Introduction

Inequalities born out of intersectional social identities are persistent as spectres plaguing the lives of many globally, especially in terms of recognition and belonging. This chapter is a reflective evaluation of how inequalities are seated in ways of knowing presumed from ways of being. With this focus, it reflects on the troubling reality of persistent inequality, especially as it is lived at the interpersonal level. It does this through contemplating racialized ethnicity and the inequalities it manifests as real consequences of its signification. I focus my evaluation on the ontological complexity and variability of mixedness, foregrounding one group of mixed people – Douglas – as a group of individuals whose being lays bare the epistemological entanglements with inequality that stem from how their mixed racialized ethnicity finds signification. These interpretations, I argue, limit and exclude ontological variability, particularly in terms of mixedness, when such is framed through the Black/White binary as the taken-for-granted bodies/heritages/cultures that merge in the mixed.

I assert that the Dougla, a Caribbean incarnation of mixedness which finds its signification in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname, affords understanding of mixed selves as constituted by multiple inheritances that contend with and express self beyond limiting ethnoracial binaries. Therefore, Dougla existence is a disruption of the dominant framing of mixedness as presumably Black/White, and this presents an opportunity, I suggest, to rethink not only how mixedness can be imagined globally but also how the boundaries around racialized ethnicity can be subject to porosity. It is from this position that I contemplate the plausibility of cultural transformations, social formations and a decolonial approach to evaluating racialized ethnicity as real in its consequences; consequences often manifest as troubling experiences of social, political and economic inequalities.

For Douglas, in particular, these interrelated inequalities are experienced as both consequences of their characteristic liminality and the consequences of the colonial inheritance that continues to shape their lives in the contemporary. Colonial meanings of Dougla as a pejorative have not disappeared entirely, especially in terms of how the body is read for meaning and how that embodiment is used to judge and prescribe political and cultural loyalties and belonging to spaces where the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are firmly etched.