Abstract
Abstract Because hotels are a microcosm of society, they offer a useful case study to explore social inequalities, including racial divisions. This article examines the experiences of African-Jamaican hotel workers and guests from independence in 1962 till the present to demonstrate the salience of Jamaica’s race and color relations. It argues that hotel workers and guests at times challenged the racialized practices that they experienced but more often refrained from doing so because of their socialization into a long-standing ethos of “Black is nuh good” and exposure to a nationalist ideology that projected a vision of racial harmony. The article also shows that through their responses to claims of racial discrimination in hotels, a variety of stakeholders, including tourist organizations, failed to challenge the island’s racial hierarchy which placed Whites on top, light-skinned Jamaicans in the middle, and dark-skinned Jamaicans at the bottom.
Highlights
In June 1972, Anthony Spaulding, minister of housing in the Jamaican government, sparked a public debate when he accused the Skyline Hotel in Kingston of racial discrimination
According to articles published in the Gleaner, Jamaica’s biggest-selling newspaper, Spaulding had met some friends for a drink in the hotel bar but the waitress had refused to serve them because one of Spaulding’s friends was wearing a cap and it was hotel policy for male guests to remove headwear when entering the hotel
As Harry Hoetink has shown, the three-tier racial hierarchy that was set in motion during slavery was still firmly in place in Jamaica on the eve of independence: the less than 1 percent Whites were at the top; mostly lightskinned Jamaicans occupied the middle rung; and the majority of dark-skinned Jamaicans were firmly placed at the bottom (Hoetink 1985:72–73)
Summary
As Frank Taylor has shown, after World War ii Jamaica’s tourist industry rapidly expanded. As a result of the in-house and other training schemes and the Employment Act that required hotels to apply for work permits for foreign staff, more African Jamaicans gained management and supervisory positions in hotels in the late 1960s and early ’70s. That expats continue to occupy the top positions in foreign hotels illustrates that mid-market to high-end hotels are still largely White zones Reinforcing this racial exclusivity is a lack of trained local managers, which the World Bank has listed as one of the main constraints facing the Jamaican tourism sector, and can be attributed to the lack of higher-level training in tourism in Jamaica (World Bank 2011:29). As the following section shows, these ideas have informed the experiences of African-Jamaican guests and their relations with local service staff
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