Since returning to Jamaica from the US a couple of years ago, I have been keenly aware of race and the positioning of whiteness in the Caribbean broadly and in Jamaica more specifically. A few months ago I found myself in the area of New Kingston at Emancipation Park. Located between the Jamaica Pegasus hotel and the Courtyard by Marriott in Kingston, this well-trafficked park and thorough-fare boasts two 11-foot-tall bronze statues (see picture below). To quote the park’s website, “This prominent sculpture comprises of two naked black male and female statues gazing to the skies – symbolic of their triumphant rise from the horrors of slavery.”
When I paused to observe the statues, a dread-locked man who was already near the statues, stepped back and moved towards me. After a quiet good afternoon he said: “Yuh know seh ah one white ooman mek dat?” As he asked, he gestured, and his hand seemed to be pointing to the foot-long penis. I side-eyed his apparent comment on the hyper-sexualization of the black man by the white woman; but he quickly clarified his point: “Ah one white ooman mek di statue dem. Eeen all ah Jamaica ah no black man and no black ooman dem could find mek big-big statue?” I did not have a ready answer for his question. While the sculptures have been in New Kingston since 2003, I had paid greater attention to their immense nude presence than to their creator. And, to some extent, I wonder if I had presumed the sculptor to be of the Afro-Jamaican majority. After a bit of silence, I finally replied, “You make a good point, my friend. And I’m sure, nuff black people it tek to set this big-big statue in place.” He nodded, we both looked on for a few more seconds, then he went his way, and I mine.
“Nuff black people it tek to set this big-big statue in place” — I’m realizing now — was double-speak. The park’s website says that more than 100 people were called in to install the works in Emancipation Park. But how many hundreds of thousands of black men and women lived, worked, and died under a British slave system only to have their emancipatory moment cast in bronze by a white Jamaican artist or, as my dread-locked friend said “one white ooman”?
What does it mean for white Caribbean people to produce art that tells the stories of Afro-Caribbean people? What does it mean for white Americans to tell the stories of black Americans? And what does it mean when white people are questioned for their choice to tell these stories? In no way supporting Kanye West’s recent comments that “slavery was a choice,” I will say that the history and legacy of slavery does not belong only to African-descendants in the New World. Slavery belongs to Europe’s descendants in the New World, too. After all, we are both recipients of this colonial history, and depending on where we fall on the racialization scale, slavery willed us either a burden or bequeathed to us a gift.
As I think about the questions that public art and public discourse can provoke, I too am provoked by the conversation I shared with a stranger while we both stood before two enormous black-bronze nudes in a public park. Accessible public art like Laura Facey’s “Redemption Song” installation in Emancipation Park should regularly invite discourse about society. It is meant to remind passersby that black people in Jamaica are both redeemed and emancipated. But do these conversations frequently take place and have white Jamaicans been made aware that they too were freed by abolitionist legislation? That is to say that when the enslaved were freed during the 19th century, so too were massa and miss. But, even though I have tried, I cannot think of any monuments that were erected to remind the descendants of masters that they are emancipated now and that they no longer need to subjugate the descendants of Africans. Without reminders, how will massa and miss understand that slavery has been over and that they have been free to be without prejudice for more than a century? How will the white West Indian know that he or she no longer has to play the role of oppressor?
What do monuments actually want us to remember? Are we meant to remember that we are free or that we are enslaved when we look at Facey’s sculpted “Redemption Song”? There are so many mixed messages residing in our memories. Allow me to recall just a few. Remember when Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered a massacre of the white people who remained in Haiti following the success of the 1804 Haitian Revolution? Remember the 1950s when “Massa Day Done” became a successful campaign slogan for Trinidad’s first prime minister, Eric Williams? Remember the 1970s when Michael Manley’s democratic socialism in Jamaica spread the fear of murder and rape throughout white Jamaica? Remember the hemispheric War on Drugs? Remember the global War on Terror? Remember trans-Atlantic and hemispheric trade embargoes? Remember international travel restrictions? Remember economic inequality and how it mirrors racial hierarchy from here to anywhere to everywhere? Remember unequal policing, unequal charges, and unequal jail time? Remember a few years ago when white masculinist studies programs and clubs started surfacing at US universities? But we thought massa day was done? And while Black activism held the media spotlight on the abuses sustained by Black American bodies, the introduction of last year’s #metoo trended public attention away from Black bodies and towards “white women’s tears.” Massa may be under pressure, but only because miss is doing the threatening. Many of the predatory men who trespassed against these women still maintain their civil liberty, wealth, and freedom to oppress others.
Maybe this is why Childish Gambino recently invited both miss and massa to experience the video monument that is “This is America” (see below).
And as I saw the rich, pained layers that went into the conceptualization of this visual project, I wondered if miss and massa would see it too? I thought also of the Caribbean and race inequality, class disparity, prejudice, willful blindness, and willful silence here. “This Is America” led my memory to recall Rihanna’s layered club-banger and recent Howard University protest song, “BBHMM” from 2015. Remember? This was the song that think-piece writers said was about colonial reparations? Watch it again post-“This is America” and you may read Rihanna anew. Watch it again knowing that Rihanna owns her masters (double-speak intended). Watch it again knowing that Rihanna named the first album she made on her own independent label Anti? (Read Erin MacLeod’s 2016 piece in NPR here.) Watch “Bitch Better Have My Money” again knowing that Rihanna has done for the epithet “savage” what Black Americans have done for “nigger.” What more clever way to re-appropriate the colonizer’s negative perceptions of the indigenous Taino and the imported African cargo, than to name her new lingerie line Savage?
As white West Indians negotiate the nuances of these distinct national spaces that make up the Caribbean, do they think introspectively of privilege or its consequences like white Jamaican writer Anthony Winkler did? I wonder. And when a white woman dresses up, powders her face with a perfectly-matched Fenty bronzer (carefully created for all shades), and props up her bust with a Savage bra, 
will she think of how black women’s beauty was denied for centuries? I wonder. And as white Americans sway to Atlanta’s best trap music, will they think of the war on drugs and how it further crippled and criminalized America’s Black communities into dangerous trap neighborhoods? Nicole Arbour’s quick to YouTube adaptation of Childish Gambino’s video monument, “This Is America: Women’s Edit,” tells me the answer is likely no. While Lil Dicky and Chris Brown’s “Freaky Friday” just leaves me speechless.
Massa day not done. And miss isn’t vacating her seat of colonial privilege yet either. If only they knew or could be reminded that like their enslaved counterparts, they have been emancipated and are free. But the funny thing is, emancipation and abolition are not synonymous. Emancipation is a process, while abolition is an action. The 1834 proclamation of emancipation only presented freedom to the youngest of the enslaved people in the British colonies. From 1834 to 1838, enslaved Africans over the age of six years were emancipated from the title slave only to become “apprentices” who provided the same unpaid labor, suffered the same tortures of violence and oppression, and faced fatal punishments if they chose to attempt an escape. Under the Emancipation Proclamation’s apprenticeship system, the former colonial slave masters ceased being slave masters only to become violent and oppressive apprentice masters instead. Emancipation presented freedom for very few.
As I think about my day in the park, I wonder how might we relate to each other in Jamaica differently today, if Emancipation Park were actually called Abolition Park?
These will be the words that get me through this journey. These will be the words that remind me to go to bed after staying awake for 37 and 1/2 hours straight. These will be the words that remind me to at least buy a water to wash down the one meal I had for the entire day. These will be the words that remind me that I am doing alright, even though my instructors think I’m not as smart as… she. Yes, she. The she that seems to have all the right tools and right answers for everything. These will be the words that remind me that I am doing my best, even when I don’t have bus fare to get to campus. These will be the words that remind me that I do belong in University, even though I am not the same age or same class or same nationality as my classmates. Me needs these words to remind me that exams are not set to destroy me, even though I feel destroyed. Exams are not set to break my spirit, even though they make me feel inadequate and overwhelmed.
After all, it is the ultimate driving machine. It has been the aspirational vehicle for many drivers the world over. It is the vehicle that one drives to communicate driving excellence, smart wealth, and a need for speed. Yes, it is a dream car, but who in Jamaica can comfortably afford this dream? Not most, I’m afraid. When I see the shiny new imported cars, and calculate the duties and taxes to have them here, I am reminded of The Roots’ pointed music video for their 1996 hip hop classic “What They Do.” (The above picture is from the music video. If you haven’t seen the video or heard the song, click 
And from a practical stand point, in Jamaica, where potholes (like the one pictured at left) litter the roads, where rains can easily flood the interior of a car, and parts are expensive to replace, I find it perplexing that with a very low ride height BMW’s 3- and 5-Series vehicles are still sold. I suppose status symbols trump practicality. I suppose idolized objects of wealth win even when they are not ideal for the terrain. Why else is there a Porsche dealership in Jamaica?
After carrying out dozens of interviews with HIV infected individuals in Jamaica, in 2007 Dawes and Cogan, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center, created a visually stunning, multi-modal, and interactive website called 
Moving through Jamaica, signs like this one (right) adorn many a shop, government agency, restaurant, and office park. With startling regularity, dress codes cycle in and out of public debate in Jamaica with the #RightToBareArms being the most recent. A lot of the recent discussion has surrounded women’s clothing, but what about the dear merino? This holey garment (pun intended) is not welcome in “proper” places of business. But, if we really think about the merino metaphorically, it is exactly what we need in “proper” Jamaican establishments because the mesh marina represents an insiding-out of expectations and, more obviously, transparency.
Every few weeks I would type into the Twitter search box the following hashtag: #DearJamaicans. I know that the show was viewed here so I supposed that Jamaicans were a part of the choir to whom the show was preaching. Twitter tells me that my supposition was incorrect. There are only a few posts that met the gauntlet that Dear White People’s Sam and Coco set with truth-bombs like: “Dear White People, if you wanted to demoralize us with your European beauty standard, mission accomplished.” But, still, a few is not zero.
To date, a #DearJamaicans hashtag has not yet taken set. Why?
How are they negotiating Jamaica’s performance of policing, yet the willful blindness to actual criminal activity? And, no, the answer to these questions is not “educated/privileged/brown Jamaicans do not feel frustration.” I regularly engage with students who are unsure of how to negotiate their progressive thinking and their regressive reality. I hear their frustrations and wonder if this realization is what feeds the desire for many Jamaicans to migrate if they can or self-medicate if physical departure is not possible.
The series debuted July 2017 and it is smart, laser sharp, and it was right on time because I really was beginning to lose patience with my reality. For its regional uniqueness, I resist making direct comparisons to Dear White People. The lead character is Renee Patience, played by singer, songwriter, and newly-minted social activist Sevana. Renee’s best friend is Desiree, played by Kimberly Patterson of Nick Cannon’s King of the Dancehall. And the very clever Justine Henzell is executive producer. I believe the show’s gift is in how it balances dialogue and silence. As one watches the series, it’s useful to remember that mirrors never talk, they reflect. Through contemporary, uptown Jamaican eyes, this series takes a pointed look at Jamaican ism schism. And through the character Desiree it throws necessary shade on the self-serving use of social media. If you haven’t watched the episodes, I encourage you to do so right now by clicking 
