Afro-Jamaican Research Articles

Phenotypic Expression of Melanocortin-1 Receptor Mutations in Black Jamaicans

Colin A. McKenzie, Rosalind M. Harding, Jennifer BrownTomlinson,w Amanda J. Ray,z KazumasaWakamatsu,y and Jonathan L. Reesz Tropical Metabolism Research Unit, University of theWest Indies, Kingston, Jamaica; Institute of Biological Anthropology, Oxford University, Oxford, UK; wDepartment of Dermatology, Kingston Public Hospital, Kingston, Jamaica; zUniversity of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK; yDepartment of Chemistry, Fujita Health University School of Health Sciences,Toyoake, Japan; zDepartment of Dermatology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Ethnic/Racial Attitudes and Self-Identification of Black Jamaican and White New England Children

A total of 411 children from urban and rural areas of Jamaica and from rural New England were examined by both White and Black interviewers for their skin color and body size preferences and for self-identification, using a modified dolls test. Overall, children from all three communities showed White favoritism and average body size favoritism. Within communities, there were age and gender differences. Kindergartners from rural Jamaica did not show skin color or body size bias, and White fifth/sixth graders from New England showed reverse, pro-Black and pro-chubby favoritism. In Jamaica, boys displayed more bias than girls. Correct racial self-identification was greater among New England than Jamaican children, possibly related to the choice of White as an ideal self among some Jamaican children. Examiner skin color influenced both color and body size preference; self-identification was influenced by examiner skin color only among the rural Jamaican children.

House-Yard Burials of Enslaved Laborers in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

Four burials were excavated from discrete house-yard compounds in an eighteenth century African Jamaican slave settlement at Seville plantation. Though only four in number, these individuals provide significant information on burial practices and physical conditions within a clearly defined African Jamaican community. The analysis of material remains illuminate living conditions and social relations within the African Jamaican community. Each individual was interred within a separate house-yard and with a unique set of artifacts that yield information about their unique identities and positions within the Seville community. Bioarchaeological assessments describe the osteological remains and detail findings concerning pathologies. To date, they are the only excavated individuals who represent the African Caribbean practice of house-yard burial.

Settlement Patterns and the Origins of African Jamaican Society: Seville Plantation, St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica

Archaeological and historical research at Seville Plantation, Jamaica, are used to explain changes in settlement patterns within the estate's African Jamaican community between 1670 and the late nineteenth century. Sugar plantations, such as Seville, are marked by well-de.ned spatial order based upon economic and power relations that was imposed upon enslaved communities by planters andmanagers. Archaeological evidence is used to explore how enslaved Africans modified this imposed order and rede.ned boundaries in ways that correspond with the development of a distinct African Jamaican society. The rigidly de.ned linear housing arrangements initially established by the planter, and their relations to the Great House, sugar works, and .elds, were reinterpreted by the enslaved residents of the village to create a degree of autonomy and freedom from constant surveillance that was at odds with themotives of the planter class.These changes occurred within the spatial parameters established by the planter, yet they re.ect dynamic and creative social processes that resulted in the emergence of an African Jamaican community.

A Jamaican psychiatrist evaluates diagnoses at a London psychiatric hospital.

Authors have suggested that the high rate of schizophrenia reported for African-Caribbeans living in the UK is due to misdiagnosis by British psychiatrists. To compare the diagnoses made by a Black Jamaican psychiatrist with those of White British psychiatrists. All in-patients on four wards at the Maudsley hospital were approached for the study; 66 participated: 24 White, 29 Black African-Caribbeans and 13 Blacks from other countries of origin. F.W.H., a Black Jamaican psychiatrist, conducted his standard clinical assessment and performed the Present State Examination (PSE) on these patients. His diagnoses were compared with the case note diagnoses made by British psychiatrists, and with the PSE CATEGO diagnoses. Of 29 African and African-Caribbean patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, the diagnoses of the British and the Jamaican psychiatrists agreed in 16 instances (55%) and disagreed in 13 (45%). Hence, interrater reliability was poor (kappa = 0.45). PSE CATEGO diagnosed a higher proportion of subjects as having schizophrenia than the Jamaican psychiatrist did (chi 2 = 3.74, P = 0.052). Agreement between the Jamaican psychiatrist and his UK counterparts about which patients had schizophrenia was poor. PSE CATEGO may overestimate rates of schizophrenia.

Familial study of prostate cancer in Jamaica

Objectives. Rates of prostate cancer in Kingston, Jamaica are extremely high (occurring in more than 300 men out of 100,000 in 1989 to 1993). This article addresses the familial aggregation of prostate cancer in Jamaica. Early evidence for familial prostate cancer was found in the Utah Mormon population. Increased risk of prostate cancer in men with a family history of prostate cancer has been consistently observed in subsequent studies. There have been few studies, however, involving black men, who are known to have an overall higher risk of developing prostate cancer. Methods. Two hundred sixty-three patients with prostate cancer documented by histology were studied. Two hundred sixty-three age-matched control patients were used for comparison. Extensive pedigrees were obtained for both patients with cancer and controls. Data on other malignancies including lung, breast, colon, stomach, and uterine were also collected. Results. The patients with cancer and the controls were comparable with respect to age and family size. Thirty patients with cancer had a first degree relative (ie, brother, father, or son) with prostate cancer compared to 15 controls. The odds ratio is 2.1 (95% confidence interval 1.1 to 4.4). Nine patients with cancer had a second degree relative (ie, grandfather, grandson, or uncle) affected compared to 3 controls. The odds ratio is 3.1 (95% confidence interval 0.8 to 17.8). There was no statistically significant difference in the rates of any of the other cancers studied. Conclusions. Familial aggregation of prostate cancer is clearly evident in black Jamaican men. A man with one first degree relative with prostate cancer is twice as likely as the general population to develop prostate cancer. In addition, there may be a statistical difference in the risk of developing prostate cancer if an individual has one second degree relative affected.

Resisting Memories: The Creole Identities of Lafcadio Hearn and Edouard Glissant

THE APPARENT SWING AWAY FROM AN ESSENTIALIST IDENTITY politics in recent discussions of colonial and postcolonial identity, and toward a vision of cultural hybridity destabilizes any and all such identitarian markers, has resulted in a heightened interest in that process of mutation and adaptation we call creolization, as Paul Gilroy puts it (Small Acts, 209). This is a process the Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite, following in the footsteps of Cuba's Fernando Ortiz, began theorizing in the early 1970s in his various studies of how, even at the height of slavery, white and black Jamaicans were creating and participating in a common culture. Just as the Creole languages of the Caribbean, spoken by white and black alike, were born out of the mixing of European and African languages, so too did the existence of this creolized culture hold out the possibility for Brathwaite of going beyond what Edward Said has called fixed ideas of settled identity and culturally authorized definition (225). Creolization offers a response to the manichean tendencies of colonial discourse-tendencies to which, moreover, Third World theorists eager to dissociate themselves from the sort of existential complicities were an inevitable result of colonial practice, if not of segregationist colonial theory, all too easily fell prey. It has thus taken its place in the postcolonial lexicon, alongside transculturation, hybridity, mongrelization, and the like, all of which anticipate the final collapse of the binary rhetoric of us and them, which is clearly no longer adequate to the complex realities of what Gilroy has called our transnational post-contemporary circumstances (ibid., 193-4). What I propose to do here is look at two opposed but nonetheless genealogically-related visions of the creolization process, one

Black Immigrants in the United States: A Comparison with Native Blacks and other Immigrants

This analysis of 1980 Census data shows that in 1979 immigrant black men had higher employment rates than native-born black men, but the wages of employed members of the two groups were nearly the same. Further, the wage differences that did exist between these groups appear to have stemmed from the selection process associated with migration, not (as has been argued by-some) from differences between the cultural traditions of immigrant and native-born blacks: on a variety of employment and wage measures, black Jamaican and other Caribbean immigrant men in 1979 were remarkably similar to native-born black “movers” (men who had moved out of their state of birth by the Census date).

Lawrence Jasud'swords, sounds and power

Abstract Lawrence Jasud's book, Words, Sounds and Power, is a startling transcription of the verbal meditations of a group of Rastafarian brethren. In this ‘evocation of the heart and mind of Rastafari’ the art of the finely-printed book and the politics of Rastafarian theology coincide in the form of a sacred text. The primary object of Rastafarian worship is the image of Haile Selassie as Christ returned. Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia (1892–1975) during his forty-four year reign made Addis Ababa a focus for African unity. Marcus Garvey, whose efforts on behalf of racial equality for Africans in the New World marked him as a type of John the Baptist in the black movement, proclaimed: ‘Look to Africa, where a Black King shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near’. As if in direct answer to this prophecy, in 1930 Ras Tafari Makonnen ascended the throne of Ethiopia and took the name Haile Selassie, meaning ‘Might of the Trinity’. He claimed descent from the Biblical King Solomon of Jerusalem and Queen Makeda of Sabo (Sheba), the southern lands of Ethiopia, with the inherited titles of ‘King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah’. By the 1960s, when the hopes of the earlier Back to Africa movement had failed to materialize, black Jamaicans leaned towards either political militancy or a religious mysticism based on the Old Testament, which came to be called Rastafari, after the ‘Ras Tafari’, the princely pre-coronation name of Haile Selassie, in whom Rastafarians recognized the Second Coming of God.

Double Jeopardy: Psychopathology of Black Mentally Ill Returned Migrants to Jamaica

The psychopathology of 126 black Jamaican migrants who had spent an average of 12 years in North America and the United Kingdom and had subsequently returned to Jamaica, was established and compared to that of a matched control group of Jamaicans who had never migrated. There was a statistically significant difference in the pattern of diagnosis between the two groups (p less than 0.0001), and although the existence of a past history of mental illness between the groups was not statistically significant (p less than 0.1), the returned migrants had a significantly higher frequency of mental hospitalisation (p less than 0.0001) than the controls, with 94% of the previous hospitalisations of the returned migrants being for schizophrenic illnesses. Case studies are presented to illustrate the social stresses experienced by the returned migrant group in the countries to which they migrated and on the return to their home country, and thus to underscore the double jeopardy faced by these patients experiencing return migration.

Diabetic maculopathy in a Jamaican population

Maculopathy is the commonest cause of severe visual loss from diabetic retinopathy in Jamaica [5]. Ophthalmic assessment of 158 black Jamaican maturity onset diabetics referred randomly from the primary and secondary health centres, demonstrated maculopathy in 48% of patients. Duration of diabetes was a strong risk factor for maculopathy (p less than 0.001). Poor compliance with diabetic and hypertensive therapy may influence the prevalence of maculopathy.

The metacarpal index in homozygous sickle-cell anaemia

I apologize to Dr Calder and his colleagues for inaccurately quoting their work in our paper. Wachira et al (1982) concluded that a high metacarpal index was a racial characteristic of Kenyan Africans. Walker and Ashcroft (1978) suggested that this might also be true for black Jamaicans.

Race and Color: Jamaican Migrants in London and New York City

This article explores the significance of race among Jamaicans in New York City and London. What it means to be a black Jamaican, it is argued, depends on the racial context of the receiving area. Although in the United States and Britain Jamaicans face racial prejudice and discrimination, there are advantages to living in New York. Being part of the larger black population cushions Jamaican migrants in New York from some of the sting of racial prejudice and provides them with easier access to certain occupations and social institutions.

The treacherous feast: a Jamaican Maroon historical myth

On June 6, 1796, an entire community of black Jamaicans, numbering nearly 600, set sail reluctantly from Port Royal, en route to Halifax, where an uncertain future awaited them. The voyage was not of their own making. Victims of British deceit during the protracted conflict which has come to be known as the Second Maroon War, these people had been thrust into the realization of their own worst fears. The Trelawny Maroons, as they were called, were the descendants of rebel slaves who had escaped into the interior, formed their own communities, and finally, completed peace treaties with the British colonial government in 1739. After rebelling again in 1795, the Trelawnys had eventually surrendered to the British, on the condition that they would not be removed from the island. The plantocratic government, however, had found it possible, once its mission was accomplished, to justify on technical grounds an egregious violation of the good faith on which the Maroons had surrendered. Putting the finishing touch to a military campaign distinguished by continual episodes of treachery, the British had decided to punish their van quished enemy by doing precisely what they had earlier promised not to do: deporting them en masse from the island. As is well known, the Trelawny Maroons were finally brought, as a result of this decision, to Nova Scotia, where they spent a few unhappy years. After numerous complaints, they were removed to what was to be their final destination, Sierra Leone, where their descendants live today.2 When the Trelawnys departed Jamaica in 1796 they left behind them a number of other Maroon communities with histories similar to

Prevalence of drug-induced immunologic changes in hypertensive Jamaicans.

Of 137 hypertensive black Jamaicans who took methyldopa for a mean period of 36 months, a positive ANA was found in 1.5% and a positive direct Coombs' test in 0.7%. In 36 patients in whom hydralazine was included in the therapeutic regimen, a positive ANA was seen in only 6%. These results suggest that in black populations, immunologic abnormalities induced by antihypertensive drugs are less common than has been reported in white patients.

Africa and the Black Diaspora: The Future in Historical Perspective

One out of every five black men lives outside Africa, most of them in the western hemisphere. Some, like the black Cubans, are now native speakers of Spanish. Some have grown up with the Portuguese language in the ghettoes of Brazil. Still others, scattered from Haiti to Martinique, are part of the French-speaking world. And there are even a few Arabic speakers in parts of the Middle East. But the largest single group outside Africa are the 'Afro-Saxons/ black people whose mother tongue is English.1 They include black Americans, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, and, increasingly, black Britons and black Canadians.