What colour is black?

Calypsonian Duke once sang: “Black is beautiful/Say it loud. Black is beautiful/I’m black and proud.” Lord Kitchener, perhaps because of his experience in “the white man’s land,” exclaimed in calypso: “If you not white/You bound to be black.” Kitch may not have been fully aware that he was giving expression to the “one drop rule,” which was the underlying concept of early America’s Jim Crowism and South Africa’s Apartheid. According to an article by Newseek’s Tom Morganthau, written in 1995, “Americans have long tended to take a ‘binary’ approach toward race — to assume, based on their historical experience, that only two races count and that skin colour is the dividing line between them.”

This belief is rooted in what historians call the “one drop rule” (as in one drop of Negro blood) which is a relic of slavery and segregation. Putting it somewhat differently, as long as it can be “shown,” or, shall we say assumed, that you have “one drop” of Negro blood in your veins then you obey the “Kitchener rule”: If you not white you “bound to be black.” However, the changing demographics, due to immigration of large groups of people who do not consider themselves either white or black must necessarily lead to a more flexible view of race and ethnicity. To return to Duke’s implicit assumption that “all blacks comprise an undifferentiated collective entity.” I wouldn’t be surprised if some with “intellectual pretensions” can rationalise Duke’s assumption on the ground that he was referring to “sociological blacks.”

I’m reminded of a little ditty which suggests that black/white miscegenation can conceivably result in a brood comprising of some black, some white and some khaki (as Derek Walcott called them. “Divided to the vein.”) That, of course, takes us into the realm of genetics, although I hasten to add that it would be stretching it a bit to explain the dilemma of the calypsonian who lamented, “Ah black like hell and ma wife like tar baby/ But Chinee children calling me ‘daddy.’” On a more serious note, there appeared sometime ago on the Oprah Winfrey Show a number of descendants of the late American statesman, President and main creator of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson. As I recall, they represented a broad range of “colours.” To cut a long story short, DNA testing confirmed that he white Jefferson had white children as well as those with “more than a drop” of Negro blood. Jefferson owned slaves. It was an open secret, and though not a sordid hole-and-corner affair, his political detractors of the time taunted him with how, “Jefferson dreamt of freedom in a slave’s embrace.” An entire book has been written on the affair and the name of the slave girl is, I believe, Sally Hemmings, although I’m subject to correction.

But, interesting as the diversion might be, let’s return to the gravamen of the issue: What colour is black? Newsweek’s Tom Morganthau surmises, “It is every conceivable shade and hue from tan to ebony — and suddenly a matter of ideology and identity and attitude as much as pigmentation.” Since we tend — some of us, at any rate — to mimic what happens in the bigger countries, especially the United States, it does no harm trying to take a critical view of foreign influences that may not quite be applicable in our specific circumstances. According to the Newsweek article, Americans are still preoccupied with race. Race divides them, defines them and in a curious way unites them — if only because they still think it matters. Race-based thinking permeates the law and policy, and the sense of racial grievance, voiced by blacks and whites alike, infects their politics. Blacks cleave to their role as history’s victims, whites grumble about reverse discrimination. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Nearer home, I seem to recall a letter-to-the-editor over the name of one David Mason of La Romaine, in which a commonly expressed view appeared, to wit, “Our politicians (mostly misguided), self-anointed political analysts, journalists and calypsonians seem hell bent on perpetuating the categories of Indo and Afro-Trinidadians.” Mr Mason asked: “Why are they continuing to slavishly ape our North American brothers who are far more deprived than us?” Try to understand, Sir, “monkey see, monkey do.” He continued, “I have never heard of an Indo Guyanese or a Chino-Jamaican (actually, it should be Sino-Jamaican) or an Afro-Barbadian. They are all proud Guyanese, Jamaican and Barbadian. Something must be done to outlaw those odious terms Afro and Indo in our society. How will we categorise our growing number of beautiful Douglas?” Better than you, Mr Mason!

Some years ago, our first Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams boldly and publicly proclaimed, (unbelievably, to my mind) that he had “banned the two most odious words that had been bequeathed from the colonial experience of slavery and indenture in reference to the respective victims. With due respect to the Doc, I’m persuaded that it was just a lot of “hot air” and an exercise in futility. What’s important is not banning the N-word and the C-word but allowing the odious attitudes and obsolete stereotypes and caricatures to die a natural death and be consigned to the dustbin of history or, alternatively, deem them antiquated artifacts. Although the term “douglas” is generally taken to mean an Afro/Indo offspring (Oh! Those terms that so annoy and upset you, Mr Mason) I rather suspect that what Mr Mason had in mind covered a much broader spectrum of the combinations and permutations (if I may say so) of the various strands of humanity. Newsweek carried a montage of sixteen faces purporting to show, as Duke might have sang that “Black is beautiful — in its several shades, or colours, if you prefer, and I might add that it’s beautiful to sport one of those “rainbow” colours.