Don't we all have a black grandmother anyway?

The idea of the black grandmother in the proverbial closet for most Mexicans who would consider themselves Mestizo or even White is a topic explored by Professor Henry Louis Gates in this powerful episode of the "Black in Latin America" series on PBS.

The series of documentaries gives a fascinating insight into the definitions of race in this region, and as a Jamaican it is most informative given that our own concepts of race are coloured by our unique colonial experience and in modern times exist more within the context of a class dichotomy than overt ethnic differences, at least in politically correct discourse. In fact very often the mere mention of racial differences is seen as impolite and crass as we are said to exist in a post-racial democracy and live by the motto "Out of Many, One People".

Every black Jamaican has at least one White, Indian, Chinese, or Middle-Eastern grandparent or great-grandparent. It is this diversity in our bloodlines that we feel makes us unique and distinct of course from Africans (and even Haitians but that is a whole 'nother post).

The fact that I have ancestors of other races does not affect my racial identity in the way that Gates posits that this admission will change the Mexican's concept of self and that the black grandmother is therefore hidden in the closet out of shame. Perhaps in the Latin American colonial experience, distinct as it was from our own in as far as the Spanish had their own modus operandi, blackness was seen as much more of a blight or a malady than it was seen relative to the British colonial experience.

Perhaps in the British colonial experience being a black person with some measure of non-black heritage was a mark of superiority, of civility, of racial evolution and ascent from the impenetrable bush of the dark continent into the cobble stone streets of British genteel modernity. A sort of taming of the uncivilized African from a eugenic perspective. And conversely the "white Jamaican", a social invention as distinct from an ethnically white person, sees his blackness as a necessary evil born of necessity. Some mixed race Jamaicans that fall into the category of "brown", the Jamaican equivalent of Mestizo or Mulatto, are seemingly proud of the fact that they are "mongrels" though this is said with a smiling almost tongue-in-cheek tone which to me sends a message that they are subconsciously ashamed of their inherent blackness.

The Mestizo in the Spanish colonial experience became a distinct racial identity in and of itself and was separate from its blackness whether for shame or because of economic advantage.

Maybe it is an internalized inferiority complex that makes a black person in Jamaica proud of their European or Asian heritage and conversely makes a Mexican (irrespective of hue) uncomfortable with their African ancestry : Black < White

I am very aware of the fact that despite some of the 'softer' more Eur-Asian pheno-typical features I have acquired through heredity that I am a black man. I am a black man of burnt caramel complexion with slightly lighter than normal eyes, a straight nose, with relatively close Indian and European ancestry and a very British surname, but I am a black man nonetheless.

This is not because I believe necessarily in the one-drop system of racial identification which says that African blood sullies and dominates, but really because that is what I see in the mirror: thick lips, coarse hair, and dark skin.

My Indian and White fore-parents don't change my personal racial identity and I believe that if it did it would speak to a discomfort I have with my blackness which would cause me to place emphasis on the fact that I'm not a "pure" black. I say this because interestingly I have heard people say this very thing to try and explain away their Africanness while trying to assimilate into a non-black social environment.

This is why the documentary resonated so much with me. The shame of blackness is something I have witnessed and can empathize with being brought up in a culture that values non-blackness or sees non-black blood as advantageous. I still have to shake the culture of my high school years where the only pretty girls were the mulattas with hair that curls into long bouncy ringlets when wet...and whose hair is always wet because when it dries out they look like your average light-skinned black girl.

Jamaica is not post-racial and these kinds of discussions are ones we need to have among ourselves if we are ever to truly understand why we are one people out of many ethnicities.

I really wish Gates had done such a documentary on Jamaica.

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