It's not black and white - Race relations a grey matter

Adam Moss, guest columnist

Last September, this newspaper published an article on prejudiced employment practices titled 'Brownings, please'. The article, which focused on the desire of some Jamaican employers for lighter-skinned employees, served to stir the boiling, if not melting, pot of race relations and consciousness in Jamaica.

The 'browning', as any Jamaican knows, is that fabled ideal of female beauty and male power in our society: the just-right mix of black and white.Here we have a person, or a kind of person, born of a racial and cultural diversity that is truly unique to this part of the world. And rather than reflect on all the elements and sources that produced such diversity, we instead covet and idealise only the product.

Now, if there exists an institutional prejudice against any member of our society - especially against our large majority of black Jamaican people - it is our responsibility to wipe it out. There are no buts there.

Fortunately, when prejudice is as blatant as it was in the case of the request for 'brown' employees, it is more easily dealt with. There is an equally great danger in the many small - almost unconscious - inequities and errors of thought that pass unnoticed among us.

COMPLEXION OVER OCCUPATION

I went to the Criminal Records Office on Duke Street, Kingston, to get a letter for my employer confirming that I do not have a criminal record. The people there are professional, polite, commendable, especially in light of the volume of customers who make their way through there daily. There are two forms you can fill out in the office. One is for local employment, like mine, and the other for those Jamaicans seeking jobs abroad. An applicant fills out the forms, has his or her fingerprints taken, goes through a brief interview, and waits to receive a letter of endorsement.

The local and international employment forms are functionally identical. They ask you for your name, aliases, address, and place and date of birth. The only tangible differences I could find between the form I filled out and the form belonging to the teacher sitting beside me, who was applying to work in Japan, were that his had a spot for 'Occupation', whereas mine did not; and his required a photograph, while mine did not.

As I looked over my own form, I realised that in the space where 'Occupation' should have been, there was instead, 'Complexion'. For the people reading my form, it did not seem to matter if I was a farmer or a doctor or a teacher myself; what was important was the fact that I am a white Jamaican of supposedly 'high' complexion. My form - and therefore, I - was less concerned with what I chose to do with my life, and more concerned with what the colour my skin happened to be.

If you read a list of words containing, for example, the word 'posse', and then are asked to give a word beginning with 'pos-', you are more inclined to say 'pos-se' than you are to say 'pos-sibility' or 'pos-itive'. Psychologists call this 'priming'.

In an experiment done at New York University, a group of students took part in a language test where they had to descramble simple jumbles of words into sentences. Without knowing it, the students were divided into three groups: one primed to be rude, one to be polite, and the third exposed to neutral words. The rude group was shown sentences including the words 'aggressively', 'bold', 'rude', 'bother', 'disturb', 'intrude', 'annoyingly', and 'interrupt'. The polite group was given 'respect', 'honour', 'considerate', 'appreciate', 'patiently', 'cordially', 'yield' and 'polite'. The neutral group was given words like 'exercising', 'flawlessly', 'occasionally', and 'normally'.

After the students descrambled the sentences, each was put in a situation where they had to wait while the examiner spoke to a colleague before telling them they were finished. More than 60 per cent of the students primed for rudeness interrupted the examiner, many of them within five minutes. By contrast, only half of the neutral group interrupted, taking an average of 8.65 minutes to do so. A full 80 per cent of the politely primed students did not interrupt at all, and the ones that did waited 10 minutes to do so.

We can be primed both positively and negatively. Nobody is suggesting that some of these students are naturally ruder or more polite than others. What the study shows is that what we are all affected by what we are made to think about, that our circumstances dictate, to an extent, the way we behave.

PRIMED FOR RACIAL PREJUDICE

If we live in a society that reinforces racial difference and division, on even the pettiest of bureaucratic levels, these differences will occupy our minds.

The time has come for us to reconsider how and when we think about race and colour.There will be differences in any human society - difference of colour, yes, but there will also be difference of belief, differences of like and dislike. This will create majority and minorities within the larger whole.

There is a natural tendency for us as humans to divide ourselves into smaller groups. The couple, the family, the extended family, the religious community, the old-boys' or old-girls' network, the neighbourhood, the region, the political party: these are but some of the groups to which we may all belong.

You need only ask a Portland man about his parish for you to see the pride and connection he shares with a group of people, most of whom he may never have met. The same, I am sure, would hold for St Mary or St Elizabeth, or indeed any of our parishes, especially the more rural, less populous ones.

Now can we expect our man in Portland to agree or identify with all of his parishioners all of the time? Of course not, nor should we. The way we identify with our various groups is fluid, and changes to meet our requirement and benefit. We cannot stop division into groups, or even further division within those groups. It is natural for us to want to associate with those we see as in some way similar to ourselves.

So if we fight for or against something, it should not be for an end to division in our society. Rather, we should fight for an awareness of the danger such division can sometimes bring. If we fight for something, it should be to remind ourselves that any one group - whether racial or otherwise - cannot define us, that we should embrace the difference and diversity of the groups to which we belong, and respect the legitimacy of those to which we do not. We must recognise our possibilities, not only our posses.

One of the main purposes of our society - that ultimate group of groups - must be to act as a moderating influence on its constituents, to prevent precisely that systemic injustice that allows one group preference over another; an injustice all too well inscribed on the darker pages of Jamaica's past.

Furthermore, it is our duty to society to ensure that we do not limit our own minds, that we do not give preference to any one facet of our own existence. Slavery of the mind, as Bob Marley crucially realised, is as subtle and dangerous a form of oppression as there is. And it is something from which only our thoughts can set our selves free.

Adam Moss is a recent graduate of Harvard University and intern at The Gleaner Company.