I donāt know if people have talked about it anywhere. But as a black woman that lives in the diaspora in the west, who wears face masks (for Covid and other diseases), itās a weird dynamic when you go back to your home country or your hometown where basically nobody masks any more.
Speaking about the Caribbean here.
The weird dynamic is: people assume YOU think youāre better than them, that you are so fancy in England that you canāt stand to breathe their Black air, that you think that the local Black people are diseased.
Once I explain āoh I came from England where there are constant outbreaks and diseases, I would never want to spread anything, let alone to my own peopleā, then folks become a little less guarded. And they start dropping their speaky-spokey English and start behaving more naturally. Itās like they treating me like an upper class white lady until I speak. They behaving like i my servants, very deferential, and they resenting me for making them do this. Iām speaking mainly of like of people in the stores etc or the taxi man.
Itās not so much like that in e.g. New York. When I went there, itās mainly Black peoples and Hispanic people I see masking. And non-masking Black people of any ethnicity (African, Black American, Caribbean) didnāt treat me any type of way for being masked. They didnāt interpret my masking as if I was making a critique about THEM.
So this leads me to conclude: if you are Black wearing a mask when you go to certain āGlobal Southā black countries whose main industry is tourism, the Covid mask can become like a class signifier. It signals that āI am the paying westerner who gets paid in western money, and I can wield my USD like a cudgel, and on top of that I am wearing a maskā which is tantamount to saying āI think all you Blackies in this country STINK. Serve me anywayā šš
idk what to do except have gentle, non threatening conversations and explain my surname and where Iām from so they know itās not like that at all. But yeah itās weird and sad. The Caribbean does NOT have Healthcare infrastructure it needs at all (this is by design). So they really canāt stand any more outbreaks (nobody can but eastern Caribbean really cant)
