Isms and schisms in Jamaica
Dear Editor,
When Lothan Cousins lit the race and class wick, he perhaps never thought that his assertion that Mark Golding, leader of the People’s National Party (PNP), is “a white, wealthy Jamaican nationalist, whose life transcends race”, would turn out to be a conflagration of enormous proportion.
Such utterances, though, are a telltale that many Jamaicans have not been emancipated from the trappings of colonialism. It also triggered discussions on race relations in Jamaica, a country that has as its motto “out of many one people”.
I grew up believing that to be white was to be rich, privileged, and upper class and blacks were inferior. Thank God for my social maturation and my emancipation from mental slavery.
In American Jim Crow South there was a song which said, “If you was white, you’d be alright, if you was brown, you could stick around, but as you’s black, oh brother, get back, get back.” Malcolm X countered that well when he urged respect for all human beings regardless of their colour.
Discriminatiom based on skin colour or complexion has long been an open secret in Jamaica – something that everybody knows exists but for one reason or another people cannot easily acknowledge it.
There are those in Jamaica, land we love who still use colour as a great divide and a measuring rod for beauty and class segregation. “Brownism” has become so fashionable that bleaching is now trending.
I wonder why the honourable was so dishonourable with his comments and insinuations.
Luckily we have had in this country light-skinned prime ministers and governors general, so Golding won’t feel bad that the blacks are ready to bring him to crucifixion hill. Recent speeches and national bleaching habits show that colourism is not dead, it is mutating.
It’s time for our nation, after 60 years of Independence, to grow beyond our tints and live harmoniously — after all, colour is just skin deep. Golding is offering himself to lead a country where skin colour should not deter his quest to serve and improve the lives of Jamaicans.
This colour and class issue should not be allowed to raise its ugly head ever again in post-independent Jamaica. One of my dear friends told me how marginalised he felt and how damaged his ego was when one day he and a friend decided to play hooky from school and were caught. He told me that they were in the bushes setting a caliban to catch birds when they saw a lady from the community coming from her field. When they saw her it was too late to run.
When she approached them she inquired why they were not in school. Too embarrassed to talk, neither of them answered. The woman looked at them and said, “I don’t know why a nice brown skin boy like you in the company of this black taco.” Her comment revealed her prejudice. What is ironic is that she was a very dark-skinned black woman.
I also have two friends who are fraternal twins — one brown, one black. You would be surprised to see how the family deifies the brown one and treats the other like the black sheep of the family, literally.
I grew up in a parish where there was a great geographical divide — the south and the north. When the German ship was wrecked off the Pedro Keys on its way to the Black River port, a number of German men were able to make it to land in the southern part of St Elizabeth and were able to leave their seeds behind, resulting in many light-hued offspring in that section, while the people in the north appeared to have stayed in the oven a little longer.
So, even up to the early 1970s, some of my peers in that part of the parish, who I met in high school, behaved like they were God’s special gift to creation. Their privilege was even endorsed by employers because when some of them graduated from school jobs were waiting on them in banks, bauxite companies, insurance companies, etc. They were selected for the jobs based on the colour of their skin, not because of their qualifications.
In this our 60th year of Independence it’s time to mature and such practices should not be pervasive in an ultra-modern age.
Cousins, don’t allow such idiocy to follow you on the campaign trail, strive to be a man of inclusion and sound judgement. We live in a world of plurality.
Burnett Robinson
blpprob@aol.com