23 January 2014updated 28 Jun 2021 4:46am

The long roots of racial prejudice and American colonialism

Francisco Bethencourt’s book Racisms explores the blood on the leaves left behind by centuries of racial discrimination, including the enduring spectre of Guantánamo Bay.

By Joanna Bourke

Racisms: From the Crusades to the 20th Century

Francisco Bethencourt

Princeton University Press, 444pp, £27.95

It must have been some time in the 1990s when I first heard a Haitian band protesting about having been incarcerated in the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay. Translated from Haitian Creole into English, the song went something like this:

“We sold our pigs, we sold our goats
To go to Miami;
Where we landed, we were returned [to Haiti].
We sold our pigs, we sold our goats;
At Guantánamo they sent us back . . .
Guantánamo is no good, Oh.”