MY JAMAICAN ODYSSEY: THE OMINOUS SPECTRE OF BLACK-ON-BLACK RACISM IN JAMAICA
I want to talk about an incident that happened to me when I was getting ready to leave Jamaica a few years ago. I remember that I had lost my passport some time ago, but I still possessed some identification to demonstrate that I was the person I claimed to be. When I arrived at the Montego Bay airport, I informed the staff working there that I had lost my passport. They informed me that I would have to take the matter up with customs and immigration before I could board a flight to Toronto. When I went to go speak with the Jamaican immigration officers, I remember that there was another woman immediately before me who also had to deal with immigration concerning the loss of her passport. Incidentally, this person happened to be a young white woman who was getting ready to board a flight to New York. She was dressed very indecently, like a common prostitute, in a bikini top and tight shorts, and although she had absolutely no documentation whatsoever proving her identity, I noticed that the Jamaican immigration officers were very polite and cordial to this woman. They smiled and laughed with her, and after a few minutes, she was let go with not even so much as a reprimand.
When I stepped into the office to speak with the customs officers, the tone immediately changed from an atmosphere of jollity to that of resentment and anger. I told the immigration officers that I had lost my passport, however I did possess the necessary documentation substantiating my identity. Nonetheless, the customs officers said that my driver’s licence or health card was probably forged and that I needed to show a passport in order to board a flight. When I asked them why, they became very nasty. One of the immigration officers was especially rude and vicious. He began asking me if I smoke ganja. I asked him what that had to do with anything. He told me that it was “bizarre” that anyone should accidentally manage to lose his passport and that people rarely, if ever, lose their passports in Jamaica. I again told him that people lose their passports all the time and that I have sufficient identification corroborating my identity. He then asked me if I snorted coke. I again asked him what that had to do with anything. Nevertheless I informed him, for his own personal edification, that I do not use drugs. He then flew into a rage and began screaming at the top of his lungs that I had something to hide. All of a sudden, the Jamaican customs officers got excited and began to accuse me of being a drug mule who was smuggling cocaine into the country. One even suggested that I was a wanted criminal from Aruba and that I had been on the run from the Jamaican authorities for years. They began going through a number of pictures of wanted Jamaican criminals and began comparing my profile with theirs. One of the officers even telephoned one of his superiors, saying that he probably had a wanted fugitive from the law in his office. When I stood up to protest this gross mistreatment, the customs officers, who seemed to be very hyperactive, told me to “calm my pussy” and decided to taunt me with threats of having me locked up behind bars for a substantial period of time. I spent a total of 6 hours in that office, being grilled by these customs officers. They were extremely rude and ignorant, displaying all the nastiness and psychopathic callousness typical of the “Jamaican character”. Eventually, I was finally let go, however I was not able to leave Jamaica until sometime afterwards.
I must admit that I was angered by the entire incident. I have travelled to numerous black majority countries in the past, and I have never experienced this kind of disgraceful abuse. On that day, I was very well-behaved and impeccably dressed. The people at Jamaican customs and immigration had no right to talk to me or treat me the way they did. Moreover, I sincerely hoped that my situation was an isolated one; however I have met numerous people of African descent who have also complained of receiving similar mistreatment and anti-black racial discrimination at the hands of bigoted Jamaican government officials and people. I now know that I am not alone in my afflictions. When I think about how Jamaican customs treated the white woman before me, I am filled with an even greater anger still. I realize now that she was given preferential treatment by Jamaican customs and immigration because she happened to be, quite literally, of Western European Caucasian origin. In reality, she didn’t need any passport or identification; her white skin and European physiognomy were all the proof she needed to board a flight to New York. Thinking about it now, I realize that it is no secret that many Jamaicans have a very Eurocentric, even colonial mentality; as a matter of fact, Jamaica is a nation that, psychologically speaking at least, has never really been truly decolonized. I was the victim of Jamaican anti-black racism!
BLACK-ON-BLACK RACISM IN JAMAICA
In the foregoing account, I am cognizant of the fact that I will be accused of being overly reductionist in my treatment of the subject of black-on-black racism in Jamaica. However, by seeking to understand the fundamental origins of Jamaican black-on-black racism, I am seeking to find the most parsimonious explanation available that accounts systematically for the institutionalized anti-black racism that permeates all facets of Jamaican society. I am simply using the blade of Occam’s razor to decipher the mystery of Jamaican anti-black racism and get at the underlying truth of the matter. In this essay, I shall present a visibly essentialist account grounded in a kind of unified field theory of Jamaican-style black-on-black racism.
Certain individuals have asserted that black-on-black racism is everywhere, but I strongly disagree with this assertion. However, I do agree that black-on-black racism does exist wherever there has been a discernible socio-historical pattern of substantial European colonization and Western cultural hegemony. Let me begin by defining what black-on-black racism ultimately means: it is the political, economic, or socio-cultural exclusion or marginalization of people of African descent from receipt of equal treatment, rights, or opportunity by other people of African descent who possess the power to authorize and legitimate such an exclusion and whose sole justification for allowing such an exclusion to occur in the first place is grounded on the perceived ethno-racial characteristics of the group of black people being discriminated against. In other words, black-on-black racism is the ethno-racially predicated social marginalization of the racialized social subjectivity, as well as the subsequent dismissal of the social subjectivity from the collective consciousness of those who perpetrate instrumental racist exclusion against the arbitrarily racialized Black Other. For example, the Jamaican perpetrator of black-on-black racism will discriminate against any group of people of African descent, be they Haitians, African-Americans, Afro-Brazilians, Nigerians etc., who can be distinguished ethno-racially from an idealized, even childishly romanticized, vision of the so-called “Jamaican identity”. Even those Jamaicans who do not meet his description of what an idealized Jamaican should be, such as a darker-skinned Jamaican or a Jamaican of Chinese ancestry, can be readily excluded from equal treatment as a “true Jamaican”. What’s more, the Jamaican anti-black racist will not only seek to show preferential treatment towards his own “kind”, but will also display preferential treatment to those he deems acceptable, such as people of Western European, particularly Scandinavian, origin, because these are the people who provide the necessary instrumental apparatus of the white power structure which the racist Jamaican will use to his own advantage by exploiting said apparatus in an attempt socially exclude or marginalize those people of African, or even East Indian, descent considered less worthy of consideration.
Some people see the corruption rife amongst the political leadership in Africa as a form of black-on-black racism. However, this is corruption, not black-on-black racism. It is, at the end of the day, due to the fact that the European colonizers failed to establish solid democratic institutions within the countries they colonized, as well as develop any kind of solid infrastructure within the country itself or an adequate bourgeoisie to safeguard these institutions, that finally paved the way for dictatorship and mass economic exploitation of the common people. Nevertheless, the widespread corruption occurring in many African countries is not black-on-black racism: it is really people in power, who happen to be black, preying economically on people who have very little power or authority, who also coincidentally happen to be black. People are not being exploited on the basis of what colour their skin happens to be, whether they are light-skinned or dark-skinned, or whether they happen to be Ghanaian or Nigerian; they are being exploited because they are weak and powerless and the people in power know there will be no immediate retribution for their misdeeds. You will mention the ongoing Hutu-Tutsi conflict in central Africa. However, this is not an instance of black-on-black racism, but one of the worst examples of tribalism ever displayed of recent memory. The Hutu-Tutsi conflict finds its origins in the rigid system of tribal classification that was instrumental in reinforcing and solidifying the Belgian colonization and imperialist occupation of central Africa. As a matter of fact, before the arrival of the Belgians, the Hutu and Tutsi actually lived in a state of peaceful coexistence with one another for hundreds of years. It was the Belgian introduction of white supremacy in the form of the so-called Hamitic hypothesis and the preferential treatment given by the European colonizers to the lighter-skinned, more Caucasian-looking Tutsis, as opposed to the Hutus, that is ultimately responsible for much of the tribal rivalry within that region of the continent. However, only Jamaican society institutionalizes a generalized hatred towards all blacks, regardless of where they come from, whereas the Tutsis and Hutus are fighting amongst themselves, NOT against other blacks. Consequently, if a number of international black visitors were to travel to Rwanda today, they would not be discriminated against because of their perceived blackness or any other ethno-racial characteristics; in fact, as opposed to the current situation in Jamaica, people of European origin would probably suffer considerably more, probably xenophobic, discrimination based on their perceived reputation as colonial oppressors. This is because people in Africa are typically tribal in outlook, they define their own individual social subjectivity in terms of immediate family through patrilineal descent, extended family, clan, and then finally tribal belonging. For many African people, tribal identity takes greater precedence over national or ethno-racial identity, which are viewed and summarily dismissed as European socio-cultural impositions of very little importance, whereas those who have been thoroughly assimilated to the values of Western European culture tend to be very ethno-racial in outlook (race and ethnicity are really European inventions).
My position is not to state that black-on-black racism only exists in Jamaica. I recognize that it exists all across the Western Hemisphere. Many of the black communities of Latin America and the Caribbean, such as those within Guyana, Trinidad, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil, as well as those within the Dominican Republic also have their own problems with black self-hatred, black-on-black racism and institutionalized anti-black discrimination. In Latin America, only people of white or mestizo heritage are considered for positions of power and influence. Much black self-hatred and black-on-black racism stems from the ubiquitous form that social mobility often assumes within a social order permeated by European cultural hegemony and euphemistically known as the Hispanic/Iberian ideology of emblanquecimiento/embrancamento, or “whitening”, a mode of socially constructed ethno-racial consciousness first introduced by the European conquistadors, where people of dark skin are expected to contract marriages amongst individuals of the higher white/mulatto caste as a means of improving their own socio-economic status. It is a feat gradually accomplished from generation to generation until the highest caste, that of pure Hispanic or Portuguese white, is eventually reached through a series of ethno-racial dilutions and amalgamations with more and more Caucasoid genetic lineages.
Thus, my point is that although black-on-black racism exists in every corner of the Western Hemisphere, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, it is much more overt in Jamaica than it is elsewhere. In fact, as a supposedly black majority society, Jamaica is one of the most anti-black societies on the face of the planet; Jamaican society is one based on a white supremacist hatred that both sanctions and institutionalizes an explicit racist discrimination against people of African heritage. Jamaica, as distinct from many of the other African-American communities of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as those residing within the industrialized Western world, is a culture permeated by black-on-black racist hatred to such a degree that it is almost without parallel in the history of both Africa and the African Diaspora. Jamaica is a society so immersed in a culture of hatred, that it actually exports black-on-black racism to all four corners of the globe.
Jamaica, like most of the other societies of the Western Hemisphere, was one born from the ashes of racial genocide against indigenous peoples and African enslavement by Europeans, particularly the Spaniards and the English. However, over and beyond this, Jamaican society, initially founded on black inferiority and white superiority, has always been characterized by a black majority that quietly accepted, if not wholeheartedly psychologically internalized, the ideology of white supremacy. Not only did the black slave population rigidly adhere to the tripartite caste structure of white-mulatto-black borrowed by the English from the slave societies of the Spaniards and the Portuguese in the New World, but it can easily be shown that the vast majority of leading Jamaican blacks were militant advocates of white racial supremacy. Others believed that the only salvation for the black man in the West Indies and Latin America was through an ethno-cultural genocide that involved total assimilation to the values of Western European culture. Many of these so-called Jamaican intellectuals, such as the planter Edward Long, helped ideologically formulate what eventually became the modern doctrine of white supremacy and contributed extensively to the European system of racial classification that was so much in vogue during the period. As a matter of fact, Edward Long was the first white supremacist to clothe European notions of black inferiority in pseudo-scientific garb. Other Jamaicans, such as the poet Francis Williams, militantly advocated white supremacy and openly agreed with the notions of black inferiority being espoused in continental Europe by such Enlightenment thinkers as Hume and Kant. Francis Williams, the most famous Jamaican of the eighteenth century, made no secret of his contempt for African culture and his great racial hatred towards people of African descent. He tried to erase whatever black consciousness he possessed by ostentatiously affecting the mannerisms of the European aristocracy; thus, he powdered his face, wearing an enormous white wig and expressing himself with a plethora of Latin aphorisms he selectively culled from various classical authors. He was known to always quip that he was “a white man acting under a black skin” and his favourite saying was reputed to be “shew me a Negro, and I will shew thee a thief.” Interestingly enough, most of the leading Jamaicans who came after Francis Williams, have also traditionally been uncomfortable with blackness and more at home under the umbrella of white racial supremacy. Many of these “white-washed” Jamaican intellectuals have gone so far as to express a marked disgust with the politics of pan-Africanism and black liberation, a hatred which reached its nadir during the 1960s and 1970s, notoriously culminating in the vicious persecution of various black civil rights activists, most notably Guyanese historian and black nationalist Walter Rodney, who was eventually banned by the Jamaican authorities from re-entering the country.
As a white supremacist state whose sole function is to spread the virus of black-on-black racial hatred, Jamaica is a society that is without parallel amongst other black majority societies. For 20 years after decolonization and subsequent independence from Great Britain, Jamaicans repeatedly democratically elected governments that were dominated by Anglo-Saxon whites and light-skinned mulattoes, demonstrating a preference for white leadership and a pathological distrust of national self-determination for indigenous people, thereby systematically reinforcing Eurocentric notions of black intellectual inferiority, as well as the corresponding belief, widespread at the time, of black incapacity for self-governance and collective autonomy. Many of the people who composed the white-mulatto Jamaican intelligentsia were militantly pro-white; a significant percentage of the whites and mulattoes who dominated much of Jamaican society during the period in question also publicly expressed contempt towards notions of black civil rights, black liberation, black pride, Negritude, and Pan-Africanism. Even today, much of the Jamaican political order is still characterized by white-mulatto political and social dominance, although not as blatant as it was during the 1960s and 1970s.
In spite of the afore-mentioned, the question must still be asked: Why would any black majority repeatedly favour being ruled by a white-mulatto elite, the actual descendents of the previous British colonial order? It would seem that, through some strange quirk of history that the Jamaican people have, more than any other Caribbean people, psychologically internalized the white supremacist ideology of the previous British colonial administration. Such a history of continued white rule, enthusiastically approved of by the black majority in the post-colonial period, is without parallel in the history of the Caribbean. No other society in the Caribbean which possessed a substantial African-American community, be it Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Grenada, Haiti or any other West Indian nation, has ever produced a history so deeply grounded in black self-hatred and so celebratory of black inferiority white racial supremacy. In fact, nearly all of the post-independence leaders of the Caribbean, as opposed to the “white-washed” bourgeois elite of Jamaica, were drawn from the indigenous black or Indian populace, and many others (such as Eric Williams, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, who discerned a strong connection between the rise of modern industrial capitalism and the first few hundred years of European enslavement of Africans in the New World) were vigorous supporters of such vibrant movements as Black Power and Pan-Africanism.
The level of black self-hatred prevalent in contemporary Jamaica is without parallel in the other societies of the Caribbean. Only in Jamaica, has the traditional tripartite caste structure of white-mulatto-black, initially introduced by the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors, been preserved in its entirely as a legitimate mode of socio-economic organization. It is this underlying class structure that permeates all facets of Jamaican society, as well as the crude physical materialization of the traditional Latin American belief that social mobility is only possible by means of deliberately embracing the ultimately white supremacist ideology of emblanquecimiento/ embrancamento. However, in Jamaica, instead of whitening oneself through intermarriage with the higher castes of mulatto or white, one is expected to whiten their own individual physiognomy by bleaching the skin with a chemical substance known as hydroquinone, an organic compound that inhibits melanin production in the epidermis. It is this traditional Hispanic/Iberian ideology of whitening, coupled with the simple equation of social advancement with the possession of a corresponding European physiognomy, that is ultimately responsible for the practice of skin bleaching throughout Jamaica, which has reached epidemic, if not shocking proportions, throughout the whole of Jamaican society, and is again almost without parallel in the other black majority societies of the Caribbean . A significant majority of Jamaicans, both males and females, will do anything to bleach their skins white, even risking malignant skin cancer and the onset of other dermatological conditions, to whiten both their bodies and even their own consciousness as well. Sadly, it is still the goal of many Jamaicans to become as white in physical appearance as possible by bleaching both body and mind (by assimilating to values of Western European culture); many have been known to literally bathe themselves in hydroquinone in a desperate attempt to transform themselves into Europeans. Given the Jamaican export of black-on-black racism on an international level, this programme seems to actually be working. (See Serge F. Kovaleski’s excellent Washington Post article on the subject, In Jamaica, Shades of an Identity Crisis, at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43/152.html)
Another aspect of Jamaican black-on-black racist hatred, is the level of violent, even murderous, hatred often directed towards African people and African culture. No black majority society in the Caribbean has ever produced such a condition of almost pathological hatred towards ones African background and genesis. Many of the black leaders of such societies as Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Haiti, Martinique, Barbados, were actually noted Pan-Africanists and black nationalists who took pride in their African identity and culture. On the other hand, Jamaican society has institutionalized this “Afrophobia” to such an extent that even Jamaicans and their descendents who live abroad have been practically brainwashed by this violent hatred of all things African. According to Stella Orakwue, an investigative journalist writing for the New African:
Do not chide me for saying, for stating point blank that they [the Jamaicans] are not Africans. They are not. They say it themselves. Go and ask them. It is you who will be chided. You will be lucky to even get a grasp of an acknowledgment that they may be descended from Africans. It was not until I moved to live deep within a community of Jamaicans in north London two years ago, that I saw and heard and realised that for them "Africa", and "an African", was and is a pejorative term. To be called "African" was and is a term of abuse, it can be thrown at someone casually with the accompanying tone of dismissal. It is used angrily to denote that they are speaking of somebody they consider to be inferior. An "African" is a figure to mock.
My shock at this entrenched attitude, prevalent irrespective of whether the person talking was old, middle-aged or young has taken a couple of years to subside. But subside it has, after much thinking about the depths of stupidity that clearly exist in "the Diaspora". It became just one more thing to add to my working list headed "How Stupid Are Black People?"
The illogicality of the thought processes which lead people who have black skin and who herald originally, via parents or grandparents, from a West Indian island, to use "African" as a dirty name, a surname, a father's name, that is "African"?
And note this, it is always continental: "the African man", "that African woman", "that African shop"; and not national, as in: "he's from Ghana", "she's from Uganda", "they are Nigerians". They know nothing about what is in Africa; they only know what "Africa" is. Everywhere to them in Africa is merely "African"; but you would need an underground bunker to shelter from the voluble storm of protest that would arise were you to mistake a Jamaican for, say, somebody from Barbados or vice versa.
On top of that, there are many aspects of institutionalized Jamaican black-on-black racism that need to be taken into consideration. It must be noted that a significant percentage of Jamaicans manifest a violent hatred and a shocking rivalry towards their Caribbean neighbours, even extending towards the people of the African continent. After all, was it not the racist bigotry and petty intolerance of Jamaican nationalism that ultimately led to the dissolution of the Federation of the West Indies in 1958, the first and only attempt by the British Caribbean to form a single nation state, and initiated a series of vicious rivalries against the black peoples of the world? The Jamaican hatred of black culture and African people truly does reach such massive proportions as to be mind-boggling. Sure there have always been various rivalries between Caribbean nations, such as the infamous Haitian-Dominican rivalry. However, only Jamaica has seemingly managed to be at odds with almost every single black majority nation state and Afro-American community in existence. There is a Jamaican-Trinidadian rivalry, Jamaican-African-American rivalry, Jamaican-Guyanese rivalry, Jamaican-Haitian rivalry, Jamaican-Nigerian rivalry... the list is virtually endless. In addition, there is the mistreatment and abuse of Haitian asylum seekers on Jamaican soil, many of them being clandestinely smuggled into Jamaica and forced to work as virtual slaves for a pittance (it is no secret, as well, that many Jamaicans themselves subconsciously yearn for the time when they could feel the cracking of the English slave master’s whip across their backsides), as well as having their human rights routinely violated by the Jamaican authorities. We must also not forget to mention the constant racist discrimination and gross mistreatment frequently directed towards visitors of African descent.
Jamaican society is also characterized by other forms of hatred besides black-on-black racism, such as anti-Semitism and homophobia, of which the latter has manifested itself as a form of mass psychosis even more sickening than that occurring within the boundaries of any Middle Eastern theocracy. It has resulted in the wanton and senseless killing of gays, such as the brutal murder of gay Jamaican activist Brian Williamson, and managed to elect a mulatto Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, who has made it his public policy to spread hatred towards male homosexuals. The incidence of Jamaican-initiated black-on-black violence, especially that being perpetrated by Jamaican nationals against people of African descent in Canada, the USA, Great Britain, and the other black majority societies of the Caribbean, represent some of the highest crime rates in the world; everywhere one looks, Jamaicans are beating, raping, torturing, and even wantonly killing people of African descent in record numbers. Furthermore, another aspect concerning the institutionalized black-on-black racism of Jamaica is that no other society of the Caribbean has ever produced the same kinds of preachers of racial hatred and intolerance that Jamaica has. Only Jamaica has demonstrated itself to be a society capable of producing deeply disturbed men like Trevor William Forrest, aka Abdullah al-Faisal, an advocate for genocidal mass murder against people of East Indian descent and American nationality; he was the chief inspiration behind the 7/7 bombings in Great Britain. Only a society such as Jamaica could produce a madman like Colin Ferguson, who embarked on a senseless campaign of racially motivated killing and mayhem in the USA.
Based on the preceding information one can readily construct a statistical generalization that reflects the reality of contemporary Jamaican society as being profoundly anti-black. A statistical generalization is a scientific methodological way of producing an accurate picture of objective reality by determining the relative probability of trait possession within a given population demographic. The veracity of the generalization itself can only be determined mathematically through the use of a series of Bayesian equations derived from a multivariate statistical analysis of whatever empirical evidence is at hand, ultimately producing a rough estimation of the degree of relative probability that a certain trait is dispersed throughout a given population demographic. It is on this basis, given the preceding evidence mentioned, that a statistical generalization can be readily constructed, clearly demonstrating that Jamaica is a bizarre, anti-black society that is founded on the expression of racial hatred and bigotry towards others. It is one of the few black majority nations on earth that vigorously exports black-on-black racial hatred to all four corners of the globe. However, we must not endeavour to forget, given the high incidence of psychopathology amongst Jamaicans in the form of megalomaniacal narcissism, paranoid schizophrenia and criminal psychopathy, that the majority of Jamaicans are seriously mentally ill and many are in desperate need of psychiatric counselling. We must remember that Jamaica is a twisted, white supremacist society and that the inhabitants who live within its boundaries have been brainwashed into being Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimahs, white “black” men who have chosen to inhabit the fringes of our collective consciousness. At this point, it should become immediately obvious that the phrase “out of many, one people” does not describe Jamaica well at all, being nothing but a disgusting propagandistic falsehood preached by a delusional, even psychotic, Jamaican leadership. The phrase “ein volk, ein Reich, ein fuehrer” best describes the conditions of contemporary Jamaica. The racist mulatto/white bigots of the Jamaican parliament would do well to consider it.
