# The Caribbean community in Australia - unity and diversity  
The Caribbean community in Australia is diverse, comprising people from different territories in the region and of different classes, races and ethnicities, and many Caribbean people are a mixture of different racial backgrounds. While they come together as a community in Australia, there is not always a unified sense of solidarity around blackness. Michelle Wright suggests that the definition of blackness for African American and Caribbean people is tied to the experience of the Middle Passage, but that history unites some people racially and culturally while at the same time others identify with whiteness because of the shame attached to transatlantic slavery. At the same time, however, the Middle Passage experience differentiates the Caribbean community in Australia from other African diasporic communities. The different understandings within the community can be connected to coloniality in the region, manifested in slavery and its aftermath, which has led to the stratification of Caribbean societies along colour/class lines, with definitions of whiteness and blackness related to a different set of signifiers from those that exist in Australia. Although writing specifically about Jamaica, Kim Robinson-Walcott (2009, p.109) explains that definitions of whiteness and blackness in Jamaica are complicated and are not based solely on phenotype: 'In Jamaica [...] the label of colour can refer not only to blood, and not only to phenotype, but also to behaviour and, most critically, to social class and economic power'. While each Caribbean territory is distinctive, similar definitions of whiteness and blackness to those outlined above exist throughout the region (Reddock, 2014). However, in the Australian