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64 three Race and the Colonial Imagination The situation,” the letter to Malcolm MacDonald, the secretary of state read, “is further complicated by the fact that an issue between Capital and Labour, or property owners and Labour, takes on added gusto according to colour.”1 The writer, presumably Robert Kirkwood, an Englishman and the new managing director of the West Indies Sugar Company, was discussing the 1938 labor rebellion and its aftermath in the island. Discontented workers had challenged their oppression, displaying their agency and asserting their right to social justice. Overwhelmingly, if not totally, of African descent, they confronted the mostly white barons of capital, contesting their power. The rebellion was, in part, a class conflict. But in another and equally significant sense, it represented a racial confrontation. Black workers were carrying on their shoulders the weight of a racialized oppression and centuries of European denigration of African peoples. The rebellion was a cathartic experience; an act of exorcism and a discovery of the possibilities of self. History had been their enemy; their future was now theirs to make. Burdened by slavery and its legacy, black Jamaicans remained the people of unmet promise, sleeping giants awaiting their moment of arousal to claim their place at the center of their homeland. Not only had their ancestors been reduced to the rank of human property, but the perpetrators of their oppression had developed an elaborate intellectual justification for white supremacy. This influential body of racist literature helped to shape colonial policy during slavery and in its aftermath. Europeans and Americans , too, were fed a steady diet of racially pejorative views about Africans and peoples of African descent. Not surprisingly, these racially inspired conclusions, exercises in ethnocentrism, cultural misunderstandings, and prejudices had an enduring and pernicious impact on the general public. British colonial officials were not immune to being influenced by the prevailing racial weltanschauung. But by the first decades of the twentieth century , they had begun to sanitize their official language of racist phraseology “ Race and the Colonial Imagination | 65 as well as their policy formulations and assumptions that were rooted in notions of white supremacy. They were not entirely successful, to be sure. The governors who were sent to Jamaica in the twentieth century did not usually make racially insensitive comments in public. Their private but of- ficial comments, however, betrayed racist conclusions about black Jamaicans , frequently conflating class and race in their pejorative references to the colonial subjects. England had not codified racial segregation as had the United States of America. But a color bar existed and was replicated with varying degrees of rigor in the colonies. Jamaica was no exception, as a white phenotype signified privilege, social prestige, and superior human worth. The mayor of Kingston, Dr. Oswald Anderson, observed in 1938 that “race hatred is being fostered and conditions here tend to develop this.” Supporting his claim, the mayor wrote that “there is a clique formed by Government officials who are sent there, and whose one desire is to do what they feel, and in so many cases little regard is given to the coloured people, and the only reason that is evident is colour. This clique and their families receive every protection that the clique can give, and in short they are likened to kings—as they can do no wrong. This clique is enlarged by certain types of people in the island and they also can do no wrong.”2 This kind of attitude and behavior bred resentment among black Jamaicans . They helped to fuel the rebellion and some hostility to whites in general . But the society functioned well enough without the kind of racially inspired daily indignities that had come to characterize the lives of African Americans, particularly those in the southern United States. Nonetheless, black Jamaicans were trapped at the bottom of their homeland’s social and economic order. Marcus Garvey had admonished Jamaicans to reclaim and proudly affirm their human worth and dignity. The celebrated writer, playwright, broadcaster , and feminist Una Marson (1905–60) also drew attention to the absence of race consciousness among many Jamaicans of African descent. She bemoaned the fact that many distanced themselves from any identification with their African past. Writing in 1937, this eminent Jamaican observed that “educated Jamaicans spend their whole lives thinking they are not coloured , and it is an insult to call them ‘Negro’ because one or two generations back they...

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