by Akala
While I am not suggesting that there is no racism in Scotland – or Germany for that matter – there is also no question that the culture and subsequent worldviews of the two countries, Scotland and England, are quite different, and the events of recent years have only served to amplify this. Despite Scotland’s bouts of amnesia regarding its role in slavery and the empire, there can be no question that the imperial nostalgia, class hatreds and cultural arrogance that feed racism are far stronger south of the border. On the other hand, Scotland also has a tiny black population and a far smaller population of non-white people generally, so we must also say that Scotland’s ‘ethnic limit’ has not really been tested in the same way England’s has.
Despite being much closer to my Jamaican family and culture, I visited both Jamaica and Scotland just once each during my childhood: Jamaica for six weeks aged seven, Scotland for ten days aged ten. Both trips had a profound impact on my life and thinking and, as hard as this may be to believe, I was very conscious of this even at the time.
In the summer of 1991, my gran took me, my older sister and our cousin Dwayne back to her village of Dunsville in Saint Ann’s, the same parish as Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley and Usain Bolt, no less. A few things stand out in my memory from the trip. During the first two weeks, I was exposed to my own staunch English nationalism. My seven-year-old self berated Jamaica to my sister for its being backwards and not having – in our gran’s village at least – indoor toilets, too many bloody mosquitoes, bus drivers that took mountain bends without regard for human life and let people bring chickens and goats on the bus and, to top it all off, they had no trains at all. I found a litany of things not to like about Jamaica; I cursed the island for being small, underdeveloped and visibly poor. My sister, by contrast, loved Jamaica from the moment we landed and she could do such an authentic Jamaican accent even at that age that nobody would believe she was really English. I was thoroughly jealous.
Yes, despite all the benefits of pan-African Saturday school and seven years of my grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s stew chickens and coconut creamed rice and peas, I was a thoroughly Westernised snob who, though poor by UK standards, looked down upon Jamaica’s ‘third world’ poverty with much disdain. Who knows, had I never taken that trip I might still feel that way today. However, as the first two weeks passed I slowly warmed to JA. I got used to the cold showers, the death-defying bus rides and to shitting outside and I actually started to enjoy myself. I hunted lizards with my cousins, I swam in the river, climbed the gullies and hills, and went on countless adventures through the dense forests. I even wiped my bum with a stinging nettle by mistake after being instructed to ‘jus use a leaf na man’. It was several days before I could sit comfortably again! My sister, cousin and I learned folk songs and games that we still remember to this day, we learned a secret language where the syllables are distorted – the children called it ‘Jamaican Gypsy’ language – and of course we perfected our ‘Jamaican’ speech, the ultimate passport to authentic blackness back then. I was carried up Dunn’s River Falls by my superhero-looking uncle Bob. I visited my great-grandfather’s grave and got a real sense of my family heritage. By the middle of the trip I had come to love Jamaica and even to think of myself as Jamaican; how impressionable young minds are, and how quickly and often they change. By the end of the six weeks I had had such a transformative time that I begged my mum to move to JA so we could continue life there.
It’s not that the trip was perfect. I saw domestic abuse and homelessness, there was a severe hurricane and Jamaica was much more dangerous back then than it is today, but the beauty of the landscape, the friendliness of the people and the immaculate pride of the children in their school uniforms or on their way to church combined with the physical and cultural freedom that I felt more than make up for the shortcomings. I’ve had a love for Jamaica and its/our culture ever since, which has been solidified by decades of reggae music and yard food, by knowledge of its history and the influence of its intellectuals, J. A. Rogers, Orlando Patterson and Marcus Garvey to name but a few.
This diaspora identity solidified in opposition to the Britishness that black people were denied, much like my uncles before me, if one generation further removed. While very few of my age group went as far as to create fake Jamaican accents for ourselves, we identified with an idealised version of the island over and above the country that we had been born into – in fact, we identified with blackness over and above being British. If England played any black team at football or cricket we would cheer for the black team; I vividly remember cheering for Cameroon at Italia 90, for example, though I’m sure this has changed for the generation younger than myself. This may seem ‘ungrateful’ to some, but given that we grew up watching black English players suffer the indignity of monkey chants and having banana skins thrown at them it’s hardly a surprising reaction.
Without being blind to its enormous challenges, one cannot deny that Jamaica is unique; one of the most brutal slave colonies in human history just over a century ago, the tiny island has exerted an unparalleled influence on popular culture relative to its size – much like Britain, though minus the imperialism – it has given us some of the greatest academics of the black diaspora, dominated athletics during the past decade, produced the founder of the largest black organisation ever, the Godfather of hip hop and the ‘Third World’s’ first superstar, this guy called Bob Marley who you may have heard of. In other perhaps surprising areas of achievement, despite still having serious problems with violence against women Jamaica is also one of only three countries on Earth where your boss is more likely to be a woman than a man, and as mentioned earlier in 2017 the country ranked eighth in the world for press freedom, thirty-two places above the UK. Whatever challenges the country still faces, it is infinitely more democratic than it was at any point during the 300 years it was ruled directly by Britain. Yet much of Britain has come to see a people whose not-too-distant ancestors British people owned as inherently violent; perhaps there is a subconscious subtext of the many slave rebellions still haunting British–Jamaican relations.
That Jamaica is one of the most violent countries in the world is of course not disputed, but what is disputed is that this violence requires no explanation beyond simple stereotypes. The simplistic representation of Caribbean men as inherently bad fathers for example is pretty ironic given that for centuries Caribbean history was shaped by men from Europe sexually exploiting indigenous and African women and leaving their ‘half breed’ children to be raised by black people or to be enslaved. The ‘yardified’ image of Jamaicans in the UK is all the more fascinating because the Jamaican middle and upper classes look upon ghetto people with a similar snobbery and because the UK is the only place in the world I have been where Jamaicans are seen so negatively. Even in the US, where the CIA-backed Jamaican drug gang known as the Shower Posse wreaked much havoc,1 the enduring stereotypes of Jamaicans are still that we are hardworking, skilled, over-educated and business savvy; you only have to ask anyone in Brooklyn or Fort Lauderdale to confirm this. It is actually a cliché to say someone ‘has as many jobs as a Jamaican’, as seen in the 2016 film Moonlight, though of course neither of these stereotypes tell the whole story. Elsewhere in the world, when people ask me ‘where are you really from?’ (many people still refuse to believe that there are black people in England), when I respond with ‘Jamaica’, the immediate response is usually one of warmth, often accompanied by shouts of ‘Bob Marley, Bob Marley’. Since I have grown my dreads this reaction has only become more common. I have seen the mention of Jamaica evoke smiles from Zimbabwe to Thailand, India to Germany, Brazil to Sweden. Reggae music has become a globally popular culture and though some engagement with it is rather gimmicky reggae is generally seen quite rightly as an anti-establishment, pro-people cultural force.
It’s a shame that successive Jamaican governments and the Jamaican elite have not yet found an effective strategy to convert this global goodwill and cultural capital into
a programme to uplift the nation. It pains me to see a country with so many brilliant and talented people still suffer from problems that are well within its capacity to solve, but JA – like elsewhere – is riddled by class divisions, local corruption and, most devastatingly, insurmountable neocolonial pressures – IMF debt, structural adjustment, capital flight, foreign interference and other post–Cold War geopolitical legacies.2
There is one other issue that I remember as a vague presence back in 1991 that has relevance to this book, namely colourism. Jamaica may well be a black-majority country, but of the twenty or so ‘big families’ that are said to control virtually all of the wealth of the island, or at least that portion not owned by foreigners, none are black. They are mostly white, with a few families of Syrian and Chinese origin thrown in for good measure. What does it mean to have the old plantocracy and later migrants into the country control all the wealth and power? Of course, there is no guarantee whatsoever that a black elite would be any more just per se, but it is nonetheless an interesting thing when the power and wealth in a country are controlled by people who do not share the heritage of African-ness and the extreme experience of chattel slavery of the vast majority of the population. Unlike in, say, most countries in Africa – where the black elite have their own distinct history and identity and may even have connections to traditional pre-colonial nobility – slavery did away with all that in the African populations of the Caribbean, and while that would not negate the existence of class, it has produced a ‘black’ identity and solidarity that can’t quite exist in the same simplified way among the Yoruba and the Igbo, the Wolof and the Fulani.
Class in Jamaica and indeed the world is racialised. To this day you cannot fail to notice as you drive from the well-off neighbourhoods of uptown Kingston to the ghettoes of downtown that the living conditions get progressively worse and the skin colour gets progressively darker. Part of this legacy of colour-coded class distinctions is that being ‘light skinned’ carries with it the assumption of wealth and privilege. There are no specific incidents that I recall from that trip in 1991 but just a vague, aching suspicion that people treated me and my sister better than our ‘fully black’ cousin. I remember phrases like ‘high colour’ and ‘redskin’ and the general sense that because we came from ‘foreign’ and were mixed we must have money, a perception that continues when I visit today. The reality that my white family is actually ‘poor’ – again by UK not Jamaican standards – and that my siblings and I are now the most educated and affluent generation in the family on either side, does not matter. The other reality, that middle- and upper-class black Jamaicans, few as they may be, almost undoubtedly enjoy a better quality of life and are certainly better educated than the average poor person in Britain doesn’t matter either; the racialised ideas are still there.
This colourism has even been a bone of contention within the family itself, and my grandmother, for all her Jamaican pride, will still not accept that her roots lie in Africa – her perception of the continent is overwhelmingly negative, despite my decades of banging on about African history. When I told her I was going to Zimbabwe for the first time back in 2011, she told me to be careful because Africa – the country – is dangerous. Jamaica is far more dangerous than almost every country in Africa of course – including Zimbabwe – but actual facts and details about Africa matter little even to my loving, African origin, colonially educated black grandmother.
‘High colour’ as status and privilege has deep roots in the colour codes of law that governed all slave colonies, and thus the reality of light-skinned privilege still plagues Caribbean and Latin American societies to this day. The reproduction of anti-black sentiment in majority-black countries may well seem paradoxical to many, but as we have seen race is a very pliable idea and societies change for the better only very, very slowly. Centuries of blackness acting as a signifier of non-human chattel slave status and as a badge of dishonor are still being wrestled with every day. That’s not by any means to say that all Jamaicans hate being black, on the contrary, Jamaicans are some of the proudest people on the earth – the rest of the Caribbean may even argue, with some justification, that we are too proud – but it is to say that history will not die easily. It is also to say that skin bleaching has some real-world logic to it in that people who are not dark-skinned black still all too often have more real-world privileges, even in Jamaica.
Even with the colourism, poverty, violence and other challenges, I came back from the 1991 trip of a lifetime a changed person, and I knew it. I now visit Jamaica regularly, have presented two documentaries on Jamaican music and bigots will be happy to hear that I may well choose to relocate back ‘where I came from’ – but who knows how I would have come to view that side of my heritage had I not had those six weeks there back in 1991. Thanks, Nanny Milly.
Three years after my tip to Jamaica, I visited Scotland. The journey to Benbecula was long and arduous. A train from London to Glasgow, a coach from Glasgow to the coast and then a three-hour stormy boat ride to the island. I don’t travel well at the best of times, let alone in a storm, and I vomited on that boat trip until there was nothing left but bile. The ship tipped and swayed; one moment I was looking up at the stars, the next I was staring into the blackness of the night sea, but eventually we arrived. Over the next ten days I went for walks around Stinky Bay – filled with rotten seaweed, it really did stink – ate Scotch broth and got a good old lungful of highland air. My Uncle Kenny and Aunty Peggy were much more welcoming than my mum’s dad had ever been.
One day, I collected a bag full of heavy stones from the bay to keep as mementoes. When we got back to London we realised we had run out of money and didn’t have enough cash for the whole family to get on the bus. My mum put us children on the bus with my heavy stones and the rest of the luggage and she walked all the way back to our house from Euston Station, a three- or four-mile journey. Bus fare was actually relatively cheap back then, but that’s how close to the bread line many families live; literally every penny counts. I remember carrying those stones from the bus stop home and regretting ever collecting them. My mum had told me it was overzealous, but I was a ten-year-old city boy let loose on the great outdoors. I chose not to listen and suffered with a sore shoulder for the rest of the week as a consequence. The stones are still at my mum’s house, though, so it seems a small price to have paid for the memory.
By the time I went to Scotland, as far as I was concerned racism was pretty normal and certainly something to be expected whenever one ventured out of the relatively ‘safe space’ of our inner-London environment. I was on edge and very conscious that I was in totally white spaces. I became conscious of my body; paranoid about looking like a thief, I would stand far from the shelves in shops and only pick up what I knew I was buying, something I still sometimes find myself doing as an adult, just to avoid having to cuss someone. Day by day, I waited for the racial abuse that I was sure was coming. I think I was even slightly annoyed; I wanted to get it out of the way. The trip went on and the abuse never came. In fact, people, even old people, were generally just quite nice. It was odd – I didn’t know how to process these white people. Looking back now, it was the first time I had spent a protracted period in such an overwhelmingly white environment and not encountered the discomfort of obvious racism.
When ‘race’ finally did surface, it was actually quite funny and sort of sweet. One of my cousins around the same age as me asked, in total innocence and fascination, ‘why are you brown?’ (You have to say it to yourself in a Scottish accent to really feel it.)
Notice that she didn’t say ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ – the latter phrase was all the rage back then – but brown, an accurate(ish) description of my skin colour, not a pejorative preconditioned social category designated black. ‘My daddy says it’s because of the sun,’ she added. It was clear that my cousin had no idea that brown people were supposed to be muggers or immigrants or criminals and certainly not ‘Chinese black nigger bastards
’, and perhaps her father never knew these things either – after all, this was a tiny island with just one school way out in the Outer Hebrides, where people barely had televisions to teach them that darkies were to be feared. Because my upbringing had given me an unusual political vocabulary for a ten-year-old, I remember thinking quite consciously in that moment that this proved that racism was learned behaviour. I never went on to become that close to my Scottish family, they’re in the Outer Hebrides after all, but I left with a respect and fondness for my Uncle Kenny and Aunty Peggy, and even for Stinky Bay. From that day forward, I went into a kind of subconscious romanticised denial of my ‘Englishness’, and that’s why you might have heard me say I’m half Scottish.
It is often said that travel is the best education. These two trips, both undertaken before I was eleven, had managed to teach me much about the stupidity and fluidity of race, about how my own racial identity changed from place to place and how the people in the hills and gullies of St Ann’s or the islands of the Outer Hebrides can be more enlightened and welcoming than some of us from the educated bright lights of the big cities.
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We have looked at blackness and whiteness, we have even looked at race and slavery, but we have not yet actually asked what ‘race’ itself is. Today, race most often connotes very distinct groups of people usually defined by skin colour, and especially the black–white binary and images of Jim Crow America and apartheid South Africa. ‘Race is a social construct’ has become such a cliché phrase that we perhaps never stop to think about how little it actually tells us. Race may well be socially constructed, but how, why and when did this happen?
