Mixed Race Studies

The colour of money in multiracial Jamaica

The Jamaica Gleaner
Jamaica, West Indies
2012-09-23

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

On a flight from Miami several years ago, I sat next to a little girl who seemed to be about 10 or so years of age. She was looking through a magazine and came across a picture of three little girls – black, white and brown. I mischievously asked her, “Which one of them looks like you?” She picked the black child.

I then asked her, “Which one do you look like?” And, believe it or not, she chose the brown child. ‘Mi nearly dead.’ I wondered if she had misunderstood. After all, it was a kind of trick question I was asking her about racial identity. But no, she did understand. As far as she was concerned, the black girl looked like her but she did not look like the black girl. And, in a funny way, it made perfectly good sense. It’s OK for the black girl to look like her; but not for her to look like the black girl.

So who is responsible for this crazy conundrum? Was this just an exceptional case of a little child confused by the ‘fool-fool’ questions of a nosy adult? Or were the little girl’s curious answers a sign of our collective paranoia about race in Jamaica? How does our national motto complexify the problem, as the Americans say? Oh, yes! If you can simplify, it’s perfectly logical to complexify…

Read the entire essay here.

Caribbean Fashion Week: Remodeling Beauty in “Out of Many One” Jamaica

Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture
Volume 14, Number 3, September 2010
pages 387-404
DOI: 10.2752/175174110X12712411520377

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

The elitist Jamaican motto, “Out of Many, One People,“ privileges racial hybridity as the quintessential marker of national identity. Conversely, populist constructions of Jamaican identity acknowledge the primacy of the African majority. The “mixed-race“ ideal inscribed in the national motto becomes the aesthetic standard for judging “beauty“ and “ugliness.“ Beauty contests, for example, become sites of contestation in which competing representations of the face of the nation jostle for recognition. Identifying with marginalized African-Jamaican aspirants who often fail to win these competitions, discontented patrons routinely claim the right to assert alternative models of beauty that challenge the authority of the “out of many one“ aesthetic. The emergence of a modeling industry in Jamaica that valorizes idiosyncratic style has opened up a space in which black images of beauty take center stage. Caribbean Fashion Week is the major platform for displaying internationally acclaimed Jamaican models. Showcasing a high percentage of decidedly black male and female models wearing spectacular designer clothes, Caribbean Fashion Week enables multiple readings of the body as cultural text. The permissive modeling aesthetic engenders capricious images of beauty that contest the very conception of the “model“ as a mold into which a singular figure of beauty is impressed.

Read or purchase the article here.

Who Is Jamaica?

The New York Times
2012-08-05

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

DURING last week’s independence festivities, I took out my prized commemorative plate. It was a gift from the mother of a long-ago boyfriend who, incomprehensibly, complained constantly that his mother loved me more than him. Needless to say, he didn’t last.

Source: Wikipedia

The plate has a little chip, but it’s the spirit that counts: a little bit of tactile history. It features the Jamaican coat of arms. There is an Amerindian woman bearing a basket of pineapples and a man holding a bow. At school we were taught they were Arawak. These days, they are called Taino. But the distinction is academic.

The native people of Xaymaca, as the island was once called, are extinct. In their culture, the pineapple symbolized hospitality. Genocide was their reward for the welcome they gave Christopher Columbus. They survive only in the coat of arms and in the modest museum that is dedicated to their history. Perched above the man and woman is a crocodile. The reptile has fared better; its descendants live on.

Jamaica was one of the first British colonies to receive its own coat of arms, in 1661. The Latin motto grandly declaimed: “Indus uterque serviet uni” (Both Indies will serve one). From East to mythic West, colonial relations of domination were inscribed in heraldry. When we gained our independence from Britain, 50 years ago today, the motto was changed to “Out of many, one people.”

Though this might appear to be a vast improvement on the servile Indies, the new motto encodes its own problematic contradictions. It marginalizes the nation’s black majority by asserting that the idealized face of the Jamaican nation is multiracial. In actuality, only about 7 percent of the population is mixed-race; 3 percent is European, Chinese or East Indian, and 90 percent is of African origin.

It was my high school English teacher, Miss Julie Thorne, who first brought the fraudulence of the motto’s homogenizing racial myth to my attention. “Out of many, one people?” she asked the class. “Which one?”

In the highly stratified Jamaica of the 1960s, the white and mixed-race elite were the “one” who ruled the “many.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.