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  • The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World
  • Sidney W. Mintz
The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World. By Mervyn C. Alleyne (Mona, Jamaica, University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 266 pp. $45.00

The author examines the linguistic roots of social difference, as embodied in and represented by the terms race and ethnicity. His primary interest is the Caribbean region—the site of Europe's first post-Columbian colonies, where ethnic and physical differences figured prominently in the building of local social systems.

It has been asserted that the racial bias typical of New World slavery was a coefficient of the institution itself—that racial bias was a consequence of slavery. The received wisdom was that the color of alien peoples was not an important concern for the Greeks and Romans and that racism was a relatively modern development. The author set out to explore seriously Graeco-Roman attitudes about people who looked different. He concludes that the Greeks and Romans were, in fact, keenly aware of such differences. If, as Alleyne believes, a typical bias against nonwhites marked the outlook of the classical world, then it becomes much more difficult to argue, as (for example) Williams had, that New World slavery was the cradle of modern racism.1

To develop the balance of his argument, Alleyne marshals several different sorts of evidence. In addition to looking at the work of classicists interested in racial attitudes, he examines psychological studies of children's perceptions of the color of others; studies of color in nature and its possible relationship to perceptions of human physical type; and considerable material dealing with the lexicon of human description. Alleyne's willingness to look so broadly at contexts to understand how we perceive others is refreshing.

The analytic use of linguistic information in the early chapters of the book continues throughout. The author often invokes lexical, syntactical, and even phonological materials for his arguments. Whether [End Page 676] discussing color ("racial") terms in the societies he studied, the place of creole languages in the formation of ethnicity, or the special linguistic character of Rastafarian subculture, Alleyne adds greatly to our enlightenment by treating language as a critical component of the culture itself.

The three chapters that precede a brief conclusion are the most illuminating and interesting portions of the book. They explore how ethnic and racial stratification in Puerto Rican, Martiniquan, and Jamaican society is reflected lexically. Alleyne suggests why particular differences, both in perception and in the language of classification, matter toeach society's demographic and economic history. The analysis lifts the discussion of race in the Caribbean region to a new level of sophistication.

Sidney W. Mintz
Johns Hopkins University

Footnotes

1. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944).

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