Dear Editor,

The recent column, “Cheers to ‘Miss Chin’ ”, published in the Jamaica Observer on August 13 celebrating Jamaica’s multicultural heritage makes a compelling argument for greater visibility on our national stages, using the beloved “Miss Chin” as a symbol of the everyday integration that defines our island life. However, framing commercial enterprises driven by financial motivation as purely cultural acts of benevolence, while glossing over the structural inequalities that shaped who could own those storefronts, misses the deeper truth about how Jamaica was actually built.

First, to portray Miss Chin’s “Jamaicanness” as simply “feeding whoever comes, which is, when you think about it, one of the most Jamaican things” overlooks the financial motivation and the fundamental economic disparities of our history. Food shops and supermarkets require capital, loans, and property ownership. Freed black Jamaicans were systematically denied access to all three by the colonial British establishment. While formerly enslaved black people were forced into subsistence farming or low-wage agricultural labour with zero generational wealth or safety nets, other immigrant groups arrived with varying degrees of capital, resources, or legal advantages. Conflating financial motivation with Jamaican hospitality is disingenuous at best.

More importantly, the essay leans on the national motto ‘Out of many, one people’. But Jamaica is not a nation of many equal parts; it is overwhelmingly black, making up roughly 92 per cent of the population. Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that an 8 per cent minority constitutes a crowd worthy of rewriting the demographic reality. While minority groups have undeniably contributed rich threads to our history, from the components of the patty to foundational pillars of our music industry, pretending that Jamaica is an evenly distributed multicultural tapestry does a disservice to the demographic and cultural core of the nation.

Enslaved African built the economic engine that sustained every incoming group, yet the author demands we throw a celebration for everyone else, warning that “a nation that under-celebrates its own ends up not knowing itself”— an irony lost entirely on her.

History instructs us that cross-cultural borrowing is rarely symmetrical. Consider a global parallel: Korean Fried Chicken is a worldwide culinary phenomenon, heavily influenced by the Southern-style fried chicken introduced by black American servicemen stationed in South Korea during and after the Korean War. Yet you will not find cultural campaigns or columns written in the national newspaper in South Korea dedicated to thanking “Miss Brown”. Cultural exchange happens, but race and power dynamics determine who gets to build an empire from it.

All other groups came to these shores by choice, driven by financial incentive, trade, indentureship, or asylum. There was only one group who arrived in chains, and they built the very foundation upon which every subsequent wave of immigrants stood. In that sense, we are a hyphenated people, carved out by lived experiences and historical inequities. We are not a post-racial utopia in which history’s bruises dissolve into a neatly woven blanket; we are a nation forged in profound fracture.

True unity does not require us to pretend the chains never existed. It requires us to honour the weight of the bedrock before we admire the beauty of the tapestry.

Jamie Pearson

jtpearso@gmail.com