West Indian Race, Colour & Identity: A Reading List

Photo credit: via Tumblr

This is a reading list for West Indians examining race, racism, colourism and identity. Every time racism comes to the forefront in the United States, the black and African descent diaspora shows itself: in good ways and not so great ways. There are West Indians on the #AllLivesMatter bandwagon too, and I am giving you all a stink cut-eye.

One of the things some West Indians cling to is the narratives we tell ourselves about the absence of “real” racism, compared to the U.S., and West Indians in foreign perpetuate this thinking as much as some in the region. When they migrate, they join the ranks of those who are simply exhausted with African Americans whining about race, as they see it. They don’t get it, they claim, because of where they’re from.

The absence of Jim Crow and public lynchings does not mean that we do not and have not had to deal with racism — systemic and otherwise. Furthermore, being from black & brown majority places doesn’t magically mean folks are immune to internalized antiblack racism or that it cannot and doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean the police are immune there, either. Some of the worst agents of white supremacy are other black & brown people. True talk.

How is it that the exact same caricatures of and aversions to blackness have managed to traverse the globe and thrive on our shores too? Strange how that works, eh? In no particular order, here is a sampling of West Indians considering privilege, colour, identity and much more. They are not afraid to share their lived experiences. To say when we need to do better. And when we need to sit and acknowledge the aspects of our societies that we’d rather pretend didn’t exist while pointing a finger at others for doing and thinking the same.

1. Dylan Kerrigan, “Transnational Anti-Black Racism and State Violence in Trinidad,” Cultural Anthroplogy

“Just as it was in colonial times, Trinidad and Tobago’s political elite disseminates an uncomplicated image of crime that links criminality with poor, urban, opportunistic Afro-Trinidadian males who kill each other. Rarely are any other groups in society implicated. This is an irony not lost on many locals, since Trinidad and Tobago is well-known for a never-ending list of white-collar crimes that are rarely punished in the courts.”

2. Eriche S., “Black Feminism in the Caribbean: Examining the Mulatto Effect,” West Indian Critic

“Without a distinct and large white upper class we see anti-black dynamics play out in a way that misleads people to believe we have transcended race. We’ve merely transplanted a racial hierarchy in a way that suits our population. The closest to white occupy the top, whereas the furthest away from whiteness occupy the bottom of the hierarchy. Every aspect of this hierarchy was constructed during colonialism and has not disappeared, even today.”

3. Nicole Dennis-Benn, “Growing Up With Miss Jamaica,” Elle  

“Their lives existed far away from ours in a world beyond Kingston 8—worlds beyond Constant Spring and Hope Road. Their worlds existed on hills that seemed to touch the clouds. At night, the lights on those hills blinked like stars, mocking us for living in the pressure-cooked alleys of Kingston, the ugly trenches. They seemed to have it easy, never once having to think about disguising their blackness or growing their hair. They woke up that way. Went to bed that way. Sometimes we spotted them in public. They stood out among the dark black faces like beautiful red hibiscus flowers among weeds.

The solution first appeared in hushed whispers throughout the school compound. Dark-skinned girls flocked to the restroom on the fifth-form block. “Yuh see how Lola face look clear an’ pretty? Is bleaching cream do it!” The other girls listened reverentially, as though what they heard would somehow answer a lifelong prayer.”

4. Ayana Malaika Crichlow, “Growing up a Black Girl in Trinidad,” Huffington Post

“Although I currently live in the U.S., I grew up in Trinidad in the 80s and 90s as a black girl. To be black in a country that idealizes a mixed ethnicity aesthetic, was rough to say the least. Although I shared the same parental genes as my sister, she was considered mixed, whereas I have dark skin. I also had kinky hair, whereas my sister and all my cousins had curly hair, or “good hair” according to Trinis. It didn’t matter that my heritage also included French, Scottish, East Indian and African; I was black to everyone who saw me. This wouldn’t have bothered me, if I hadn’t been treated as less than my sister for most of our childhood because if it.”

5. “Carlie Ester on the culture of race in Barbados,” Antillean Media Group

“Kadooment, a street parade of rum-fuelled revelry that draws masqueraders from a cross-section of Barbadian society, bares an open secret that is rarely publicly questioned: it has a masquerade band whose members are almost entirely White.

The band, known as Blue Box Cart, is traditionally always the first band to lead the Kadooment parade, and stands in stark contrast to all others that – by and large – reflect the Black ethnic make-up of the 166 sq. mile island. Says Ester, ‘to witness a sea of white faces gathered together is at first glance, surprising…[but] it’s just another way in which the race relations of plantation society curiously manifest themselves in 2014.'”

6. Victoria Brown, “In Solidarity: When Caribbean Immigrants Become Black,” NBC News

“While the majority of my immigrant students could weigh in on why they considered African Americans less successful, Caribbean immigrants in particular were at pains to define themselves as separate from native born African Americans. Most discouraging was their de facto confidence that American blacks made poor decisions, and their lack of criticism of undeserved racist stereotyping.

I taught writing but felt my students needed an historical context to understand how black struggle and resistance had made so many of their immigrant aspirations, including a post-secondary education, possible. Indeed, how they came to have a black, immigrant woman as their professor.”

7. Luis Vasquez La Roche, “Walking While Black,” Luis Vasquez La Roche

“Anahita explains again what we are doing and what the walking seminar is about. While she speaks to him I look over to Miatta and tell her that he stopped me because I am black. She asked me if he really said that and replied to her “ Yes, he just told that to Ramon”.

He keeps asking for our documents, which Anahita explains again to him that everyone’s documents are in the car along with the rest of our things. I looked over to my right and see Michelle and Andreya walking over to where we were, followed by another Police car. The Police car was right behind them. It seemed like they were rounding up prisoners or suspects. A few police officers got out of the car. I cannot recall how many Police officers were there with us. Some of them start directing traffic while others talk to other people in the group.”

8. Eriche S., “White Privilege In The Caribbean,” West Indian Critic

“Whiteness is a funny thing in the Caribbean. Some pretend that it’s nonexistent, but really it is invisible, similar to whiteness in the United States but not quite the same. While our lives are different from those of Black Americans, we suffer oppression along the same lines.”

Of #prisonbae and Beauty Ideals

So, #prisonbae is now a certifiable meme and while I am not too surprised, I was annoyed that so much of the rhetoric around this unfolding meme and Jeremy Meeks’ perceived attractiveness got leveled onto the shoulders of superficial women of the interwebz everywhere. Of course. Because we love driving the machine that upholds unrealistic and problematic beauty ideals and we do this by imagining giving cute guys with arrest records a shot at getting with us. It was all: look at these women! Look how thirsty they are! Most of the commentary on my social media feeds looked like this with few people actually taking to task the constructs of beauty that we get inundated with or anyone really grappling with the ways in which these ideas particularly impact, specifically here, hetero women. No, women are just beyond thirsty, when the reality is no one — and I mean no one — adversely suffers from the effects of beauty culture and its endless demands like women. If there’s someone who understands the lookism of society and the leverage it pays out: a woman does. Fat women and black women (of all sizes) know it even more.

Likewise, female-of-center, cisgender women and trans*women — whose “woman-ness” often gets mitigated against how well they can adhere to “traditional” (and often Eurocentric) notions of feminine beauty know this. It’s insidious and difficult to just be able to live fully, as you are. People can make it shitty for you and we can make it shitty for ourselves based on beliefs about looks and being attractive, or not. The extent to which most of the hetero women who “liked” Meeks’ pic understand that an attractive man — recently arrested or not, represents a standard of beauty that affords him privileges, is probably a given. To live in the world, wherever we are, inhabiting a female body, means that we also grow to know this well. Women are held to unrealistic standards of beauty on a societal level and personal level that most hetero men will never have  to deal with, quite in the same ways.

So I couldn’t give a judgmental damn about women thinking that Meeks is attractive. What would you do, if you worked at the front desk somewhere and he walked it near late to drop off/send in something? Would you give him a bligh? I probably would, especially if he asked nicely with some charm. Lots of people would too. The same people who are out on social media calling people misguided etc. and preaching respectability standards to women. Have some standards; he’s a felon. And what? Perceived attractiveness is one of the attributes in this world that keeps on paying out for some people, in small ways and big ways. And we all know this. Why else are so many of us bleaching ourselves into walking jumbies? Why are celebs product pitching?

Trinidad James and Cultural Respectability Politics

Full disclosure: this post was started a long-ass time ago and has been languishing on my WordPress dash since forever. I just never bothered to finish it earlier for no particular reason; I also got sidetracked by other projects along the way. The last draft was dated quite April 2013. I figured I might as well go ahead and post it anyway — finally.

If a beauty queen from a small Caribbean island appears in a rap video, does she cause a ruckus at the behest of respectability politics? Apparently, yes. And if said video includes shots in a low income community on the island, are some folks crowing in unparalleled indignation? Also, yes. On Facebook, folks lamented among other things, that “she’s in Trinidad James’ music video about being a hoe. So not becoming of her” and Metro Magazine (among others) had long running threads on Facebook dedicated to whether it was “beneath her and unbecoming for her to be in a video for a song that calls women hoes.” All this after Trinidad James visited the land of his birth before Carnival and shot this video for “Females Welcomed.” Look, what Athaliah decides to do with her own self is her own decision and how we can make the leap from appearance in a rap video to “hoe” is beyond me. Just stereotyping on top of stereotyping.

I disagree with the notion that by wearing the Miss World Trinidad and Tobago crown, this means that her autonomy becomes null and void. She also doesn’t become a slave to national respectability politics either. Especially not after a slew of us were disparaging her looks and her background. Oh, no, you don’t. (Google search Athaliah Samuels — go ahead do it. See what Google asks you.) A beauty queen is not an emblem of a living, throbbing West Indian culture and its diaspora and she doesn’t have to lug around the weight of your expectations and unending demands of respectability on her back. She’s just a beautiful young lady, probably doing the best she can, that is all. To quote Trudy from Gradient Lair, “I am NEVER gonna be here for respectability politics meant to intraracially police BW who are already intraracially policed.” Furthermore,

Now some will argue that if someone is beautiful (or “ugly”), famous and/or in a field where their sexuality is a part of their image, they no longer deserve respect from Whites or anyone else. They lose their right to discern who may touch them. I’m fully aware of how the politics of respectability and Eurocentric beauty myths manifest for Black people, especially Black women. However, I don’t agree with this. I will NEVER accept the faulty logic that if anyone perceives someone as “not respecting themselves,” everyone else has the “right” to disrespect them as well.”

I eh here for that either. Athaliah herself, would eventually have to take to Facebook in the form of an open letter to nicely read the widespread hypocrisy of Trinidadians for utter filth and claim her space to negotiate her own future and decision making. Enter Trini Trent‘s rant about respectability, Trinidad James, and most of all, the representation of the country, which of course, is rooted deep inside cultural respectability politics.

About that, first off, a Trini living in Trinidad vexedly lamenting all the national symbol waving by folks no longer living in Trinidad is really a pointless harangue. Yes, we all love the country, but of course, people who migrate go a bit extra with that. Understandably so, they left or their parents left with them. Some of it is all psychological really: I will rep this place so damn hard because I don’t want to ever lose sight of the fact that this culture is a part of who I am; even though, I am not physically living there anymore and may never be. How and why is Trent’s use of the “Trini” moniker more legitimate than James’ usage and claim of “Trinidad?”

Updates: On life, living etc.

So, while I have missing from my corner of the blogosphere (if anyone noticed), I have been staying relatively busy on the Facebook page, linking and posting all manner of poetry, articles, images that inspire and incite and more, from various web sojourns. I suppose, overall, lots of stuff has been taking place — let’s see, I got a manuscript accepted. My forthcoming (and first!) poetry chapbook will come out in late 2013, published by the ethereal and immensely talented dancing girl press. It will be suffused with hibiscus, creaking spines, dark rum, blackness and blackgirl love.

Also, in the meantime, my heart has been aching for Palestine, I have kept peeping my favorite blogs (yeah, I see you all), I’ve been bonding more with Mama Oshun, snuggling regularly with a certain deliciously warm and wonderful brown body, I got involved with the Two Lips collective project where I’ll be trying to work all kinds of black-West Indian-femme-feminist-fierceness in partnership with Kayla from Sage (among others); I watched Sesame Street (random post coming on that soon); I got more in tune with my cosmic ish (take heed: Jupiter is in retrograde allyuh!); plus, I got thoroughly annoyed with the ever tiring myth of Indian exceptionalism being spewed by one of our country’s ambassadors (post might be coming on that soon) Grrrr.

All that taking place, then I saw this:

OK, to start with, I understand that “jokey soca” is supposed to be a genre onto itself (see some chunes by Crazy for example) which is separate from picong, though the traditions inform one another in some ways. This is also separate from the tradition of double entendre in soca and kaiso which, may or may not, be funny. Alright — now with that said, we can connect cultural notions of Trinbagonian picong too to similar diasporic manifestations like “playing the dozens” where insults and barbs are “New World” incarnations of African sociolinguistic expressions and the oral tradition carried within descendants of the earliest Africans.

We also cannot categorically consider this song anything close to picong because there is only one voice in the song and that is of Myron B’s. Picong involves an exchange of wits at least. The woman has no voice here. I’ve noted before how even inside supposedly “jokey” soca — there are always problematic elements of truthtelling about who we are as a people and who we decide to make fun of and in what ways.  In Anthurium, Andrea Shaw has observed how the fat black female body became this site for hypersexualisation in soca and dancehall, as well as humor.

Note the kind of big woman in this music video, note her shade, note her nod to Mammy — her simultaneous pseudo-sexualisation (from the first attraction) then the chronic, progressive desexualization throughout the song and video; this is key here: the fact that the “attraction” and whatever sexual attributes once there, (oh wait, it’s happening only because he never dated someone 300 lbs before) positively shrink throughout the song and the fat black woman is in fact, the central punchline by the end. The joke is on her actually, never him, even though they end up in a bed together and he ends up in bandages and he would like us to think the joke is on him (she dreams of ice-cream while next to him, remember?). And that’s a problem. The whole thing is a problem.

Image via: Buttah Love

The very premise of fat women and fat black women as voyeuristic challenges for a man to prove his manly mettle because of their size, is problematic all on its own and not just because real fatphobia exists and women who don’t fit in the dominant paradigm’s mandate of what an appropriate size should be end up having to deal with these same attitudes from too many people every damn day. It’s not okay because fat people are human beings and their feelings are valid just like anyone else’s. Their right to exist free from body shame, bullying and damaging parodies is valid, again, just like anyone else’s.

The Color of Justice

In a white supremacist society, white people are the victims EVEN WHEN they are the perpetrators. #TrayvonMartin via Son of Baldwin

So, so much fuckery happening in the state that I currently reside it, I can barely process it all. A young boy leaves to get a snack and ends up dead — probably the most tragic juxtaposition of doing anything to ‘taste the rainbow’ ever. Firstly, Florida’s awful stand your ground law is truly the stuff nightmares are made of. Please consider yourself informed if you plan on ever coming here. Everyone is in some danger, but brown and black bodies are especially unsafe here which each passing year of this madness.

Secondly, I’ve found some of best sense-making, calm-after-the-infernal-storm-inducing and people of color rage on some tumblr and facebook interwebs and wanted to share some powerful contextualizations; for their grief, their rage, their solidarity, overstanding, love and fierce truth-telling, when I couldn’t even find the words to myself. If, as Dr. West has said, “justice is what love looks like in public” — then how much do we love slain children of color? Not a whole bloody lot, it seems like.

“Whiteness is White people telling a person of color that not all White people are bad and saying so would hurt their feelings when they are expressing their pain over one of their babies being killed.” – theoceanandthesky via Son of Baldwin

Save Your Tears (For the Day when our Pain is Far Behind)

“It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.” —Mahatma Gandhi

White people, this is for you. And only you.

For a long while, during discourses about racism, race relations, and human rights in general, I have watched you and your interject your opinions time and again, derail the discussion, and center it on yourself and your feelings. And I have watched—and participated in—the attempts to either shut you up or make you realize that these issues are not about you; these discourses are not a personal attack on you. You aren’t even welcomed in those discussions most of the time.

This one is. This one is yours. Feel free to interject, but don’t cry when we barbecue you. You’re the one who came with a thin coat of BBQ sauce on your ass.

Recently, if you have kept tabs on the POC on here like you are so wont to do at the wrong time, you may have caught wind of the cold-blooded murder of 17 year old Trayvon Martin (TW: violence). I will condense the story for the convenience of those who haven’t heard it, and to keep you focused on this thread.

George Zimmerman, the self-appointed Neighborhood Watch President for a gated, mostly-white community in Florida, stalked Trayvon Martin in the middle of the night, and shot him; not once, but twice. The police tell Zimmerman not to follow Trayvon and to let them handle it. Zimmerman claims that Trayvon looked suspicious. It was raining, Trayvon was on his way home from from the store with candy for himself and his brother, and he had on a hood.

Before you ghost your fingers over the keyboard to bang out some indignant defense, ask yourself this: had Trayvon been a white kid, would Zimmerman have stalked and shot him?

Had Trayvon’s screams for mercy and begging for his life been that of a white woman, would Zimmerman be able to walk freely? Would the police be trying so ardently to cover this up and chalk it up to an honest mistake?

He shot the boy twice. Not once, twice. Once to silence his screams, and second to finish him off. That’s what we call an execution…a double-tap. That’s an execution if ever there was one. If I didn’t think Zimmerman was just another racist white person, I’d be demanding to look in to see if it was a sanctioned hit.

It was not someone trying to protect his neighbors. It was someone looking for a reason to kill someone, and all the better that the person happened to be Black. Why?

Because in this society, we are conditioned to believe that Black lives hold little to no value in comparison to white lives. In this society we’re conditioned to believe that Black boys are destined for prison and one less Black boy in the world is one less Black boy in the prison system that your tax dollars clothe and feed. In this society, we are taught that Black people are expendable and interchangeable, incapable of anything more than lawlessness and decadence.

It’s 2012, and Black people aren’t safe in their own neighborhoods. In white neighborhoods, where some of us go to escape REAL dangers of everyday life in the city. And here we are, being taught that the no where is safe for us. We’re in danger from real criminals in the city, and we’re in danger from our white neighbors in the suburbs. And what did Trayvon’s fellow neighbors do? What did they do?

They defended Zimmerman.

How can they look Trayvon’s parents in the face, now? People who live in the same neighborhood as them who are burying their firstborn son because one of their neighbors EXECUTED HIM?

We’re angry. All of us. Every last one of us are angry, and you all should consider yourselves lucky that we don’t rise up and take every last one of you out, now for this. Because this demands more than that. This demands justice. This demands vengeance.

Zimmerman should not be rotting behind bars. He should be executed, as he executed an unarmed, Black boy—his own neighbor, on the grounds that he looked suspicious. When he came up to Trayvon, how come he did not immediately recognize him as his neighbor’s son? As someone he has probably seen everyday going to school and coming home? How come as Trayvon begged and screamed for his life, Zimmerman didn’t back off?

Where was the compassion of the man who claimed he was protecting his neighbors? Compassion does not dwell in the hearts of those who have decided to kill. A true self-proclaimed protector would exercise reason, would retreat, would stop themselves from doing something that could possibly bring harm to another.

But Zimmerman is not a protector. He is a cold-blooded murderer, and he went through with the execution because he knew—even if it was a subconscious knowing—that the law would always be on his side because he is a white, cisgendered male, and Trayvon is what society will write off as just another nameless Black boy who was probably never going to amount to anything.

That’s what Whiteness does to you. That’s what Whiteness does to us.

But I’m not going to let this pass into memory. We’re not going to let this be swept under the rug until there’s justice meted out, or until Zimmerman’s blood soaks the streets.

Either way, we’re not going to be silent about it.

Now, if you want to interject, feel free, but it would be in your best interest to utilize reading comprehension before you do…because I am not fucking with you people anymore. No GIFs, no image macros. This is not a joke. (via thegoddamazon)

hashtag SOE

i purposefully hadn’t bothered to comment on the trinidad and tobago government’s state of emergency all this time because i think it’s a load of crock and save for that, i really didn’t have anything constructive to employ in the conversation initially. who goes pulling states of emergencies all willy-nilly from out their backside like it’s nobody’s business? & sorry, but i also don’t trust the average local officer to not exploit the SOE — i feel like some might be gorging themselves on power, beating the pavement like giddy overlords drunk on the high of tossing alleged miscreants into the backs of pick-up trucks with no recourse. the whole thing just doesn’t sit well.

also, i’ve mused on crime & race before on here and though jack warner doth protest too much — images do tell a perspective, a slant, that is all. the whole discourse in parliament and outside is often full of fail. first of all, coming from the presupposition that black males in trinidad are posited, innately, as The Criminal — that in and of itself is a flickin’ problem! all the hand-wringing is coming from these problematic, patronising places from atop a moral high ground that makes some of us feel good about ourselves and meanwhile, root issues and inequity aren’t being solved. the kinds of insensitivities being spewed also makes me shiver to my core: “lock dem up” — “all ah dem” and things of that nature, when you don’t even know the hows and whys. bet your talk change when they come for you or someone you love though.

Beautiful Monster

Jeremy Love’s astounding, graphic novel Bayou (volume one) is filled with many not so beautiful monsters: ghosts of Southern racism and tragedy; and beautiful ones, like Bayou—the large, hulking, green-tinged monster of the Mississippi bayou who wonderfully calls on his inner courage to help a new friend in need, even as it jeopardizes his own safety. Admittedly, I am not the biggest reader of graphic novels and while I’ve read entire comic collections, namely: The Far Side and The Boondocks among others—I’d probably read more graphic novels if they were all like Bayou: haunting, achingly familiar and beautifully drawn. I couldn’t get the book out of my mind after I read it the first day: the colours, all the ochres and amber, shades of grey, browns, and moss greens nestled in the dark shadows; the soul of Emmett Till (Billy) with large sunset-tinged wings on his back, and Lee Wagstaff with her pluck and tenacity, reminding me fondly of Liza Lou in some ways, picking her way through the swamp to grandmother’s house. Lee is a well drawn blackgirl character who nicely encapsulates some of the variant tensions of blackgirlhood in the 1930s in the South (and still today in some ways). I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I would encourage anyone to read it in print or online. (See Bayou link embeded above. You can thank me later.)

Race, Politricks & Crime in Trinidad & Tobago’s Electoral Debate

It’s election time in Trinidad and Tobago right now and it’s been very, very interesting so far, taking stock of the two contending parties. That being said, of course, I have to make the requisite elections post—‘the mother of all elections‘ even, says the Jamaica Observer.

It’s all so fascinating. Pondering all the main issues. The concerns. The relevant “wajang” behaviour newspaper headlines. The discussions being had with and amongst friends and family of mine. The fascinating facebook notes written by friends, popping up in my mini-feed. People in my mini-feed liking Patrick Manning’s latest insipid status updates. The person who did the wack photo edits on certain profile pics on this Kamla Persad Bissessar page in the neck area. I peeped her page the other day and thought, seriously? The woman looks fine, just as she is and the tweaked texture of her chin and neck are not preferable.

Truth is stranger than everything else

The Bluest Eye by Dan Ramey

Yesterday on facebook, a girl I know posted a status update about watching the first part of the premier of Anderson Cooper’s pilot study revisiting the “doll test,” showing how young children (black and white) start to internalize racialized identities and negative ideas about others of different races (or their very own). A mini convo follows on girl’s facebook page with a few other folks chiming in about also watching said special.  

Then this black guy who I do not know comments, pondering on whether the black and white children’s negative assumptions about people of color–especially the linkages of black people–to crime and fear were in fact justified. He then proceeds to link this outta timing* theory to slavery because since we as black people HAD to be rebellious to become free, maybe it is kind of socially and genetically encoded in us and that’s why black people tend to be criminals, therefore people will assume as much.

Buh wha’ de jail is dis I hearin’? 

Chomping at the Bit Wondering: Where have All the Black Vampires Gone?

I have been watching True Blood since it premiered, unlike some of the legions of never-see-come-sees out there and while I have never read a single Charlaine Harris book yet—surprisingly. I have skimmed them in a book store and I do think that I would enjoy them very much. About as much or even more than I enjoy the shows which are very entertaining. I also watched and enjoyed all seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so go figure that I would jump at the creation of a new vampire show.

I may not be at all Gothic and stuff but I do love imaginative story-lines and great characters. Ok, and I might be slightly, admittedly emo too. I’ve come to that realization. In a way that a quirky black West Indian feminist with a bit too much internal angst can be—without the requisite Hot Topic staples, dark clothes and strangulated countenance. Alas, but I do love me some black eyeliner. I know I have too much boobies and ass to be emo, swivel too much when I walk apparently and have an affinity for most variations of hot pink. But the whole emotionality thing? So got that.