‘Your President Is Not Black!’: Jamaican Reflections On Identity, Race, Class, and (Global) Politics

Abstract

AbstractPresident Barack Obama enjoys mass‐appeal in Jamaica as an Afro‐descendant leader of a world superpower. Yet, Jamaicans' fondness for Obama as a Black president is partially intersected by local understandings of race and privilege. This paper helps to inform how Jamaican and U.S. American social hierarchies are divergent and how research consultants in Kingston, Jamaica can simultaneously deploy knowledge of American and Jamaican racial systems. It also addresses the outcomes of inbuilt racism in Jamaica to include disproportionate negative effects of SAPs for Jamaica's Black urban poor, the lack of transparent governance, and the maintenance of a rigid social hierarchy. This comparison of two racial systems within the Black Atlantic contributes to understandings of how Afro‐descendants around the world interpret the historic presidency of Barack Obama within the context of U.S. American racism.