What an exhausting week! This year has really overreached its ability to make us feel as if we are living through ‘The Hunger Games’. Confined to our homes, due to COVID-19, we have been captive audiences of the videos and visuals from the protests across the globe against systemic racism and the modern-day lynching of an unarmed black man by a police officer in America.
I found myself thinking of my mixed-race Guyanese heritage a lot this week. I also thought of what it means have privilege in our society, how systems designed and influenced by our colonial history and the structures they are supported by can marginalize peoples and most of all how important it is to share our experiences to ensure we be better understand each other. I found scores of people across my social media feeds using that platform to speak of how they felt systems oppressed right at home and also a select few asking them to focus on problems in their own country, which by extension is a form of gaslighting as it tries to invalidate the person’s experience. There is no wrong time to speak on race, just as there is no wrong time to speak about domestic violence or mental health.
