Dear David,

Reparations for slavery, a topic that comes and goes, has once again come to the fore of public discourse. This topic's most recent public showing, is due in large part to the Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron's official visit to Jamaica, a former British colony, his address to their government and Portia Simpson, Jamaica's Prime Minister's words to him.

Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles, in his role as the Chairman of the CARICOM Reparation Commission, penned an open letter to the British PM, raising the issue of reparations to him. Just over a year ago, in an address before The House of Commons, Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles spoke on reparations and gave suggestions/proposals of how reparations could work. The letter is posted in full below. The link to the reparations address can be read by clicking here, or the link below the letter.

This is not an opinion post today, but rather one seeking discussion about reparations, and the opinions of people here in Barbados, the Caribbean and the wider world about the topic. What do we think folks, reparations yay or nay? Yay, but different to the proposition in the link?

Open Letter to the Honourable David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK & Northern Ireland

26th September 2015

Dear Honourable Prime Minister,

I join with the resolute and resilient people of Jamaica and their government in extending to you a warm and glorious welcome to our homeland. We recognise you, Prime Minister, given your family's long and significant relationship to our country, as an internal stakeholder with historically assigned credentials.  To us, therefore, you are more than a Prime Minister. You are a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears' sins of the enslavement of our ancestors.

As we prepare for you a red carpet befitting your formal status we invite you to cast your eyes upon the colours of our national flag that symbolise the history we share. You are, Sir, a prized product of this land and the bonanza benefits reaped by your family and inherited by you continue to bind us together like birds of a feather.

Be assured, Prime Minister, that you will find no more generous people on our planet Earth than those who will greet you with golden hearts and civilised consciousness. I urge that you embrace the sincerity of our salutations. It is born and bred in the cauldron of our enslavement by your family and society. Consider it a golden gift of friendship and not simply the empty expression of protocols relevant to the events you will attend. It is furthermore, an overture to an expectation of a dialogue of reparatory justice that can redefine for us a new intimacy for this long 21st century on which we are embarked.

Your advisers would have informed you that beyond the boundary of the affairs of State, civil society welcomes you without reservation, though with a qualification that bears the burden of our tortured past within the historically textured present. I speak of outstanding and unresolved matters that are relevant to our sense of mutual respect as equal nations dedicated to the cause of furthering humanity's finest imagined destiny.

I speak, Sir, of the legacies of slavery that continue to derail, undermine and haunt our best efforts at sustainable economic development and the psychological and cultural rehabilitation of our people from the ravishes of the crimes against humanity committed by your British State and its citizens in the form of chattel slavery and native genocide.

In this regard I urge you to be aware that the issue of reparatory justice for these crimes is now before our respective nations, and the wider world. It is not an issue that can be further ignored, remain under the rug, or placed on back burners, as your minister who recently visited us so aptly described your agenda for Jamaica and the Caribbean. It will generate the greatest global political movement of our time unless respected and resolved by you, the leader of the State that extracted more wealth from our enslavement than any other.

The Jamaican economy, more than any other, at a critical moment in your nation's economic development, fuelled its sustainable growth. Britain as a result became great and Jamaica has remained the poorer. Jamaica now calls upon Britain to reciprocate, not in the context of crime and compulsion, but in friendly, mutually respected dialogue. It is an offer of opportunity written not in the blood of our enslaved ancestors but in the imagination of their offspring and progeny who have survived the holocaust and are looking to the future for salvation.

As a man, a humane man, with responsibility for the humanity of your nation we call upon you to rise to this moment as you realise and internalise that without the wealth made by your enslaving ancestors, right here in our Jamaica, we would not be enchained together, today, called upon to treat with this shared past.

Successive governments in this land, a place still groaning under the weight of this injustice,  have done well during the fifty three years of sovereignty, but the burden of the inherited mess from slavery and colonialism has overwhelmed many of our best efforts. You owe it to us as you return here to communicate a commitment to reparatory justice that will enable your nation to play its part in cleaning up this monumental mess of Empire. We ask not for handouts or any such acts of indecent submission. We merely ask that you acknowledge responsibility for your share of this situation and move to contribute in a joint programme of rehabilitation and renewal. The continuing suffering of our people, Sir, is as much your nation's duty to alleviate as it is ours to resolve in steadfast acts of self-responsibility.

In the four corners of Kingston there are already whispers that your strategy will be to seek a way to weaken Jamaica's commitment to Caribbean reparations in a singular act of gift granting designed to divide and rule and to subvert the regional discourse and movement.  You Sir, are a Briton, not a Greek, and we have no reason therefore to fear what you bear. But we do ask that you recall that the Caribbean region was once your nation's unified field for taxation, theatre for warfare, and space for the implementation of trade law and policy. Seeing the region as one is therefore in your diplomatic DNA; and this we urge that you remember.

Finally Sir, I write from the perspective of an academic bred in Britain and reared in the University of the West Indies, an institution your nation planted in Kingston in 1948 with a small but significant grant. It would honour us to show you what we the people have reaped from this single seed. We have created a flourishing federal farm that now cultivates the minds of millions, a symbol of our collective determination to take seriously our self-responsibility and to place our dignity as an emerging nation before any other consideration. From this singular seed we have grown one of the finest universities in the world crafted by our hands and inspired by our dreams.

This story, Sir, can guide your reflection as to who we are and what we expect of you.  We urge you then, in this light, to indicate your nation's willingness to work towards a reparatory justice programme for the Caribbean, with a view to allowing us to come together in order to come to closure, put this terrible past behind us, and to leave it to us to continue the making of our future.

Kindest regards,
Hilary Beckles,
Chairman, CARICOM Reparations Commission.

The reparations proposal as taken from a transcript of a speech given by Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles before the British House of Commons in the summer of 2014 can be viewed here: https://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/news/releases/release.asp?id=514

Fruit Baskets and Floral Arrangements

When I look into the Caribbean, and anywhere where the African resides, I see beauty and I am reminded of floral arrangements and fruit baskets :D. A plethora of people, ideas, ideals, philosophies and hues. I know people usually go to the rainbow as a metaphor for broad spectrum beauty, and it does fit my purpose, but the rainbow lacks the depth of diversity I'm trying to portray, and a fruit basket , with its grapes and oranges and plums and apples and mangoes, or the floral arrangement with the roses, and orchids, and oleanders just does it much better. But the fruit basket and the floral arrangement do all share the feature I'm going to highlight, they are all cut off from their roots, and as such their beauty is fleeting, if anything it represents a facade of something already dead, and at best dying.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey said that a people without knowledge of their history are like a tree without its roots, and I look around in this fruit basket and floral arrangement (yes I'm in it) and see no roots. I look beneath it at the foundation and see wicker lined with decorative tissue and cut stems in water and that green thing - no roots. A rooted mahogany tree does not ask whether or not it is a mahogany tree, it knows it. A polished mahoganhy chair may, however, need to be reminded every now and again of it mahogany heritage. Comedian Kat Williams did a joke about tigers in a zoo, wherein the tigers begin to question whether or not they are tigers or "vicious ass koala bears." Until a break in the zoo routine occurs, the tigers are a shell of themselves and in limbo where their self image is concerned.
Hello Black people!! We are the tigers. We are the beautiful, rootless fruits and flowers, we are dead to ourselves and unsure of our heritage. Honestly, unlike the self questioning tigers, most of us do not know it or accept it.

I did not want to talk about it, I was really trying to avoid the entire debate and maybe blog about music again, or something else, but I am here at 4 in the AM writing about it; bleaching!
I was in a few online debates about it and well Sade's "Another Rasta Rant", pretty much hit it up already, but then I was here vibsing in my magical FB music group and listening to Tarrus Riley's "Shaka Zulu Pickney" and felt the need to write.
Bleaching is once again being highlighted in the popular media here in the Caribbean thanks to the new stylings of Vybz Kartel and his unashamed attitude about the entire thing. Bleaching has, for years, been a matter highlighted time and time again the the Jamaican media, with newspaper articles, television news segments and television specials, each time portrayed as something affecting the poorest of the population. (The middle and upper middle classes have other, more discreet ways of skin lightening - marriage/breeding for example. The underlying mentality or rationale, however, is the same.)

There is a running train of thought in society that, the fairer the skin, or the closer to white that one is the more success you will have or at least the more avenues/oppurtunities are available to you. Given the historical context that society is built upon this maybe an ugly notion or thought to some, but a quiet real one, that is it a real perception that people have. The lighter skinned blacks are the ones that dominate the popular media, dem and dem good, pretty hair. As the girl in the video said, no one can tell her anything at night in the club because she is white. So I know there are many out there that think that we live in a "post-racial" era, lol, or in a "colour blind society - not yet folks. Take a look at these videos here below and see why the society, and note that when I say the society I mean the global society, is not yet post racial or colour blind.

Video one is British based. The creams are illegal in Europe, but only to sell regionally, but can be made and exported. If they are too dangerous for Europeans why would they not be too dangerous for the rest of the world? Note that in the video the seized shipment being smuggled back into Europe is coming from Africa.

 

Video 2 is not so much about bleaching, but the girl Jenna does highlight and manifest within herself, the mentality of society taken to the confused extremes that lead to bleaching.

 

Video 3 is the first part of Tyra's episode about bleaching and also highlights that it is a fairly long standing African American subculture as well. (notice that these women's faces appear more matted than actually lightened and this is what I meant about Bajan women's faces looking over washed)

Notice that this is not a Caribbean phenomenon but exists in the "post-racial" American society and Britain, and from what we can gather from the first video shown, the continent, Africa, as well. This is a problem present in all post-colonial and former slave societies. Interestingly enough, the places with highest cited usage are poorest of the countries on that list.
Until recently bleaching was unheard of, or at least not spoken about in the popular and news media and seemed to evade the public sphere here in Barbados. Honestly, I always used to wonder sometimes about some women I used to see with faces that did not seem to match the rest of their heads, not to mention their bodies, and I said to myself these resemble the bleachers I see in the Jamaican and other international media. I, however, also said to myself that I never heard about bleaching in Barbados and dismissed them as women inept at applying makeup properly or persons who over washed their faces (yuh know what I mean too, dem girls dat does be washing dem face every chance them get at school, especially right before they leave to go to town on evenings after school). Apparently, I was wrong because they were most likely bleaching, and it has been happening here for a long time, but as a girl told me, "nuhbody din studying nuffin so back den, is only now dat Kartel start up pun it dat people talking." It really should not be surprising though, considering the reasons for bleaching are: poor self image and a belief in the concept that lighter is better, that it would have a subculture presence in Barbados and be overlooked by the media and society.

Well niggas (omg he called us niggas), guess what?!?!          wait for it, wait for it...     it is time to wake up and stop this shit.
I know it is not as simple as "wake up and stop it". It most definately is not as simple as, "when Kartel moves on, so too will this trend," because by and large this is not merely a trend, there is nothing trendy about it. It is a serious psychological problem deeply entrenched in the psyche of a diaspora longtold that they are second, third and fourth class citizens, not of any particular country but of the world. This psychological problem is socially and culturally maintained as the result of the colonial and neo-colonial world paradigm.
The world cannot get to a post-racial or colour blind state when the past is yet to be overcome. James Brown's song cannot do it, Bob Marley cannot do it, Michael Jackson cannot do it, H.I.M. Haile Selassie I in his speech to the United Nations cannot do it, Barack Obama cannot do it, and the month of February sure as hell will do it. It is a problem historically rooted and the first thing that must happen is that that history has to be properly and fully understood. This means not leaving out the bad parts or misleading people with omittances, like some historians traditionally do, neither does it mean romanticising and skewing the oppressed side as some other historians do. From there you work on changing the social elements used, overtly and discreetly, to create and maintain the existing psyche and attempt to neutralise and reverse them. This can only be done once the contemporary situation is understood through its historical context, so remember that it is history first before attempting to correct.
One has to see that the mindset and rationale behind bleaching is not exclusive to bleaching, and that it is deeply institutionalised. It is so entrenched in fact that some parts of it are seen almost as natural features of modern, contemporary society. I do not have to list or highlight any examples, you know them. (if you are from Mars, or live the delusion of a colour blind world, just listen to some of the rationalising given in the videos. The girl Jenna from the first Tyra clip manifests some of those things)


As I said we are pretty and diverse like the fruit baskets and floral arrangements, and just as rootless and slowly moving to a wilting stage. It is time to be more like orchards and gardens; lastingly beautiful and firmly rooted. This is not just for my African/Black people, but all humanity, just love yourself and respect others. Big up yourself without belittling others, that is pretty much the answer really.

I just like live music, especially live reggae, ain't nothing like a stageshow. <3

Piss in my Pocket and call it Gold; Stop Insulting My Intelligence.

Setting: Caribbean.
Total population: 38,045,052*

There are a few people who sit in fancy chairs around fancy tables in each island and tattle amongst themselves, and then they meet with their counterparts from across the region and tattle amongst themselves again and then they stand behind lecterns, on top of podiums, in front of cameras and speak to us, the ordinary folk, and say we are moving towards integration, we are finding and working towards ways of unifying all almost 40 million people.

After this the brilliant ones amongst us sit in lecture theaters and and classrooms and library cubicles and analyse the implications and possibilities that would arise from this unification and integration. They write papers and present their findings to their peers who either cheer or chide and then it is filtered by removing jargon and convoluted terms and given to Joe Public so as to get them on board and in a mind state to facilitate what is called the integration movement.

All is fine and fair so far, here is where it gets tricky, and where the insulting of my intelligence begins; ready? Remember your parents back in the days of your youth telling you, "Do as I say not as I do."? Well the officials, the academics, the institutions, the governments are manifesting this parenting cliche. How? Like this.

The University of the West Indies, an institution created within the vision of regional integration, one university, three campuses, none offering the same specialties so as to make people leave home and travel (read as integrate) to other regional territories and foster relationships with a regional cross section of persons. This would facilitate a much smoother integration process...LOL! So fast forward a few years, and the campuses begin offering the same things as each other, so Bajans really do not need to leff home and Jamaicans don't haffi fly out and Trinis can stay home and lime. Well non-campus territories still have to send their people out, but integration is a all encompassing not selective, as some people would like to have us believe. University of Guyana? 4th UWI campus? Things of myth and legend I believe.

Caribbean Court of Justice, who sign on? Enough said, moving on.

Media. Yes media. "The integration movement is making significant strides to becoming a reality", says one news report, then the rest of the news program is dedicated to how Jamaicans are drug dealers and prostitutes and murderous bastards, Trinidadians are obnoxious, self centered people with serious internal integration problems based on a racial divide, the Winward and Leeward Islands are hopeless banana republics and the non-English speaking countries are not worth a once-over.
I sense a mixed message here..subtle.

What is the end result? well you get stories like these:
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Finger-raped-in-Barbados_8573453

With comments like these:

• This is an outrage and very shameful. The Jamaican government has many tools at its disposal to retaliate against the Barbados yet is seemingly polite about this travesty. Sadly, this is not an isolated incident and requires a string response. Jamaicans, if little Barbados can treat some of us like that, you retaliate by not vacationing there, don't buy goods made in Barbados and boycott Bajan owned companies in Jamaica. Support Jamaican owned enterprises.
  Jamaicans, you have power. Use it!!!

• Jamaica must go it alone, no to Caricom and no to CCJ. It is a good thing that Jamaica did get out of the West Indian Federation. This "Finger-raped" would never happened to Shanique if she was traveling on an US or Canadian or EU passport because those governments will "punish" Barbados.
  It is bad when a "white country" theat Jamaicans "bad" but when it it a 'black country" doing the same there are no words to discribe shame shame on our so call " black" brothers and sistersin Barbados.

Someone somewhere thinks I am stupid.

Why produce/promote songs like this then nuh if wunna really aint bout this togetherness thing?

Piss in muh facking pocket and call it gold man, I stupid so. Would have to be.

Guidance and blessings, Jah love!

*Figure from: http://encyclopedia.caribseek.com/Caribbean_Population_and_Languages/