Mixed Race Studies

5 Nations That Imported Europeans to Whiten The Population

Atlanta Black Star
2014-03-10

Andre Moore

After the trans-Atlantic slave trade was officially abolished toward the end of the 19th century, many whites felt threatened and feared free Blacks would become a menacing element in society. The elites spent a great dealing of time mulling over how best to solve the so-called Negro problem. A popular solution that emerged during this period was the ideology of racial whitening or “whitening.”

Supporters of the “whitening” ideology believed that if a “superior” white population was encouraged to mix with an “inferior” Black population, Blacks would advance culturally, genetically or even disappear totally, within several generations. Some also believed that an influx of immigrants from Europe would be necessary to successfully carry out the process.

Although both ideologies were driven by racism and White supremacy, whitening was in contrast to some countries that opted for segregation rather than miscegenation, ultimately outlawing the mixing of the races. This, however, was just a different means to the same end as these nations also imported more Europeans while slaughtering and oppressing the Black population.

Here are 5 of the several counties that adopted a whitening policy and what happened as a result…

Read the entire article here.

Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: Race, Nation and Beauty Competitions, 1929–70

Manchester University Press
October 2013
192 pages
216 x 138 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7190-8867-4

Rochelle Rowe
University of Exeter

Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence, Imagining Caribbean Womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. It traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean from 1929 to 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation.

The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultured, modern beauty. Modern Caribbean femininity was intended to be politically functional but also commercially viable and subtly eroticised. The lively discussion surrounding beauty competitions, examined in this book, reveals that femininity was used to shape ideas about Caribbean modernity, citizenship, and political and economic freedom. This cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions will be of value to scholarship on beauty, Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, ‘race’ and racism studies and studies of the body.

Contents

• Introduction: Caribbean beauty competitions in context
• 1. The early ‘Miss Jamaica’ competition: cultural revolution and feminist voices, 1929–1950
• 2. Cleaning up carnival: race, culture and power in the Trinidad ‘Carnival Queen’ beauty competition, 1946–1959
• 3. Parading the ‘crème de la crème’: constructing the contest in Barbados, 1958–1966
• 4. Fashioning ‘Ebony Cinderellas’ and brown icons: Jamaican beauty competitions and the myth of racial democracy, 1955–1964
• 5. ‘Colonisation in reverse’: Claudia Jones, the West Indian Gazette and the ‘Carnival Queen’ contest in London, 1959–1964
• Afterword: a Grenadian ‘Miss World’, 1970
• Bibliography
• Index

Extended Families: Mixed-Race Children and Scottish Experience, 1770-1820

international journal of scottish literature
ISSN: 1751-2808
ISSUE FOUR, SPRING/SUMMER 2008

Daniel A. Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

Daniel Livesay was winner of the 2007 North American Conference on British Studies Prize, Dissertation Year Fellowship for “Imagining Difference: Mixed-Race Britons and Racial Ideology in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic.”

Three years prior to the ending of the slave trade, Jamaica’s richest and most influential merchant mused on the possible consequences of abolition. Writing to his friend George Hibbert in January of 1804, Simon Taylor offered a stark vision of the British imperial economy without slave importation, echoing scores of other pro-slavery writers who preached the financial doom and gloom of a post-abolitionist society.  Economics, however, were not the only thing on either man’s mind. Hibbert, in a previous letter, had asked Taylor for his thoughts on the future of Jamaica’s white population if fresh supplies of slaves came to a halt.  He wondered if the colony’s whites could farm sugar themselves and if such back-breaking labour would further stifle the increase of the island’s already meager European population. Throwing off his earlier pessimism, Taylor replied with high hopes for the growth of Jamaica’s white residents.  His optimism sprung from a phenomenon he had watched develop over the last two generations: ‘When I returned from England in the year 1760 there were only three Quadroon Women in the Town of Kingston. There are now three hundred, and more of the decent Class of them never will have any commerce with their own Colour, but only with White People. Their progeny is growing whiter and whiter every remove […] from thence a White Generation will come’.  Taylor had seen all other attempts to increase the white population fail and he believed that this process of ‘washing the Blackamoor White’ to be the only way to build an effective racial hedge against an overwhelming black majority on the island.

If miscegenation was the answer to Jamaica’s problems, Simon Taylor could claim to be doing his part for the movement. Indeed, he had earned a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic for his multiracial family. Not long after arriving in Jamaica with her husband, the new Lieutenant-Governor of the island, Lady Maria Nugent visited Simon Taylor in his Golden Grove estate. She commented in her diary that Taylor was ‘an old bachelor’ who ‘detests the society of women’, but she seemed determined to win him over.  However, she could not help but register surprise after an evening at Taylor’s estate when ‘[a] little mulatto girl was sent into the drawing-room to amuse [her]’. Recording the event in her diary, she noted, ‘Mr. T[aylor] appeared very anxious for me to dismiss her, and in the evening, the housekeeper told me she was his own daughter, and that he had a numerous family, some almost on every one of his estates’.  Taylor’s sexual activities with slaves and women of colour were not unusual, nor was his attempt to hide them from European eyes.  Like many white West Indians at the time, Taylor may have given some favours to his children of colour, but he did not treat them as full members of his family.

In contrast to Simon Taylor’s inattention to his mixed-race children, John Tailyour, Simon’s cousin, made a significant attempt to provide for his offspring of colour.  Tailyour originated from Montrose, near Simon’s ancestral home in Borrowfield, and made several unsuccessful attempts at business in the colonies. Forced to abandon his tobacco trade in Virginia at the outbreak of the American Revolution, he returned to North America in 1781, but failed to establish himself in New York’s dry-goods market. Rather than return home to Scotland once again, Tailyour ventured to Jamaica at his cousin Simon’s invitation, where he operated as a merchant from 1783 to 1792. With very few white women on the island from which to choose, Tailyour took up residence with an enslaved woman from his cousin’s plantation. The couple eventually had four children together before Tailyour finally decided to return to Scotland in 1792. Rather than leave his children in Jamaica, however, John Tailyour sent at least three of them to Britain for their education and to be brought up in a trade. His conduct toward his mixed-race offspring stands in sharp relief with that of his cousin’s and reveals the complicated attitudes that whites had toward these children…

Read the entire article here.

Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present by Sara Salih (review)

Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Volume 25, Number 4, Summer 2013
pages 777-780
DOI: 10.1353/ecf.2013.0025

Nicole N. Aljoe, Assistant Professor of English
Northeastern University

Sarah Salih, Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present (London, New York: Routledge, 2010)

Sara Salih offers a welcome and rigorous analysis of the relationships among the development of the law, notions of subjectivity, and discourses of race and sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and Jamaica. This book makes a productive contribution to ongoing critical conversations about the complexity and nuance of race in the British past by responding explicitly to David Scott’s suggestion that we consider more carefully the stories we assume we know, particularly about slavery. One such story concerns the mulatto and his/her tragic outsiderness as exemplified in the trope of “tragic mulatto.” Numerous scholars, including Werner Sollors and Eve Raimon, have explored this trope within the context of the United States, and Salih’s study builds on this work and extends it by considering representations of mixed-race individuals in the British-Jamaican context. In addition, by making clear the different ways in which the mulatto was treated and represented outside of the US context—for example, noting that neither interracial sex nor marriage were ever outlawed in Jamaica or England, unlike in the United States—Salih’s study offers a corrective to uncritical conflation of the distinct cultures of enslavement. Most specifically, her study reveals the ways in which, in the British-West Indian context, although mulattos were frequently figured as being inside particular aspects of national and subject-constituting discourses—mulattos could “pass” for white, and in the eighteenth century they could legally petition to be designated as white—they were simultaneously and persistently represented as isolated and “firmly outside the heterorepronormative narrative paradigm” (125).

This book is invested in illustrating the “processes of normalization and the consolidation of norms” about the legal status, nature, and character of mixed race individuals in Jamaica and England from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century by considering cultural representations alongside juridical and colonial documents. Salih argues that all of these texts—the fiction, nonfiction, legal writings, and judicial statutes—contribute dialogically to creating and sustaining societal norms and subjects. The study traces the ways in which these texts inform the legal identity “mulatto” that eventually comes to be defined and understood as a cultural/political identity. In tracing this movement, she is “less interested in ‘race’ as interiority and affect than in the specific ways in which it is produced and enacted legally and performatively” (123–24). And although the study scrupulously sets itself against those studies of race in the eighteenth century that deal with questions and issues of identity, it is best seen as a complement to these other studies. In particular, by attending to the ways in which discussions of the mulatto were also discussions of interracial sex, Salih illuminates the impact of sexuality on notions of race.

Salih begins her close readings with Marly, an 1828 novel about a Jamaican slave plantation. After providing an intriguing reading of the relationship between fiction, the law, and power grounded in the novel’s initial image of a slave driver exchanging his whip for a pen (56), Salih outlines how the novel, by offering fiction as well as history in its description of life on the plantation, contributes to the creation of societal norms. In so doing, according to Salih, novels can reveal “narrative investment in the disciplining of subjects” (57). For example, society wants mixedrace women to disappear, and hence they are novelistically relegated to the background. However, the novel Marly also reveals the complicated positioning of mixed-race individuals. Although women are relegated to the background, a mixed-race man is foregrounded in a chapter in which he offers a long harangue on how similar brown or mixed-race people are to whites and therefore should be allowed more freedoms in Jamaica (68–70). Although the brown man gets to proclaim his proximity to whiteness, at the end of the novel he too is isolated like the brown women, Salih argues, and is placed in a non-reproductive category.

The study then moves to a reading of The Woman of Colour (1808), edited by Lyndon Dominique for Broadview Press (2007). Salih addresses how in the novel, despite a positive representation of Olivia (its interracial character), she too is isolated and unmarried…

Capturing the Spirit World on Film: Albert Chong’s artistic recipe blends Jamaica, Catholicism, Santeria and America in an eclectic artistic stew

The Los Angeles Times
1993-10-10

Leah Ollman

When photographer and installation artist Albert Chong was about 6 years old, his parents bought a new house in Kingston, Jamaica.

Chong’s father invited a Catholic priest to bless the house by sprinkling holy water throughout. A few days later, his father brought in another priest, this time a black Obeahman, or shaman, who sacrificed two roosters and scattered their blood not far from where the holy water had just dried.

“My father thought he should cover all his bases,” Chong recalls, laughing. “We were Catholics, really. But when things would start getting really bad and you’d see forces that were being worked against you that the regular, established Catholic religion couldn’t help you with—you couldn’t go to your local priest and say, hey, somebody has worked some wicked magic on me. Yet it’s a real thing.”

Like his father, Chong has a lot of bases to cover. His life gives new meaning to the overused term multicultural. Half-Chinese, half-Jamaican Chong was raised Catholic but has followed Rastafarianism, the Ethiopian-inspired political/religious movement, and Santeria, the syncretic religion forged by African slaves living under Christian domination in the Caribbean. He is married to Frances Charteris, an artist from England, and their two children, Ayinde and Chinwe, are, he says with pride and just a touch of resignation, very American…

Read the entire article here.

Violent Liaisons: Historical Crossings and the Negotiation of Sex, Sexuality, and Race in The Book of Night Women and The True History of Paradise

small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism
Volume 16,Number 2, 38 (2012)
pages 43-59
DOI: 10.1215/07990537-1665668

Sam Vásquez, Associate Professor of English
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Increased criticism and representations of violence in contemporary Jamaica often account for these tensions by citing poverty or gang and political rivalries in the post-independence era. However, both Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (2009) and Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (1999) take these explorations a step further, specifically examining women’s responses to violence and reminding readers that present-day sexual violence creates conditions of entrapment, hostility, and lawlessness reminiscent of the barbarities of slavery and colonialism. In so doing, the authors highlight the ways historical gender and racial stereotypes inform contemporary understandings of Caribbean gender and sexuality. Anchoring this discussion in recent theories about sex and sexuality and specifically examining mixed-race and white Caribbean women, Sam Vásquez argues that both authors use neo–slave narrative tropes to simultaneously problematize acts of violence against these individuals and demonstrate how women engaged and even utilized limiting colonial paradigms.

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial Identity: An International Perspective

Palgrave Macmillan
September 2000
186 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-312-23219-1
ISBN10: 0-312-23219-5

Mark Christian, Professor of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Multiracial Identity provides an accessible account of the social construction of racialized groups. Using both primary (in-depth interviews) and secondary data, four nations are examined: the UK, US, South Africa, and Jamaica. The author discusses how little attention has been traditionally been given to theorizing multiracial identity in the context of white supremacist thought and practice.

Table of Contents

• Foreword–Diedre L. Badejo
• Part I: Theorizing Multiracial Identity
  • Toward a Definition of Identity
  • Multiracial Identity as a Term in the 1990s
  • Historical Theories of ‘Mixed Race’ Persons
  • Contemporary US Theories in Multiracial Identity
  • Contemporary UK Theories in Multiracial Identity
• Part II: Speaking forThemselves (I)
  • How the Liverpool, UK Respondents Define Themselves in a Racial Sense
  • Parental Influence in the Construction of a Racialized Identity
• Part III: Speaking for Themselves (II) Shades of Blackness
  • Is Wanting to Change One’s Physical Appearance an Issue?
• Part IV: South Africa and Jamaica: “Other” Multiracial Case Studies
  • South Africa and the Social Construction of “Coloureds”
  • Jamaica in Context
• Part V: Assessing Multiracial Identity White Supremacy and Multiracial Identity
  • Social Status and Multiracial Identity
  • Nomenclature Default and Multiracial Terminology

Racialisation in Jamaica

Mapping Global Racisms Project (2012- )
University of Leeds
Working Papers
13 pages

Benjamin Joyce

Introduction

The processes of racialisation in Jamaica reflect a complex and sustained ideological grounding upon colonial logics which actively repress perceived racial otherness. Despite the insistence of governmental institutions and the projected image of a raceless nation, contemporary Jamaica is still subject to overt and entrenched forms of racist discourse. The island’s racial climate must be seen within the context of a potent and active colonial legacy, through which social values of worth and economic racialisation are fundamentally determined by skin colour. The class structure of Jamaica is inexorably tied to racialisation, as such it enduringly pervades and dictates all elements of Jamaican life. Specific studies of Jamaican racialisation have been limited, in conjunction with a government unwilling to explore it’s domestic race problem, the operation of a racial machine is left unchecked and in no small way contributes to Jamaica’s stagnant economy and warring society. It is the purpose of this essay to explore the racialisation of post-colonial Jamaica and to expose how ‘the social regulation of race’1, enduringly limits its Afro-Caribbean population in economy, society and to a certain extent politics. This focus shall not be at the expense of other races, however, black Jamaicans are at a nexus of racial judgement.

The perceived identity of Jamaica

The picture painted by Jamaican governmental institutions is one of harmony in an ideologically raceless society. This post-raciality was not sought through any definitive steps to absolving racial difference, rather, the government conscripted the concealment (not removal) of racial boundaries; this is reflected in Jamaica’s national Motto — “Out of Many, One People.” The desire to strip the nation of a globally perceived race does not reflect the unification of race through assimilation, rather, it serves to strengthen the divide between Jamaican ‘races.’ Despite this, the racial diversity of the island has been seen to reference an environment of equality, multiculturalism and diversity. Wardle describes a ‘globalized image of a racial consciousness which defines a land of free-choice.’ This image of Jamaica, must be seen in the context of a government dependent upon its tourist industry which ‘has become, in recent years, the most vital component of the Jamaican economy.’  The instability of contemporary Jamaica’s economy is attributable to the decaying foundations of a plantation economy which favours white Jamaicans over blacks. As a result of this selective presentation, there is little external recognition of race hate within Jamaica. More alarmingly and certainly symptomatic of the true nature of Jamaican race, there is little internal administrative recognition of domestic racism.

The general assessment of Jamaica is inexorably linked to the globalized identity of (predominantly black) Jamaican citizens. Hence, a prevalent global expectation to be quintessentially Jamaican; and to conform to a black dreddie phenotype exists. Whilst global expectations such as these seem trivial, in a country whose ‘people acquired globalized world views,’ this expectation is imported and takes hold in Jamaica…

…The racial identity of Jamaica

The truth of perceived Jamaican races is far more diverse than the homogenous black perception of the west, rather presents ‘a situation of considerable racial ideological complexity.’ Miller suggests ‘Racial groups intermarried to produce Jamaican society from a varying mixture of Europeans, Jews, Africans, Indians and Chinese races.’ However, these interactions were mediated through a colonial and caste system of judgement. Needless to say, the relationship between the first white and African inhabitants was one of white superiority. The arrival of east Indians and the shadist caste-system under which their society is structured, compounded the degradation of African-Jamaicans; widening the void between blacks and other Jamaican ethnicities. This process of racialisation seems to conform to Goldberg’s relational methodology which suggests; ’colonial outlooks, interests, dispositions and arrangements set the… frameworks for… engaging and distancing, exploiting and governing, admitting and administering those conceived as racially distinct and different- and relatedly for elevating and privileging those deemed racially to belong to the dominant. Certainly, the importation of an Indian caste system had the potential to disrupt such a reading, but their subservience to whites and denigration to blacks, meant that this system correlated neatlywith sustained colonial philosophies.

The colour-based classification of race, which characterizes racial relations throughout the Caribbean has evolved into a number of categories which oversimplify the genesis of racial distinction in the country; White, Brown and Black. These divisions are seen to correlate with ’the socioeconomic categories of upper class, middle class and working class.’ ‘This colour scheme characterizes the social, economic and political institutions in Jamaica today, even though over time the colonial prejudices have been hidden behind education and social class.’ Again, Miller’s lexical choice is a significant one; hidden, the effects of governmental concealment are pervasive. There have been superficial social reforms, but increasing poverty and subsequent criminality; leads to the increase and fortification of a rich-poor divide…

…Jamaican racialisation has established a number of modes of racist interactions. Firstly, racialisation from above; the imposition of racial categories and therefore judgements of worth, by a light skinned minority upon majority populus. Secondly, the notion of associational race, a majoritive judgement whereby a persons social status and resultant associations define their racial identity. And finally, self- racialisation; the individual’s ascription to ‘characteristics’ defining ethnicity and their personal judgements of them.

Racialisation from above, is arguably the basis for the other two modes, in that it is the mode which establishes a racial hierarchy. However, of increasing significance in contemporary Jamaica are the latter two. Associational race in particular factors in the interactions between ‘Brown’ Jamaicans and blacks.

The illegitimate offspring of absentee plantation owners were often left in positions of authority, with benefits of such status; hence, they ‘emerged as the elite class within Jamaican society after emancipation.’ Inheritance for mixed race Jamaicans, and their perceived success through associations with a white world, further enforced the dominance of fairness and perpetuated the racial alienation African-Jamaicans. Protection for the offspring of whites was written into the original colonial charters, showing that de jure and de facto racism, were literally written into the hierarchy of the island.

Alleyne alleges that ‘in Jamaica, “brown”… has become the more active pole of opposition and antithesis to black.’ This rift was reflected in Marcus Garvey’s judgements of ‘mulattoes.’ He stated, ‘they [mixed-race Jamaicans] train themselves to believe that in the slightest shade the coloured man is above the black man and so it runs up to white.’

This view typifies the racially fractured infrastructure of thought which reacts to oppression by supporting the stratification of race. Contrary to Garvey’s assertion, mixed race citizens are not training themselves, rather are subject to a pervasive and prevailing system which favours fair skin. Consequently, Jamaican mixed race citizens (in accordance with global precedent) suffer a state of suspension between poles, denied full integration to either. Considering the breadth of Jamaican mixed-race heritage; this reflects the implosive depreciation of individual race.

However, the same notion of associational race does not factor in the final mode of racist interaction; self-racialisation. Both of the other modes through essentially force blacks to apologise for their racial otherness. Hence, the need for self-affirmation emerges, an identification with and celebration of racial allegiances. That being said, alongside this positive affirmation there lies ‘a pernicious internalized form of racism which involves prejudice, stereotyping and perceptions of beauty among members of the same racial group, whereby light skin is more highly valued that dark skin.’…

Read the entire paper here.

Children of Empire: The Fate of Mixed-Race Individuals in British India, the Caribbean, and the Early American Republic

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 105: North American Conference on British Studies
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom III (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

Papers

• “‘We Are an Indian People’: Mixed-Race Peoples on Virginia’s Eastern Shore” / Royce Gildersleeve, George Mason University
• “Global Citizens: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in the Caribbean, Britain, and India” / Daniel Livesay, Drury University
• “George Washington’s Anglo-Indian Relatives” / Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

Comment: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

This session will examine the fate of mixed-race individuals in selected places in the English-speaking world from approximately 1775 through 1820. Royce Gildersleeve’s paper focuses on the Virginia government’s efforts to dispossess a group of Gingaskin Indians from their traditional lands on the Eastern Shore. Over time, intermarriage between free black people and the native population had altered the appearance of tribal members. By 1812, the Virginia government maintained that the community was no longer inhabited by Indians but by African Americans who did not deserve title to the land. Daniel Livesay investigates the stories of mixed-race individuals from Jamaica who moved first to Britain and then to British India in an effort to improve their social and economic status. Focusing on the story of three families of color, Livesay explores how British imperialism allowed mixed-race individuals to forge new identities in a new place, but also shows how the hardening of racial ideologies ultimately foreclosed some of the most promising avenues of advancement. Rosemarie Zagarri explores the effects of a migration that proceeded in the opposite direction. Thomas Law, a high-ranking British East India Company official, brought his three illegitimate children, born of an Indian concubine, first to England and then to the young United States. Law hoped that this move would allow his Eurasian children to escape India’s increasingly hostile environment for mixed-race children and secure his sons’ future in what he believed to be a land of unbounded opportunity. Kathleen Wilson, an eminent scholar of the “new” imperial history of Britain, is an ideal commentator for the session.

By focusing on a small group of individuals from a wide geographic expanse, scholars on this panel will directly address the 2013 convention theme, “Lives, Places, Stories.” By concentrating on mixed-race peoples, the panel will complicate our understanding of racial regimes that have been seen in terms of binary oppositions, such black and white, native American and white, Anglo and Indian. The panel will also provide an opportunity for the study of comparative imperialisms. Despite their common British origins, British India, the Caribbean, and the early American republic are seldom examined with reference to one another. Given the relatively flexible character of racial ideology in the mid-eighteenth century, mixed-race individuals from these places could often exploit the ambiguities of their descent to their own advantage. Yet in both British India and the early American republic, the rise of scientific forms of racial ideology in the early nineteenth century diminished their room to maneuver. White Europeans and Americans came to define “race” less in terms of a society’s degree of civilization and economic affluence and more in terms of its members’ skin color and physical characteristics. Nonetheless, the application of these ideas was highly contextual and differed from place to place. By juxtaposing the fate of individuals of mixed-race origins in a variety of English-speaking contexts, this panel will provide new insights into the development of racial identity and the ways in which different imperial regimes imposed shared racial ideologies.

For more information, click here.

Peter Tosh did Not Joke with Words

The Jamaica Gleaner
Jamaica, West Indies
2012-10-14

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

Shortly after Peter Tosh made his last concert appearance in December 1983, I did an interview with him that was published in Pulse magazine. One of his most powerful declarations was this: “… me don’t run joke wid words.” Tosh was objecting to the way in which the term ‘peace treaty’ was being used so loosely. And he gave a rather irreverent sermon on the subject:

“Claudie Mashup, or weh him want to name, him came to my house once and told me about this project that they had. And dem say that dem going to call it a peace treaty. I a look fe peace. Because to me, peace should have really meant people respecting people, people loving people.

“A man becoming his brother’s keeper. A man can lef him door open an go bout him business and a next man don’t come pop it off. Is so me call peace. A man don’t have gun over the next area an a tell you say him have a border cross ya-so and you can’t come across there.

“So I mek them know me don’t run joke wid words. Every time I see the word ‘peace’, you know where I see it? In the cemetery: ‘Here lies the body of such and such. May he rest in peace.’ So how a guy waan come tell me say him a go have a peace treaty amongst the living, where all the dead rest in wha? Peace? Ah-oh.”

I don’t know if this wicked mashing up Massop’s name was a Tosh original. There are many such examples of witty word play in his lyrics. Poliomyelitis became reggaemylitis, a joyous infection that moves every muscle in the body. The words ‘system’ and ‘situation’ were cleverly transformed by the addition of a well-placed ‘h’ and ‘t’. Tosh evoked the stench of the oppressive dunghills of social injustice and moral corruption that continue to rise up everywhere in Jamaica.

In his dread lecture delivered at the so-called ‘Peace Concert’ in 1978, Tosh chanted down the excremental system: “Four hundred years an de same bucky maasa bizniz. An black inferiority, an brown superiority rule dis lickle black country here fe a long [t]imes. Well, I an I come wid Earthquake, Lightnin an Tunda to break down dese barriers of oppression an drive away transgression and rule equality between humble black people.”

GARVEY’S AFRICAN REDEMPTION

Peter Tosh was an unapologetic advocate of what Marcus Garvey called “African Redemption”. We hear this in his rousing anthem, African, from the 1977 Equal Rights album: “Don’t care where yu come from/As long as you’re a black man/You’re an African.” Not all Jamaicans would agree. Some of us don’t even want to admit that we’re black, let alone African.

In a letter to the editor published in The Gleaner on September 25, Daive Facey asks a revealing question, “Who are ‘blacks’, Ms Cooper?” He already knows the answer: “Many classified as ‘blacks’ based on external features and placed into the 90 per cent majority can easily trace their mixed lineages, and in terms of genealogy are no less Caucasian, Indian or Chinese.”

Mr Facey is quite right. Many clearly black Jamaicans routinely claim ancestors of other races who have left no visible traces of themselves on the body of their supposed relatives. And even in cases where some racial mixing is evident, the African element in the mix is always the half that is never told. Mixed-race Jamaicans are half-Indian; half-Chinese; half-Syrian; half-white. But never half-African!

It is only people of African descent in Jamaica who do not define their racial identity in terms that point to ancestral homelands. Europeans, Chinese, Syrians and Indians are all raced and placed in their very naming. Africans are ‘so-so’ black. Going against the tide, Tosh deliberately chose ‘African’ as a marker of racial identity…

Read the entire article here.