Orville Taylor | One wrong does not make one white

It was a private session yesterday, but I hope that for its own sake, the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) understands its history, including those factors that made it lose or win elections.

Boasting a healthy lead over the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP), it might feel so comfortable, that it might believe that it can take as many liberties with the will of the people as it wishes. Some of its parliamentarians, who have strangleholds on safe seats, must always remember that the majority of Jamaicans are neither garrisoned Labourites nor Comrades, and there are patterns from our history which should be observed in avoiding ‘electile’ dysfunctions. In Jamaica we have a maxim for intemperate speakers, and it begins “Cock mouth….”

Only 26 per cent of Jamaicans say they would vote for the JLP. True, it is more than the PNP’s 17 per cent; but there are as many who are as unsure as those who would vote Labour and a largest 31 per cent who said neither. Most of us, including powerbrokers in the private sector, are fed up of dirty ad hominem politics.

Rewind to the 1930s when William Alexander Clarke had just returned home, rebranded with a Hispanic name, Alejandro Bustamante. Despite all my research, and discussions with my grandmother, father, Stanley Vernon and many of his other contemporaries, some of whom I chatted with as a schoolboy in Victoria Park, I still cannot get a clear picture as to why a grown man would be adopted and changed his name.

Some historical sources suggest that Clarke, wherever it was required, described himself as ‘white’. However, given his tawny ‘browning’ complexion and his frizzy hair, his African ancestry would clearly have dragged him, like a ram-goat’s rope, back across the race line. His whiteness, as that of many light-skinned Jamaicans, expired at the Palisadoes airport and Kingston port.

AFRICAN DNA

Importantly, nonetheless, even continental Hispanics have large doses of African DNA, because the Moors had occupied Spain for 800 years up to just before Cristoforo Colombo took money from Fernando and Isabel, to get lost and stupidly thought that the Cacique was the maharaja.

Thus, inasmuch as a Clarke would definitely be fingered as a ‘Malatta’; a Bustamante, ‘wussalackahow’ he had a nose that brought the American eagle to mind, could easily look like a Spanish nobleman.

Never mind his diction and accent, which unlike his cousin/brother Norman Manley, squarely place him in the same racial, ethnic group and social stratum as those blue-eyed people from Flagman in St Elizabeth; I cannot find a single source where he self-described as black. Let this sink in; the JLP’s founder was never considered a black man.

After a cameo appearance by Donald Sangster, a man with less unruly hair and melanin than Busta, it was Hugh Shearer who shifted the race marker left to the black side. And in any event, complexion wise, he was not anywhere near even Desmond McKenzie. Indeed, it is his nappy hair and thick lips that gave him the extra credits to pass the race test.

After endearing himself to the working class via his work as a trade unionist, Michael Manley won a landslide in 1972. A successful campaign by Manley and the PNP consolidated its power in the mid-1970s on the back of a ‘My leader born ya’ campaign. As a teenager in the Western St Andrew constituency, where the JLP candidate was the ‘white’ Jamaican Owen Stephenson, the sheer hypocrisy and ludicrousness was obvious to even me, given that the PNP’s powerful incumbent Dudley Thompson was born in Panama.

Manley, the whitest prime minister in our history, never took on a white identity, and unlike his father and the JLP of the 1960s, strongly embraced Rastafari and black culture and identity, while fighting for labour rights. What a paradox! Manley, whose ‘malatta’ elitist father was a Marcus Garvey antagonist, reversed the anti-black power sentiments that characterised the entire Jamaican Parliament of the 1960s, which included his father.

LEAST AFRICAN ANCESTRY

Manley’s loss in 1980 brought Edward Seaga to the helm. Seaga, looked white and although being Middle Eastern, and thus, not considered ‘white’ in America, he doubtless was seen as white here.

To date, Seaga has the least African ancestry of any Jamaican head of government since universal adult suffrage in 1944. Moreover, he was not born here. Nonsense apart, Seaga was a Jamaican nationalist. Unlike many current Labourites who took on ‘foreign’ citizenship, white Seaga gave his up and came home to build his country. It is a total disrespect to this great Jamaican that any member of the party that he led for years could trample on his legacy by disrespecting anyone on the basis of his skin colour or even nationality of his parents. All JLP prime ministers have been lighter skinned than P.J. Patterson and Portia Simpson Miller. So, they can ‘tan’ deh and throw shades, when it was Seaga who made it possible for some of the very race mongers to have a voice in ‘politricks’.

In the history of Jamaica, the swing voters have a reputation of i) voting against the incumbent party whose policies reach a flashpoint of appearing anti-worker and/or anti-press. Moreover ii) when someone steps from his privileged position and identifies with the working class, it gives him an electoral boost, especially when he is attacked based on his unchangeable characteristics. Busta, Michael and Eddie gained the love of the common people even though they did not look like us.

It is a dangerous political strategy to attack a patriotic Jamaican, who, with a long thread bag, does not need politics, and whose only obvious motivation is to serve.

The motto, ‘Out of Many One People’, actually means something. We are better than this.

- Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.