About the author
The experience of growing up as a Creole in a post-colonial protestant community in Freetown, Sierra Leone, had a huge impact on the author’s life. As a descendant of slaves from the Caribbean and the USA, who became the elite of the country, she was raised with assumptions about her superiority over the majority community.
Her upbringing, however, nurtured her curiosity about the process that transformed former slaves into masters and into believing in their inherent superiority over their African cousins.
On her return to the country of her birth in the nineteen-eighties, this curiosity was magnified by the complexity of life in multicultural London. Just as in Freetown, the contradictory idea that all men are created equal but not born equal lay at the heart of the rules that guided daily life. Whether you were male or female, ‘black’ or ‘white’, from the right social class or group, Christian or Muslim, counted for much more than ability, character and hard work.
At the age of twenty five, she began her obsessive quest to examine this worldview and where it came from. In her first unpublished book Prejudice: Myth or Reality subtitled The Power of Love she followed these rules through their stages of evolution up to the Anglo Saxon value system that governed her British protestant upbringing. Globalisation of these rules accelerated after their exportation to the United States and, from there, across the world.
She was advised by a literary agent to spend some time testing her hypothesis in the real world. As a result, she dedicated most of her late twenties and thirties to developing experimental projects to test her ideas.
How would that make you feel? is the culmination of this journey and her conclusion that the fallout from the ideology of natural inequality lies at the heart of the crisis we are facing – of the environment, global poverty, religious conflict and social breakdown.
It is a reply to the call of the hundreds of millions of people in the United States and across the world who rejected stagnation and rooted for change in November two thousand eight. It is also a call to action to these men and women to also change so that the world can evolve again.
Read and Transform 