Who is Jamaica?
Published:
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Raymond Ramcharitar
http://ht.ly/gdJarAn indispensable preamble to the Jamaica Observer’s December 11 “ethnic stocking” editorial is an op-ed by Jamaican (UWI) academic, Prof Carolyn Cooper, in the NY Times on August 5.
Titled “Who is Jamaica,” it addressed the island’s independence, starting with its national motto: “Out of many, one people,” which, Cooper opined, “marginalises the nation’s black majority by asserting that the idealised face of the Jamaican nation is multiracial. In actuality, only about seven per cent of the population is mixed-race; three per cent is European, Chinese or East Indian, and 90 per cent is of African origin.”
And since “the roots of our distinctive music, religion, politics, philosophy, science, literature and language are African,” the imperative of (Afro) Jamaicans is “rejecting the homogenising myth of multicultural assimilation.”
Prof Cooper’s context is Jamaica’s insane brown-white hegemony, but the logic is familiar and once you’ve gone to UWI and read books by UWI academics, you know it’s not restricted to Jamaica. Otherwise, this is garden variety US Afrocentrism, and it is not logic the Times ordinarily endorses.
What if this reasoning were applied in the pre-civil rights US, with a population that was 90 per cent white and 10 per cent black? No President Obama, for one thing. (See Charles M Blow’s Times op-ed of December 12.) But its publication leaves us to assume it constitutes acceptable positions in Jamaica on ethnicity and entitlement, and in the metropole of the Jamaica/the Caribbean’s character. (Prof Cooper is also a Jamaica Gleaner columnist.)
With this attitude and logic as premise, it’s clear what the Observer editorial objected to was “too much Indian.” I’ll bypass the obvious, like suggesting to the Observer: “Why you ent study your own damn business, like skin bleach and the 60 per cent of Jamaicans who want the Queen back?”
And I’ll recall we’ve heard this before. Post-1996, once the UNC got in, various commentators noticed with alarm that Indians were everywhere: in UWI, in business, in Government, on state boards—too many of them. Said commentators expressed their surprise in violently ignorant ways, which were enabled by the media because of free speech. Similarly, the Jamaican equivalent of MATT has opined that the “stocking” thing is a free speech issue.
So the opinion and its justification are unremarkable. What’s remarkable is that if the editorial illustrates a regional attitude, as I believe, it’s official: there’s no difference between ethnic fascism and cultural criticism; and racial ignorance and free speech are the same.
And if distinctions do exist, many people who should know better seem eminently comfortable with both. How did this happen? Two reasons: First, UWI. Second, the politics of the Caribbean in the metropolitan academe.
In UWI, US Afrocentric nonsense thrives. Prof Cooper is UWI’s preeminent scholar of Jamaican (and “Caribbean”) culture, and from my experience, her position is UWI orthodoxy. Cultural studies at St Augustine is understood as an ethnic (Afrocentric) pursuit, despite the fact that elementary knowledge of the subject refutes this.
The same could be said of art, history, creative writing, even the social sciences. A consequence of this episteme is the diffusion of the Afrocentric consensus throughout the region, which, inter alia, imparts the confidence that an opinion like the Observer’s is not racial ignorance. But its hypocrisy is evident since the inverse doesn’t hold: to notice Afrocentric “stocking” is “racist.”
Second reason: The Caribbean as knowledge abroad. Ostensibly in the service of “tourist” concerns, there’s an ardently promoted fantasy that the Caribbean is Carnival (an African festival) and that the first world tourist “loves” Carnival.
A consequence of that fantasy is that the metropolitan observer views the Caribbean as a primitivist diversion, its people unworthy of serious attention. And the tourist’s “affection” is uncertain. An article in the NY Times on December 5, 2011 reported NY City cops, assigned to the Parkway parade (via Facebook posts), calling revellers “animals” and “savages,” echoing apparently widespread opinions on NY’s Caribbean Carnival.
This way of knowing the Caribbean became established through many Caribbean academics and émigrés who found themselves in metropolitan universities over the last generation. Many subsumed themselves in the general ethnic politics of the US and Canadian academe.
The institutional praxis is that the establishment allows ethnocentric splinter disciplines (like Caribbean Studies) to exist as proof of their commitment to “diversity,” or whatever, but considers them unimportant. Some scholars are thus allowed to pursue outlandish agendas, and sometimes not held to normal academic standards.
This is a generalisation; significant exceptions exist. But it’s true enough to generalise and say that, thanks to these academics, Caribbean history and society have become an appendix of African American history, another theatre of slavery and black oppression, erasing all other histories.
Thus the general sense of enraged ethnic entitlement and oppression of US Afrocentrism (embodied in people like Louis Farrakhan) define the metropolitan perception of the Caribbean. It then returns to the Caribbean, pervades the public sphere and UWI curricula with the imprimatur of the first world academe. Ergo, ejaculations like the Jamaica Observer editorial.
Very neat, but there’s a catch: Outside the specific social historical matrix of the US, exonerating “ethnic stocking” in one breath, and in the other, being hyper-vigilant in identifying, and violent in responding to, any insult, real or imagined, to all things African, is, by definition, racist. (See the comments on the Guardian website to my Carnival articles and Who Invited Farrakhan?)
Afrocentric hate-speech might get a pass in the US because the establishment uses it as proof of its liberality, and it does no real harm. But here, it’s dangerous, offensive ole mas, costuming self-inflicted debility and self-loathing as moral entitlement. Time to end the ole mas, and hold Afrocentrism to grown-up standards.
