When the average person listens to reggae the depth and innovation of the music is often lost. Geoffe’s article goes into a side of reggae that even people who are familiar with the music’s history may be very unaware of. Often people focus on the antioppressionist themes seen in the soundscape, but the angle of the “Chinese shop” being an early building block of the reggae uprising shows how capitalism can breed innovation but be corrupted easily by cultural divides.

In Jamaica and other islands in the Caribbean, the “Chinese shop” is a staple even today, but the average person on the street has no idea of the influential role they played in the explosion of the Reggae sound. The Chinese populations in the Caribbean are often drastic minorities and are often faced with discrimination from the general populous. The discrimination stems from the idea that these stores are stealing jobs and funneling money out of the local economy. In reality, these stores and people have been and will continue to be an essential part of rural island living. These stores supply fair-priced international goods with the help of their trading connections. As we see in the video Geographies of racial capitalism, our breed of capitalism stems from the inequality of peoples to fill the roles of producers and consumers, of which the former is significantly looked down upon. In the case of the reggae soundscapes, our capitalistic points of view completely scrubbed the Jamaican-Chinese relationship, which facilitated the popularization of the music.

I live on a small island called Anguilla in the eastern Caribbean. I have seen first hand how the attitude towards the extracolonial Chinese is not gratitude but one discrimination. It is even more shocking, with the information in Geoff’s article that, that a crucial part in the Caribbean’s history lies with a people who are so low regarded within a society dependent on them.