Which narratives dominate contemporary anti-racist movements? While acknowledging shared struggles is important, Shelene Gomes and Alison Mc Letchie argue against the use of monolithic Black identities in favour of more nuanced understandings of Black lived experiences and their relationship both to colonial legacies and present-day sociocultural and political structures and institutions.
What is the relationship between historical analysis and contemporary anti-racist movements? While history undeniably shapes present-day racial inequalities, our view is that the recognition of diverse Black experiences strengthens rather than undermines solidarity. This commitment anchors our Black Diversities in the Americas project, initiated from our distinct vantage points in South Carolina, USA, and Trinidad and Tobago in the southern Caribbean.
But our observations of anti-racist movements in our locations finds a concerning pattern: there is a public neglect of the structural elements of racial discrimination – and the need to challenge these – in favour of symbolic gestures of resistance to oppression.
When it comes to racial inequality, “always historicize”
In Trinidad and Tobago, the renaming of public places to de-glorify colonial figures/enslavers is one example. While rightly, these historical figures should not be lauded and monuments should be housed in museums for public education, the focus on symbolic gestures came at the expense of advancing political economic or structural changes. There was no discussion about how Caribbean tax regimes for multinational corporations facilitate global racial economic inequalities by hiding resources that could be used for welfare or reparations, for instance.
While rightly, these historical figures should not be lauded, the focus on symbolic gestures came at the expense of advancing political economic or structural changes
In South Carolina, the Confederate Flag was removed from the grounds of the Statehouse after the massacre of nine worshippers at the Mother Emanuel AME Church by a White supremacist in 2015. But there has been no call to address race- and class-based inequalities related to the poor quality of public institutions like healthcare, education, or housing, for example. Instead, these social inequalities continue to be primarily described and analysed as racial inequalities – at the expense of class analysis.
A more nuanced treatment of the shooting would include a discussion of the complex social history of South Carolina that led a young White man to carry out this massacre. Although he came from a middle-class, professional family, he chose to live modestly in a trailer. And relatedly, the people he targeted and martyred were themselves middle-class professionals. Yet despite these points, the analysis of this case, as in many others, is often limited to race alone.
Instead, from our positions at the peripheries of US and global academia, we emphasise both the material conditions underlying racial inequality and the critical importance of historical analysis, following Fredric Jameson’s imperative to “always historicize”.
A wider historical aperture can help us to recognise how genocide along with the sociohistorical conditions of plantations in the Americas – shaped by the transatlantic slave trade and imperial indentured labour schemes of the modern imperial-colonial era – continue to reverberate through contemporary structural inequalities. But we move beyond looking for continuities to examine the diverse experiences, circumstances and systems within the Caribbean and the Americas.
By situating Black populations within this broader context, we challenge flat and ahistorical conceptualisations of nationhood and cultural identity
By situating Black populations within this broader context, we challenge flat and ahistorical conceptualisations of nationhood and cultural identity in the twenty-first century. We emphasise intra-group diversity while challenging primordialist or naturalised narratives that posit monolithic Black identities. We deliberately position Blackness outside restrictive frameworks of “African-ness,” confronting narrow ideological constructs that have shaped both institutions and cultural identities in the contemporary Caribbean.
The institutionalisation of race on the modern plantation
Writing in 1972, George Beckford’s plantation society and economy thesis in Persistent Poverty argues that what has emerged over time are stratified societies based on the various groups’ relationship to economic and civil society. “Rigidly stratified by race and colour directly correlated with occupational status”, Beckford reminds us that race is often a key marker used to identify group members. But it’s also true that the plantation system developed in the 1500s has been transformed by, and been transforming for, the Americas and its diverse populations.
So while an abridged explanation of race in the region might go as follows:
White colonisers arrived, massacred or interned First Nations peoples, then turned to Africa and subsequently Asia as a source of labour. These groups were then subjected to systems of enslavement and indentureship for the economic benefit of Europe, elite Europeans and their acknowledged descendants.
There is, in fact, much more to this historical story.
For example, Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), argued that the “New World” plantation presented a microcosm of culture contact best understood through transculturation – the process of cultural transformation that occurs when cultures interact and influence each other in ways that go beyond simple acculturation (adopting a dominant culture) or deculturation (losing one’s own culture). It wasn’t only groups at the top of stratified society that influenced culture, but groups at the bottom, Ortiz argued.
Theories of cultural pluralism in the Caribbean around this time also developed against the backdrop of the institutionalisation of race, questions of nationalism, “Old World” and “New World” transnationalism, and the economic power of the plantation, as M.G. Smith pointed to in The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965). Other studies offered detailed accounts of colonial power dynamics, diverse Black sociality and cultural hybridity within the complex intersections of plantation, peasant, and urban life, with many of these ideas brought together in Paul Gilroy’s ground-breaking work, Black Atlantic.
But while Black coalitions and intellectuals sought to challenge the negativity and subordination imposed by centuries of White supremacy, an enduring problem has been the popular assumptions and flat narratives of racial homogeneity that continue to overlook the diversity of Black lived experiences and situations.
Cultural creolisation, class, and material conditions
The Merikins in Trinidad and Gullah Geechee in the southern US are but two examples of these communities and processes of diverse Black identity formation within plantation societies.
Following the victory of the USA in the war of 1812 against the former imperial state of Great Britain, Black soldiers who had been trained as soldiers and paid to serve in the British army were granted safe passage to the British colony of Trinidad. Arriving as free people, the African-descended Merikins were also de facto property owners within a system of enslavement. Adding to the existing free Black population of Trinidad, Merikins also worked outside the plantation system in subsistence farming.
The development of a distinct Merikin identity served to further separate them in geography, power and status from existing African and Black populations in Trinidad. The Baptist religion that Merikins brought was central to the Merikin identity in that era, and their establishment of Black Baptist churches in Trinidad was another example of creolisation and empowerment. Here, European Christian beliefs and rituals were adapted by subordinated populations, with the Bible reinterpreted to support the fight for emancipation from enslavement and the equality of all races.
European Christian beliefs and rituals were adapted by subordinated populations, with the Bible reinterpreted to support the fight for emancipation from enslavement and the equality of all races.
The Gullah Geechee of the Lowcountry can be found in South Carolina and North Carolina, including in the islands off the coast of these states, as well as in some parts of Florida and Georgia. Their culture is characterised by processes of creolisation, as exemplified in the Gullah Geechee Creole language, similar to other plantation economies in the Americas. Similarities are also observed in practices like using blue bottles to capture evil spirits and protect the population against evil, as well as foods such as the typical red rice.
These cultural practices have been maintained and reinforced by geographic isolation as well as strong oral traditions. At the same time, Gullah Geechee culture travelled with its people as they were relocated by force or choice, with a distinct Gullah Geechee identity solidifying over time through encounters with other groups. These encounters often highlighted the differences between Gullah Geechee culture and shaped a “marked identity”. Even today, this identity continues to be ridiculed at the same time as it is co-opted and commodified, especially in the food and tourist industries (as shown, for instance, in the popularity of Gullah Geechee hand-woven sweet grass baskets – as depicted at the top of this post).
Understanding Black lived experiences in terms of the relationships between and within various communities, the larger plantation-colonial enterprise, and contemporary status within the context of the nation-state means considering ideas around culture, race, class, and material conditions. Crucially, it means considering all of these together. What’s more, when we look at cultural heterogeneity and lived multiculturalism, we have to recognise the many contradictions in postcolonial contexts.
Particularly in Trinidad and Tobago, the positive discursive reframing of racial categories has failed to address two critical issues: the institutionalisation of race as an axis of inequality, and, following C.L.R. James, race’s ideological function in obscuring class exploitation within postcolonial elite structures.
According to James, race and its attendant hierarchy was embedded in all institutions, structuring life and death. In The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution (1938), James analyses how the slave-led Haitian revolution was premised on a collective consciousness of the enslaved class to their exploitation by the enslaver class. Africans were not enslaved in Saint Domingue (then Haiti) simply because they were classified as Black, but because their labour was critical to plantation production. Race served to legitimise this labour exploitation.
So where does this leave us? Recognising diversity beyond the perfunctory, we argue, means critically examining how diverse histories can inform the process of reconstructing inclusive sociocultural and political institutions across the contemporary Black Atlantic.
By challenging monolithic categorisations while acknowledging shared struggles – like those of free, Black, property-owning Merikins in Trinidad and marginalised Gullah Geechee whose culture is commodified in the present-day Southeastern US – we offer a more nuanced understanding of Black lived experiences and their relationship to broader colonial legacies and present-day state structures. Through this work, we aim to continue efforts to refashion a more egalitarian life in the twenty-first century Americas.
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All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s). They do not represent the position of LSE Inequalities, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credits: Blue bottle image by Warren LeMay via WikiCommons. Gullah Geechee hand-woven sweet grass basket by MSnider via Shutterstock.
