Chapter 9 - Mapping Caribbean Racisms: Unsettling the Creole, Unseating Whiteness

Summary

Introduction

In the Global Northwest, whiteness is a ghost in the Anglophone Caribbean because of the erasure of past white European settler colonialism and its involvement in genocide, African and Indigenous enslavement and African, Chinese, Indian, Javan and white indenture. Caribbean whiteness is also erased because of the continuing necessity of racial purity to prove one's whiteness. The spectre of ‘race mixing’ and the stubbornness of white European racial boundaries allow some Caribbeans of Lebanese and Syrian descent to benefit from colourism while simultaneously being kept apart from Creole whiteness, for example, in censuses (Douglass 1992). This non-European descent texture of Caribbean whiteness and the disappearance of the white, European settler colonial past mean that white Anglophone Caribbean bodies have also been made to vanish from national public life, although they are integral to it (Douglass 1992). These bodies have been replaced by a predominance of African-descent Black people and people of colour, but the Anglophone Caribbean has whiteness in its past, present and future. This Creole whiteness emerges across a variety of bodies and remains a small percentage of the population but is the elite in economic terms.

Being an Anglophone Caribbean white elite also means marginalization, unbelonging and illegitimacy within cultures in which Black African descent is largely hegemonic, such as Jamaica, or where there is continuing contestation for hegemony between the Africandescent and Indian-descent populations as in Trinidad and Tobago. Notwithstanding poor white populations, while it is elite, whiteness is an absent presence. As an identification and position of privilege in the twenty-first century, whiteness carries Caribbean racisms in terms of structural inequalities based on skin colour, wealth and status as well as cultural approximation to that which is seen as ‘European’ and ‘not African’. This chapter looks at the complexities in the emergence of Caribbean whiteness in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago (Trinbago); uses Peta Gay Jensen's (2005) The Last Colonials as a source of data to interrogate the meanings, paradoxes and affective life of Caribbean whiteness as creolized in contrast to metropolitan whiteness; and thinks through the failure of Creole whiteness in its desire for belonging through ‘browning’/‘brownness’/‘light-skin’ aesthetics.