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Re: Why Are Jamaicans Racist Towards Black People And African Culture?
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 Hispano-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.
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