Tuesday, November 15, 2011

OUT OF MANY, ONE PEOPLE

            The concept of race has many different definitions. The different variations as they appear in Jamaica are different when compared to other Caribbean islands as well as the United States.The contrasts between Haiti and Martinique and between Puerto Rico and Ecuador naturally make one want to compare the American set of racial categories with that of another English-speaking New World culture. Like the United States, Jamaica was also a British colony with a slave economy, but its history is very different from our own. Thus, based on cultural reasoning, one would expect it to have developed a different folk taxonomy from ours. Its categoris would however be expected to show greater similarities to American ones than those of Haiti, Martinique or Puerto Rico. That is, despite Jamaica’s geographical proximity in the Caribbean to the latter three and similarity in climate, small size and insular form, one would predict that the British cultural influence would predominate in the formation of racial categories. This is, in fact, the case, despite Jamaican categories being based primarily on physical appearance rather than on ancestry.
            Social class is very important in Jamaica, money counts more than color. With regard to physical appearance, however African and European ancestry predominate and there has been considerable mixture among people from these backgrounds over the years. Although other groups are present, most Jamaicans view their physical appearance as resulting from both African and European traits- a common, expected, and nonproblematic state of affairs. Variation in physical appearance with a family is the norm and terms exist to refer to some of these differences.

            Unlike the situation in the Latin cultures just discussed, the main physical trait used to classify people in the Afro-European domain is skin color. Facial features, hair texture, and color and eye color are not usually used. Because intermediate shades are seen as the norms, the terms “black” and “white” apply to extremes and are rarely used for Jamaicans. Instead, distinctions are made primarily in the mid-range of skin as “fair” (or “light” or “red”), “brown” and “dark”. Thus, it would not be uncommon for a couple to have a fair child, a brown child, and a dark child, and for them and other Jamaicans to describe them that way if asked to do so. This is in contrast to the United States, where all three would be considered black. It also contrasts with the other cultures described above, where as in Jamaica, they would receive different classifications- but where skin color alone would provide insufficient information to categorize them.
            For Jamaicans in the United States, our folk taxonomy seems both impoverished and wrong. It seems impoverished because it offers only the two options of black and white, where Jamaicans routinely make more distinctions. And it seems wrong because it misclassifies people as white or black (usually just black) when they are actually something in between. Another way of putting this is to say that while both Americans and Jamaicans use the English words “white” and “black” in their folk taxonomies, the words refer to different overlapping groups of people and thus have different meanings in the two cultures. In the airplane example, someone who gets on as a black in New York City can get off in Kingston as fair or brown or dark.

Citations:
            Fish, Jefferson M. The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy.  21-22. 2010. Print.
            Johnson, Violet Showers. Racial Frontiers in Jamaica’s Nonracial Nationhood.  1-2.

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