DISMANTLING CROWN AND KINGDOM. SAM KANER, HUMAN SCIENCES, OXFORD UNIVERSITY (STUDENT).
‘Jamaican Brown’ was the class to which my grandfather belonged. Hair texture, skin colour, facial features acted not only as racializing markers in the Anglo-Caribbean prior to Independence, but also as indicators of proximity, proximity to the Crown. When I say Crown here, however, I do not mean it as a metonymy of power, or as marking any kind of meaningful influence beyond the realm of local politics and bureaucracy. Crown represents an ideal, a perceived sense of prestige and a misguided commitment to Britain as Motherland, the natural Kingdom, a way perhaps, to construct forms of personal protection from the onslaught of racism experienced by lighterskinned and middle-class Jamaicans and other Anglo-Caribbeans migrating to the UK in the wake of Independence. It is through the actions of the political Crown that colourism was created, and it is through the inculcation of the Crown’s racist dictates that it has found hosts to parasitically sustain itself. And now the beating heart of colourism sends ripples and waves through my family line, to be felt within my own blood. My grandfather, realising that the ideal of the Crown, could not protect him from the grinding teeth of systemic racism and the deathly incisions of institutionalised anti-blackness, withdrew deeper and deeper into the gaping chasm of colonially induced colourism. Because he had been told that his skin was not black, that he had traceable
European heritage, he believed that he could construct himself differently in the society which had exported such an insidious ideology in the first place. And when such ideology was viscerally re-amplified upon his venture to the Motherland through the witnessing of serial acts of violence perpetrated against him and his countryfolk, he attempted to put up a protective shroud, relying on his status as ‘Brown’ to deflect the hand of racism as it pushed him slowly towards depression, ennui and social disadvantage. ‘Nigger’ was painted across my mother’s house when she was a child. Born of a white mother and a ‘Brown’ father, her colour could act both as a source of redemption and as a source of shame in my grandfather’s colourist painting of social and moral relations. In a failure to produce white children, my grandfather made successive attempts to isolate his children from the blemishing effects of their African, slave-descended blood. They would be different, yet in order to be so, they too would have to hate themselves. The ‘nigger’ house became a nigger-free zone, black clothing was banned due to its devilish connotations, and dub and reggae, the devil’s music, would face a permanent ban. My grandfather was light-skinned but in spite of all the above, he was black in the Motherland, a slave-descendent, a ‘nigger’, less than human, a ‘black bastard’, dirty, slow, incompetent. He used colourism to protect himself but in so doing, sowed the seeds for greater
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