By: Christiana Best-Giacomini, Ph.D.
January 27, 2026
I grew up in the Caribbean hearing debates about whether racism truly existed in places where Black people are the majority. In Grenada, Jamaica, Barbados, and across the English-speaking Caribbean, Black people lead governments, shape culture, and define national identity. Inequality was visible, but it was rarely named as racism. Instead, we spoke quietly about color, class, and who had access to land, education, and opportunity (Mohammed, 2002). Racism, we were told, was something that happened elsewhere.
It was only after leaving home that I learned how racism operates when it is embedded in institutions.
In the United States, race organizes social life in ways that were unfamiliar to me. Black people are a numerical minority, and racism functions not as background noise but as a governing force, shaping education, housing, health care, policing, and even language (Feagin, 2020; Bonilla-Silva, 2021). In academic and professional spaces, I encountered racialized assumptions that questioned my belonging and legitimacy. African American friends listened and said, simply, “Welcome to our world.” In that moment, racism shifted from theory to lived reality.
Nowhere was this contrast more striking than in learning about medical racism. In the United States, exploitation of Black bodies did not end with slavery. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study allowed Black men to suffer untreated, and Henrietta Lacks’ cells were taken without consent and used to transform modern medicine (Brawley, 1998; Washington, 2008). These were not isolated ethical failures but expressions of a belief that Black lives were less worthy of care. That belief continues to shape health outcomes today, contributing to deep mistrust of medical systems and persistent racial disparities (Hoffman et al., 2016).
Looking back, I began to see similar patterns in the Caribbean, though they are far less publicly acknowledged. Enslaved Africans across the region were subjected to medical experimentation, but post-emancipation interventions continued this logic under the guise of public health and development. From the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, Black Caribbean communities became targets of large-scale campaigns against hookworm, yaws, and malaria, often funded by colonial governments and U.S. philanthropic organizations (Farley, 2003; Hogarth, 2017). Framed as humanitarian, these programs frequently relied on experimental treatments, mass drug administration, and surveillance, with little consent or lasting investment in local health systems. Caribbean bodies were treated as sites of risk in service of global medical knowledge.
These histories echo into the present. Today, the Caribbean is once again positioned as a testing ground, this time through tourism-driven development, climate adaptation projects, and global health initiatives. Prime land is owned by foreign investors, luxury resorts rise alongside housing insecurity, and disaster aid arrives with conditions that deepen dependency. Caribbean resilience is celebrated while reparative justice remains absent, reflecting enduring patterns of global inequality rooted in colonial extraction (Rodney, 1972).
Economic inequality follows a similar pattern. In the United States, African Americans were locked out of wealth-building through policies like redlining, ensuring intergenerational advantage for white families (Rothstein, 2017). In the Caribbean, wealth was extracted through plantation economies, and land ownership remained concentrated in white and foreign hands long after emancipation (Beckford, 1972). Political independence did not dismantle economic hierarchy. The yachts, gated communities, and exclusive coastlines tell a familiar story.
Policing reveals how racism adapts to context. In the United States, law enforcement grew out of slave patrols, a legacy that persists through mass incarceration and racialized violence (Alexander, 2020). In the Caribbean, social control operated through colonial governance rather than policing a racial minority. The outcome, however, was the same: protecting economic interests over Black lives.
Leaving the Caribbean taught me that racism does not require Black absence to thrive. It can operate loudly through law and violence, or quietly through landownership, capital flows, and global power. Learning racism after leaving home forced me to hold two truths at once: that the Caribbean is a place of Black pride and political leadership, and that it remains shaped by colonial legacies that continue to determine who benefits most.
Racism is inherited, adaptive, and global. Understanding how it moves across the Black diaspora is not only necessary, it is urgent.
(Dr Christiana Best is an Associate Professor at the University of Saint Joseph, Connecticut)
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