What Decolonization Means

When Michaeline Crichlow moved from her native St. Lucia to upstate New York, she had a lot to learn — and not just in the graduate program she attended at Binghamton University.

“I became a Black person not in the Caribbean, but in the United States,” said the professor and interim chair of African & African American Studies.

Race wasn’t often discussed in St. Lucia, where the vast majority of the population is Black. The rare times it was, the conversation wasn’t about Black and white, but the Indo-Caribbean peoples descended from the small number of Indian indentured servants brought to the island in the 1800s.