Dawn Ritch MELVILLE COOKE has asked whether or not I consider myself a member of the black race. Clearly not, but what does that prove?
Through DNA analysis and research, scientists have now proven that everybody on the planet earth is 99.99 per cent the same. Furthermore scientists believe they've narrowed it down to the same six ancestors in Africa. In other words everybody living now originally came from Africa.
Nearly 20 years ago world-famous geneticists at a public conference in London said that in 500 years the population of the whole world would be brown in skin colour.
The thing that disturbs me is that Africa, the seat of life for the planet, sets no prize on life. Life is cheap there, too cheap in fact and I can't bear even thinking about it.
So I personally am glad for the institution of British chattel slavery, because it had the effect of creating societies in Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean.
What the Americans did to slavery was nothing short of cankerous. Since their slaves were different to our slaves, even though genetically the same, I don't care much for black Americans either. They are loud, like to wear their underwear outside their pants, and arrive for vacation here in sizes too large for any chair. They remind me of Trinidadians, who are equally "nuff".
We as Jamaicans I think would rather have respect than money, even though that is changing and becoming more American. While renowned for our hospitality we have also been admired in the past for our good manners, even reserve. That is acculturation by the British and Protestants, instead of the Irish and Catholic as in the United States, even though they claim to be Episcopalian. They had Mandingo, we had Tea and Sympathy and no "Gone with the Wind".
How the United States became a world power, much less the world's only superpower in just 50 years after World War II, is the most astonishing feat of finance ever known.
It was only a few years ago that the United Kingdom finally finished paying off the land lease repayments to the U.S.A. The irony is that Germany which had been the aggressor and lost the war, got the Marshall Plan and free money. But the victors, Britain (assisted by the Americans and the French Resistance) which won the war, faced crippling costs as well as repayments to the U.S. That didn't seem very generous to me. It was all nothing more than empire envy, and a very poor show indeed.
So I make a distinction between the American legacy to race relations, and that of the British whose churches educated us. Admiral Penn and General Venables are part of the history of this island and real people to me. I'm glad they ran up a British flag and kept it there until 1962. Left to me the Union Jack could have stayed another 200 years.
So when I defend empire, I'm thinking of the British one, not the cultural American dominance that has encircled the world for the last 50 years.
While it is true that Britain sat at the table when both Africa and the Middle East were being carved up into inadequate countries, she was a junior partner in the whole exercise. The U.S. had all the say, and was setting in train the dispossession of Britain from her colonies, and worldwide democratic states. At least that was the American propaganda at the time.
The irony is that since then and among the rich countries of the world, the U.S.A. has both historically and currently given by far the least charitable aid to Third World, expressed as a percentage of GDP.
Even without knowing that, much of the developing world resents the hell out of Americans. That government complained to the World Trade Organisation at the behest of an American company producing "Chiquita" bananas, that the Caribbean's preferential trade agreements with the U.K. and Europe should cease. Whole Caribbean economies have therefore been imperilled for the sake of one American company.
Now democracy has come around and bitten them on their bottoms, and they don't like it. Moreover the institution in the United States of the U.S. Patriotic Act means they won't be enjoying much democracy at home either.
That having been said, the world is neither black nor white, and Superman isn't a real person.
The Arawaks, unlike some Africans and all Caribs, were not cannibals. We know from Arawak middems, where runaway slave artefacts have been found up in Jamaica's mountainous interior, that intermingling took place. No gnawed human bones have been discovered, so no cannibalism was practised. I admire that about the heritage of Jamaica.
I'm also glad we don't have any Haitian Voodoo tradition which seems inevitable as long as there's a strong Roman Catholic influence. Poor Brazil is riven with it too. Even though there's only 0.001 per cent genetically that separates any of us from the next person, regardless of the colour of our skin or the religion we practise, superstition still seems to kill some people and not others.
Melville Cooke is likely to find no solace in science, because he's swallowed American propaganda on British colonialism, race, and so much else, hook, line and sinker. He rightly expects that he will not have the last word, so I'm having the last, as is my right and privilege.
Long live the difference in the genetic code because I'm not African, don't live there, and have no interest in very large and dangerous creatures, whether of the human or animal kind.
