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Re: Why Are Jamaicans Racist Towards Black People And African Culture?
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 Serge F. Kovaleski, In Jamaica, Shades of an Identity Crisis)
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.
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