi.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2139/6339/Jeanette%20Morris3.pdf?sequence=1>.

Trinidad Express Newspapers. The glass ceiling

. 12 November 2016. 22 November 2017 <http://www.trinidadexpress.com/20161112/editorial/the-glass-ceiling>.

Images Used:
Bulace Magazine. Destination Highlight: Trinidad Tobago 02 August 2016. Accessed 19 November 2017.
http://www.bulacemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Trinidad-and-beach.jpg