“Anything Too Black Nuh Good:” Contouring the Everyday and Extraordinary Anti-Black Racism of Contemporary Jamaica

Abstract

If asked, many Jamaicans will adamantly state that the country does not have a race problem; rather, it (openly) has a class problem. This series of "meditations on race" explore the tensions of living, loving, and dying in a "paradise" tenebrously held together by the country's motto "Out of Many One People." The excursion starts at the feet of an Indian grandmother, the counterpoint against which the writer’s earliest understandings of her own Blackness were formed. Along the way, it onboards and unpacks the experiences of the BlackPoor, the BlackQueer, the BlackWoman, the BlackChild, and Jamaica’s mostly Black diaspora, to grapple with the complex and far-reaching anti-Black reality of colonial and contemporary Jamaica. What does it mean when Black death is so normalized that it redefines grief and an entire genre of music? What decisions must be taken by people living in the chokehold of racism and cultural imperialism, as a matter of survival? And how do even the most intimate aspects of human existence deflate and reform under the pressure of persistent poverty, supported and exploited by the “Global North”? Through prose-like and poetic explorations of the every-day and extraordinary experiences of Black Jamaicans, this piece unsettles the easy equivocation of a majority Black population with a Black-accepting nation. It shifts the façade of "paradise" to explore the depth of its colonial roots. And it amplifies the breathless, relentless question of "should I stay or should I go?" that has haunted the writer and many like her for decades.