White Lies: Race and Sexuality in Occupied Trinidad

Let’s take a trip through Port of Spain
The city fair and kind–
Where every soldier from the States
Is growing color-blind

Excerpt from “White Lies,” Trinidad News Tips, January 1, 1942

Just months after American servicemen had begun their wartime occupation of the British colony of Trinidad in May 1941, their locally published army newspaper, Trinidad News Tips, carried a poem entitled “White Lies.” Penned by a white American serviceman, it was a lyrical mockery of his peers’ indiscriminate dating habits. White visitors, the poem concluded, had become “color-blind” in their search for female companionship. Such a development, however, was no laughing matter, particularly for predominantly white local elites and the senior American officials they now had to accommodate. Both groups appreciated that “color blindness” among the white Americans who arrived to install and defend military bases in Trinidad posed a serious threat to the legitimacy of a social order in which whites’ subordination of black, Indian, and mixed people was a fundamental organizing principle. ¹

Although rooted in the material history of colonialism and slavery, the dominance of this tiny (historically heterogeneous but increasingly coherent) minority of Europeans and European descendants was inseparable from beliefs about the prestige of white skin. In the British Caribbean, as in much of the modern colonized world, whiteness was synonymous with political, economic, and social privilege and maintaining this equivalence was an official priority and an elite preoccupation. Without legal recourse, fabricating the facade of white moral and intellectual superiority was full-time work, an everyday process that demanded cooperation from all whites appearing in the colonies. ² In these uneasy circumstances, white men had a crucial responsibility: whenever their sexual partners were nonwhite, the exercise of discretion was paramount. Though hardly prohibited from taking liberties with women of color, they were expected to deny these relationships the legitimacy that came through public acknowledgment and, more so, through marriage. ³ In the colony, the quip about whites counteracting their lusty integration by night with strict segregation by day was not just mischievous humor; it also reflected a moral obligation.

That some American visitors boldly sported and in some cases even married their local colored girlfriends, therefore, constituted a spectacularly subversive development, and this article addresses how white witnesses in Trinidad, both senior American officials and especially local residents, responded to these breaches of convention. ⁴ It emphasizes above all their anxious efforts to preempt these racial transgressions and, when that failed, to veil them carefully; it also demonstrates that, because British colonial identity in the Caribbean was favorably conceived in opposition to a racist Americanness, elites in wartime Trinidad (British as well as American) could not be candid about their strenuous efforts to police these interracial relationships. What follows, then, is a story with an ironic twist, one that underlines how male representatives of a racist, imperialist U.S. culture unwittingly challenged white supremacy in a British colony.

Comprehending the historical significance of intersections and collisions between British and American imperialisms requires broad and imaginative scholarly approaches. Historians investigating these interimperial encounters can no longer afford to remain faithful to the strictures of diplomatic history, employing official statements and policies to construct arguments about U.S. interests in and effects on British (and more broadly European) decolonization. ⁵ As recent scholarship on global encounters with “America” has shown, exploring the fields of popular culture, gender, and sexuality can enrich our visions of imperial and international histories. ⁶ In this specific instance, paying attention to “foreign affairs” (to steal Petra Goedde’s clever pun) involving white American men and nonwhite British West Indian women helps to bare the tensions involved in race making in a society forced to accommodate a new imperial presence. ⁷ In exploring these tensions, this article highlights the dissonance between British and American imperial imaginations and processes, for essentially what it captures is a U.S. intervention that turns a longstanding British colonial settlement into a kind of frontier zone, a space in which established identities and practices become unsettled.

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