Tag Archives: caribbean

Factoid: Barbados Has Quite the Calendar

#Barbados celebrates an entire annual “Season of Emancipation” running from April 14 to August 23:

  • the anniversary of the Bussa’s rebellion, a major slave rebellion in 1816, April 14
  • National Heroes Day, April 28;
  • Crop Over festival, which includes May, June and the first week of August
  • Africa Day, May 25
  • Day of National Significance, which commemorates the Labour
  • Rebellion of 1937, July 26
  • Emancipation Day, August 1
  • birthday of Marcus Garvey, August 17
  • International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, August 23

 

I found this article via Global Voices, and I was very much interested in the reaction by other Jamaicans and Jamaican-Americans to the article. The article states that Afro-Caribbean people who move to the United States worry less about racism than African-American descendants of antebellum slavery, and ultimately recommends that we should “take it easy” rather than worry much about perceived racial issues. The reactions largely respond with citing the racially-charged histories of even the Black-majority states in the Caribbean (where, apparently, it’s not always the case that being raised in a comfortable Black demographic majority inoculates against skin-color biases). #Jamaica #Caribbean #race