Commentary

Class-colour prejudice still evident in Jamaica

By WANDEKA GAYLE, Staff Reporter

BLACK PEOPLE HAVE been dealt a bad card. In fact, Jamaicans have been mentally violated for centuries.

A columnist once wrote that while it has been 60 years since millions of Jews were killed at Aushcwitz and their relatives and survivors receive billions of dollars in repatriation, black people should just GET OVER IT since it was our distant ANCESTORS who suffered for more than 400 years of enslavement and not us.

Well, slavery was abolished in 1834 and it is 170 years since that time but frankly, we simply cannot just GET OVER IT because we have not been ALLOWED TO.

Imagine being taught constantly that you are nothing but a useless animal whose only duty in life is to bow and scrape before the "fairest of them all", who even after being "freed", was discriminated against, marginalised and hated because of mere skin colour. They taught their children this same miseducation and then handed it down from generation to generation like a family heirloom.

Yes, of course thanks to our national heroes, Marcus Garvey's black power movement, Martin Luther King Jr, and a host of others we began to see that we are not poor, wretched people after all.

However, it seems that damage control for centuries of hate and abuse seems insufficient so far.

There were those who fought to uphold self-esteem and black pride even when it was unpopular to do so. And, thanks to them, racial integration in the classroom, workplace, and the community is a common affair although it once was taboo.

Don't get me wrong. These things are not rosy for black people across the world since the abolition of slavery.

There have been improvements in understanding our power as a race. Yet, in Jamaica class-colour prejudice is still very evident. A white, tan, beige, pink Jamaican receives immediate respect from those in the business community over his black counterpart any day of the week. This I believe is wrought out of our brainwashing that they are some what better than us.

I also believe that colonisation also taught us that the European way of life is a symbol of social elevation. Listen to the way lawyers, doctors and "learned" professionals enunciate their words like the British, they boast about loving the finer arts, which include classical music, can identify and use with skill all the cutlery at the master banquet, and you will see someone who believes himself greater than his poor-country-bumpkin counterparts.

Colonisation also said that Africa is a dark continent full of people who had to be taught civilised behaviour by Europeans. Many of us still believe that Africa is a vast wasteland with poor starving people who need our $1 a day to save them. First of all, Africa is a CONTINENT with many COUNTRIES.

Africa had the first university. Many of the inhabitants don't even like to be considered as Africans. They are Ghanaians, Nigerians, South-Africans. Just like we are Jamaicans rather than West Indians and we say Canadians and not North Americans.

In short, no amount of money will suffice for the wrong they did to our people as they have taken more than blood, sweat, tears, and lives. They have distorted our view of ourselves.