Caribbean Racisms

Connections and Complexities in the Racialization of the Caribbean Region

I. Law, S. Tate

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349449620, 9781137287274
• eBook ISBN: 9781137287281
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book identifies and engages with an analysis of racism in the Caribbean region, providing an empirically-based theoretical re-framing of both the racialisation of the globe and evaluation of the prospects for anti-racism and the post-racial.

1

Racial Caribbeanization: Origins and Development

Introduction

This book identifies, and engages with, an analysis of racism in the Caribbean region, contributing further to the Mapping Global Racisms series and an empirically based theoretical reframing of both the racialization of the globe and the evaluation of the prospects for anti-racism and the post-racial. The 30 contemporary territories of the Caribbean and their differing colonial and post-colonial contexts provide a highly dynamic setting that urges a reassessment of the ways in which contemporary processes of racialization are working. This book seeks to develop a new account of racialization in this region, and many established arguments, propositions and narratives of racial Caribbeanization are challenged in the coming chapters. As Basil Reid has argued in his debunking of 11 myths of Caribbean history (2009), over 7,000 years of complex human history preceded the arrival of Europeans in the 1400s, and the old story of ferocious, cannibalistic Caribs pursuing peaceful Arawaks across the islands ‘endlessly repeated in history primers and magazine articles’ (Hulme and Whitehead, 1992: 3) is largely rejected.

Racial exterminations, exploitations and separations are central to the making of the Caribbean, and so is mixedness. We are all mixed. So what is to be made of debates about ‘racial and ethnic mixing’? We all possess mixed ethnic and cultural heritage, and racial groups are a scientific fiction, so the notion of racial mixing is itself misleading. We all have common African ancestry (as confirmed by the Human Genome Project 2007 study ‘Genetic Anthropology, Ancestry and Human Migration’).¹ Therefore, the fundamental nature of racial and ethnic mixing is known but not widely accepted. The marking and making of ethnoracial mixing provides one of the core registers through which the peoples of the contemporary Caribbean are portrayed and brought into social and political being. The Caribbean is characterized by some of the most complex interactions between previously divergent populations, from the extensive Mesoamerican migrations in pre-Columbian times onwards (Moreno-Estrada et al., 2013). The dilemmas and directions of historical and contemporary debates about what work whiteness, blackness and mixedness do in the Caribbean context is a central theme here. Through this Caribbean triad the power of racialization and its long reach is held up to critical scrutiny.

The Caribbean is a complex context and this book cannot do justice to all parts, peoples and places, although it does aim to establish and interrogate some key overarching regional relational racial dynamics and processes, together with attention particularly to the insular, rather than mainland, Caribbean, and a set of selected case-study contexts, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Racial Caribbeanization is the process of ethnoracial domination of this region rooted in European colonialism, which encompasses the conquest and genocide of the Amerindian peoples, the enslavement and exploitation of Africans, the use of indentured labour, and the embedding of racial and ethnic hierarchies in post-colonial, post-independence contexts. The interrogation of this process is the central focus of this book. This chapter introduces the Caribbean region and identifies the origins and development of racism and processes of racialization. First, aspects of indigeneity, indigenous groups and the colonial experience are examined. Second, the complex shaping of structures of racial hierarchy across the Caribbean is examined together with the exterminationist and segregationist logics of successive regimes and their operation in the context of plantation slavery and colonialism. Mapping out the diverse range of contexts and the ways in which differential patterns of racialization have been embedded, the chapter provides a thematic and relational account of these processes. Connections with processes of racial Europeanization and racial Americanization are examined, as well as links with other significant contexts, including India and China through in-migration. Also using an interactionist approach (Dikötter, 2008), the chapter seeks to assess both the uniqueness and specificities of racisms in Caribbean contexts and the impact of external structures of racial rule and racial regulation.

Racial beginnings

Proto-racisms and the pre-colonial, pre-Columbian circum-Caribbean

Tracing the origins of structures of racial differentiations and hierarchies, and their interconnections with religion, science, gender and sexuality and the operation of military and economic power, is foundational to the theorization of the racialization of the planet. Mistakes in our historical analysis have serious consequences and will produce poor theory. It is a common practice in much of the literature on race and racism in both the Caribbean and Europe to claim, explicitly or implicitly, that the history of race begins with the development of Western capitalist modernity, identifying early colonial encounters in the Caribbean (Hulme, 1986) and the development of post-Reformation racial science in Europe (Hannaford, 1996) as key moments in that process. Joyce Chaplin states that ‘race was Atlantic’ (2002: 154) and, more definitively, ‘racism in its present form is a specific product of Atlantic history’. This all-encompassing claim is disputed here.

The Eurocentric assertion that racism is solely a product of Western capitalist modernity is, however, now fundamentally contested as we can identify pre-modern, non-Western and communist racisms which need to be integrated into contemporary critical race theory. Critical analysis of polyracism and proto-racisms in the pre-modern era – the development of non-Western racisms, for example, in Africa and China, and the racialization of communist modernist political projects such as in the Soviet Union and Cuba, produced as earlier works in the Mapping Global Racisms series – elaborates these arguments (Law, 2012; Law et al., 2014). This poses a series of questions for the analysis of race and racism in the Caribbean region. How were human differentiation and physical difference understood prior to European encounters? Can we identify any elements of proto-, pre-modern racial discourse or representation in the groups of people living and moving across the circum-Caribbean, the area occupied by different societies around the Caribbean Sea, which includes the coastal continental areas of Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the islands of the Greater Antilles and the Lesser Antilles? As Frank Dikotter (2011: 24) argued, ‘pre-existing cognitive and social traditions’ outside Europe need to be paid close attention.

The symbolic, cosmological universes developed before European contact in many societies – for example, among Amerindians and in China – contain key discursive elements of racial differentiation, including colour symbolism and myths of lineage and descent. Caribbean history did not begin in 1492. Decentring the role of the West in the history of the Caribbean region involves giving greater recognition to the ‘cultural mosaic’ (Wilson, 1993) of indigenous groups. It is possible that the symbolic cosmological universes of pre-colonial Caribbean communities similarly contained proto-racism, or racism based on pre-modern, pre-scientific concepts. This claim hinges on the available evidence and there has been rapid development in our knowledge of this region’s pre-colonial history in recent years – for example, in investigation of the ceremonial centre at Tibes in eastern Puerto Rico, the Archaic site at Banwari Trace in south-western Trinidad and the Taino site at Chacuey in the Dominican Republic with its representation of human figures at the Pool of the Little Faces. The creolization of the ancient Caribbean at the end of the Saladoid/La Heuca period discussed by Curet and Hauser (2011) involved increasing cultural diversity across this region resulting from migrations from South America and mixing with Caribbean Archaic peoples. ‘Multi-scalar forms of mobility’ produced complex networks of movement, migration, interaction and exchange (Hofman, 2010). Increasing sophistication in material culture, including the production of religious and ceremonial artefacts and architecture and other ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence, confirms a pattern of dense and diverse cultural groups. Interactions between groups on various islands or between islands, and more long-distance interactions with other parts of the Americas, shaped social, economic, political, religious and cultural dynamics across these populations and were producing a developing Caribbean culture. Within this context, forms of status differentiation between political, military and religious chiefs and elites, and common people, have been identified together with ethnic differentiation between kingdoms and tribes – for example, between the five major kingdoms in Hispaniola: the Jaragua, Maguana, Marién, Maguá and Higüey (Martin, 2012). So by the late pre-colonial period the densely populated circum-Caribbean was organized into societies of varying complexity (Helms, 1984), exchanging goods and sharing myths, tales, songs, dances, ritual knowledge and experience, which according to Corinne Hofman et al. (2010: 1) were ‘embedded in native cosmovision’. The cosmological world of pre-colonial circum-Caribbean peoples was constructed on varying archives of knowledge about gods, spirits, human bodies, differing populations and places, so narratives of origin, lineage and descent are likely to have provided a framework of proto-racial meanings. Late post-classic mesoamerican civilization (1200–1519) developed complex polytheistic religious systems with dualist meanings ascribed to, for example, light and dark, and many forms of figurative representation including Taino petroglyphs. Interpretation remains contested and fragmentary, but it is clear that such cosmovision provided a framework within which to understand the world and its peoples. This framework also provided the means to understand the nature and arrival of Europeans.

Proto-racisms and the pre-colonial, pre-Columbian Mediterranean

The discursive construction of Caribbean peoples and the circum-Caribbean region in the Western imagination derives from the archives of proto-racial Mediterraneanization and the ways in which these were shaped, confirmed and challenged in the context of interactions with Caribbean peoples, cultures and places. In the Mediterranean region before 1492, many regimes and societies produced complex systems of racial hierarchy, racialized norms and values, and patterns of domination and exclusion (Law et al., 2014). This region was one of the key global sites where race, racism and racial rule began and the exporting of an interconnected matrix of racialized regimes of truth relied upon many centuries of historical knowledge deriving from discursive archives of classical antiquity, religion, travel, slavery, art, poetry, literature and politics. Many of these archives informed ‘Columbus’s grid of expectations’ and this set of discursive exports was rehearsed, reworked and transformed in the complex process of interaction as Peter Hulme confirms: ‘time and again these Caribbean texts are set against or have introduced into them the terms of reference of a classical or biblical text, and time and again those Mediterranean texts are rejected or turned back upon themselves’ (1986: 3).

Mediterranean racial discourse includes representations of blackness and other racial categories in the artefacts of Egyptian civilization, and Homer’s identification of ‘two Ethiopias’ – an eastern and a western – which created a racialized (and racist) discourse of ‘worthy’ and ‘savage Ethiopians’. The classification of peoples according to external physical features, and the derivation of characters and destiny from these – physiognomics – were a feature of classical knowledge. For example, Pliny the Elder provided an account of ‘monstrous races’ in the first century AD (Jahoda, 1999: 3–4). Comparison of foreign people to animals, and other forms of xenophobia and ethnic hatred, are identified as becoming more hostile and aggressive in the context of imperialist and expansionist moments. Strong anti-Oriental attitudes emerged in accounts of Persians, and there is a direct determinate link between imperialism and the inferiorization of those who were deemed to be ‘Asiatics’. Roman views of subject peoples and the idea of collective natural slavery were intertwined with patterns of conquest, subjugation and governance. Racial hierarchies also began to emerge in Arabic writing of the pre-modern period, especially in the religious sciences – the ‘transmitted sciences’ (fiulüm naqliyya) – and geographical writings in the ‘cognitive sciences’ (fiulüm fiaqliyya). The splitting of the world into seven climatic zones upon which were then produced a hierarchical account of the origins and character of races of peoples was a central feature of early Islamicate geography and history. Iconographic traditions also cross-fertilized as Roger Bartlett (2009) shows in his examination of European manuscript illuminations in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where skin colour and the shape of eyes, nose and lips were being used to construct a set of physiological depictions of racialized characteristics. Saracenization is a further discursive process, where negative representations of Muslims of the Mediterranean represented in crusade literature as vicious heathens with scimitars and turbans were transposed onto ‘Others’, such as Mongols and other ‘wild races’ of Asia, in the illustrations of Marco Polo’s travels (1260–1295), for example.

The Reconquesta of Iberia by five independent Christian kingdoms ended in 1492 with the fall of the last Islamic state, Granada. Its cultural, military and ideological legacy provided a set of racialized narratives around Christian superiority, power and privilege, and crusading military acquisition which framed New World explorations and encounters. The encomienda system, for example, was based on the Reconquista adelantados idea where those Christians who conquered and resettled land had the right to extract tribute from Muslims or others in those areas, the difference being that Caribbean land was stolen and not owned by Iberian settlers but by the Crown, and indigenous people were enslaved.

Mediterranean racial discourse was also situated in and interlinked with the medieval world of Muslim and Christian economic processes which contained key elements, such as the use of slaves, slave trading, sugar cultivation and refining and marketing networks, which were central to the development of the Caribbean plantation complex (Phillips Jnr., 2011). The Atlantic islands, Madeira and the Canary Islands provided the ‘staging area’ for the development of slave-based sugar plantations by the Portuguese and the Spanish, and also for the development of racial hierarchies, which sorted Arabs, Berbers, sub-Saharan Africans, Atlantic islanders (Guanche – aboriginal Berbers) and Europeans into differing economic roles and positions of social status prior to the next phase of Atlantic expansion further west. Columbus’s journal makes a number of links with these Atlantic island experiences. Directly quoted by Fray Bartolomé de la Casas and translated by Tyler, based on the 1962 Sanz edition, he gives his first impressions of the skin colour of the first people whom he met: ‘some paint themselves a blackish colour, but they are of the color of the Canary Islanders [the indigenous Guanches], neither black nor white’ (Tyler, 1988: 38). Joyce Chaplin’s evaluation of ideas of race in Atlantic history examines European racial discourse prior to the development of crossings, trade and colonization, interestingly suggesting that ‘everything that could have been said about human difference had already been said’ (2002: 160). Pre-Columbian Mediterranean racial discourse provided a dynamic hegemonic system in the settlement and colonization of the circum-Caribbean region.

Iberian racial Caribbeanization

Heading west from Portugal to find the East Indies, in October 1492, Columbus ended up in that part of the world that was later known as the Caribbean. Yet as Corinne Hofman, a leading Caribbean archaeologist, confirms, ‘we know very little about the colonisation processes, and the transformations that indigenous societies underwent as existing evidence is based on biased European colonial documents’ and a new research project, NEXUS 1492 (2013–2019), has recently begun work that aims to rewrite the history of these colonization processes from the indigenous Caribbean perspective (University of Leiden, 2013). Iberian regimes used, among other arguments, the narrative of extinct Amerindian sociopolitical structures and cultures to legitimate their process of colonial domination. However, indigenous cultures did not disappear and many elements of Amerindian culture remain. This research team is analysing the interaction between Amerindians and Europeans on the basis of human remains, and the circulation of inhabitants and materials throughout the Caribbean archipelago. There is no doubt that the indigenous people of the Caribbean were largely decimated by post-1492 colonial practices in the Greater Antilles, including the interruption of agricultural scheduling, slavery, foreign disease and outright genocide. However, indigenous bloodlines and traditions have survived. Though declared extinct in many parts of the Antilles, many individuals and groups with indigenous Caribbean ancestry are today challenging colonial history and reclaiming their indigenous identity (Wilson, 1997). A recent study of the population genetic history of this region examined patterns of genome-wide variation among 330 individuals from three of the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola), two mainland (Honduras, Colombia) and three indigenous South American (Yukpa, Bari and Warao) populations, combining this with a database of genomic variation in over 3,000 individuals from diverse European, African and Amerindian populations. It confirmed that the native population collapse of the Caribbean islands happened almost immediately after the arrival of Columbus, within one generation of his first visits and the appearance of other Europeans (Moreno-Estrada et al., 2013). This constituted genocide and is, along with Atlantic slavery, the subject of a regional reparations movement led by Hilary Beckles and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) (Beckles, 2013).

The nature of racialized hierarchies and levels of violence were dependent on the form of economic, political, military and ideological relations established between colonizers and colonized. An ascending level of violence between settlers and natives can be categorized across four key types of relation and their associated forms of racialization:

• trading contexts where there was little settlement and little conquest, violence and murder took place and initial entry relied on local elites – here there was a more ambivalent construction of racial difference (e.g. between Columbus and a local cacique, Guacanagaríx, on Hispaniola);

• plunder and tribute-taking interactions with sharper racial distinctions being drawn;

• plantation colonies, pioneered by the Portuguese in the Caribbean, where Tainos and others were worked to death;

• settlements not requiring non-European labour where indigenous people were subject to mass murder, and racial hierarchies and ideologies were rigorously enforced.

Columbus’s initial reactions were to refer to indigenous peoples as having ‘a very acute intelligence’, a natural goodness, there being ‘no human monstrosities’ apart from the human flesh-eating, ferocious Carib, who could be shipped as slaves ‘as many as they [their highnesses] shall order’. The equation of Caribs with exocannibalism extended the derived meaning of the classical notion of the anthropophagite meaning of ritual consumption of relatives after death to those outside the group (Hulme and Whitehead, 1992; Boucher, 2011). Enslavement of both male and female ‘cannibals’ (Caribs) was regally authorized by Isabella in 1503 and confirmed subsequently.

Iberian erasure of pre-Columbian cultural identities accompanied both a failure to appropriately identify differing island groups and a wilful construction of aggregated inferiorized categories, the Carib being the most notorious, having a global lexical power to position complex circum-Caribbean cultural dynamics in a single word. Many differing groups of people were labelled ‘Caribs’, particularly those who resisted Iberian overtures. Tainos were the first victims of capitalist conquest, and Iberian racial violence included the use of forced labour in gold-mining and pearl extraction, and associated forced population displacements and early slave trading. They were also forced participants in the first sugar plantations that were created in Hispaniola in about 1520 and in Puerto Rico in the 1540s (Sued-Bardillo, 2011). Strategic killings were used to provoke uprisings and carry through violent repression, as well as enslavement. Strategic slaughter was more generally used to quell rebellions. In response to this state violence ranchos de indios alzados, Maroon camps, developed encompassing both Taino and African runaways.

The racial superiority of Old World cosmographies provided easy explanations for carrying through Caribbean conquest and military violence. A more stealthy proce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• 1. Racial Caribbeanization: Origins and Development
• 2. Racial States in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean
• 3. Mixing, Métissage and Mestizaje
• 4. Whiteness and the Contemporary Caribbean
• 5. The ‘Post-Race Contemporary’ and the Caribbean
• 6. Polyracial Neoliberalism
• Notes
• References
• Index