Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

Even if we look at the differences between the racial regimes of the continental United States, where European settlers were the majority, and the Caribbean, where people of European heritage were a minority, we still see whiteness functioning as a fulcrum of power. In the USA, especially after slavery was ‘abolished’, there was a tendency toward the ‘one drop’ rule, which defined a person containing any vestige of ‘black blood’ as a negro and thus subject to Jim Crow discrimination. In the Caribbean plantations, there was a greater likelihood of ‘whites’ recognising their mixed-race offspring and even using these offspring as a buffer class in the plantation system. These different systems of race management have legacies that are with us until this very day; in the USA I am without a doubt a black person, yet the same light-brown skin that makes me a black person in America or even Britain, with all the stereotypes and issues that come with ‘blackness’, makes me a person of ‘high colour’ in the Caribbean. In the Caribbean, my complexion is associated with being middle class, with privilege and wealth and snobbery. Very few people of my complexion live in Jamaica’s ghettoes for example, which is part of what made Bob Marley’s story so unusual.