Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media: The Struggle for a Positive Ethnic Reputation (New Americans (Lfb Scholarly Publishing Llc).)

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Author: Christine M. Du Bois | Sidney W. Mintz

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The New Americans Recent Immigration and American Society

Edited by Steven J. Gold and Rubén G. Rumbaut

A Series from LFB Scholarly

This page intentionally left blank

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media The Struggle for a Positive Ethnic Reputation

Christine M. Du Bois

LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC New York 2004

Copyright © 2004 by LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Du Bois, Christine M., 1962Images of West Indian immigrants in mass media : the struggle for a positive ethnic reputation / Christine M. Du Bois. p. cm. -- (The new Americans) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-59332-037-X (alk. paper) 1. West Indian Americans in mass media. 2. Mass media--United States. I. Title. II. Series: New Americans (LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC) P94.5.W47D8 2004 070.4'49305896073--dc22 2004005487

ISBN 1-59332-037-X Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper. Manufactured in the United States of America.

For my parents, George Bache Du Bois, Jr. and Danièle Sureau Du Bois;

For my daughters, Rebecca Valerie Buxbaum, and Marielle Georgia Buxbaum, in honor of their varied forebears who fled persecution and came to America;

and

For my best friend, Laurence Umberto Buxbaum


Table of Contents

Foreword by Sidney W. Mintz.............................................................. xi Preface ..................................................................................................xv Acknowledgments ............................................................................. xvii Chapter One: A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed............................................................................... 1 Chapter Two: Why Media Representations Matter............................. 37 Chapter Three: West Indians in Print and Television News ............... 57 Chapter Four: Images in Chesapeake Advertising and Marketing..... 99 Chapter Five: Hollywood’s West Indians ......................................... 105 Chapter Six: Local West Indian Responses to Media Imagery......... 127 Chapter Seven: Conclusion—The Dilemmas of Reputation............. 145 Appendix: Methods for Searching and Categorizing Print Media .... 157 Notes .................................................................................................. 163 References.......................................................................................... 185 Index .................................................................................................. 203

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Timelines and Graph

Timeline: News Reports about West Indians in the Chesapeake Region ............. 63

Graph: Negative and Positive Articles about West Indians in Chesapeakearea Print Media..................................................................... 70

Thematic Timeline: Films and TV Entertainment with Afro-West Indian Characters, 1965-1999............................................................................ 111

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Foreword By Sidney W. Mintz

The drama of North American migration lies partly in our history as a welcoming land, on the one hand, and partly in the relative ease with which, ever since our birth as a nation, newcomers have been becoming North American, culturally and psychologically.1 While we North Americans share these features to some degree with other New World countries, such as Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, during the last half century the United States has become ever more a magnet for the peoples of other lands. Its ascendant power and influence, its relatively flexible social structure, and the economic opportunities it has so frequently afforded, continue to attract those who are fleeing oppression, or seeking brighter futures for themselves and their children. Though it happens in variable degree and at different speeds, migrants arrive as culturally different and then change, often with considerable pain and unease. Their children then complete a process of becoming that their parents, like it or not, had begun. What may take two, three or more generations in other countries—that may never really happen in those places at all, in some regards—can happen here with great rapidity. And so the saga of migration is about the trauma of the uprooting, and the triumph of growing roots anew. But the picture of the U.S. as a refuge, as a new home, was dramatically transformed in 1965. In that year, legislation ended the “national origins” immigration policy, a policy that had favored North European immigrants over everyone else, while disfavoring all people of color, throughout the world. Before 1965, one could safely say that the message of the Statue of Liberty applied to white people only (Bryce-Laporte 1986). From the perspective of the twenty-first century, then, it is well nigh stunning to recognize how the 1965 laws have changed the complexion—both physical and political—of the United xi

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Foreword

States. As recently as the 1970s, the people of the United States simply did not look the way they do today. For anyone old enough to remember what we looked like when, say, John F. Kennedy was president, that transformation is surely remarkable. But even more remarkable may be the mystery of how consensus for such a radical shift in policy was achieved. The Hart-Celler Act, overseen by President Lyndon Johnson, soon gave an entirely new look to immigration itself, and so far—in spite of considerable grumbling, both polite and impolite, and numerous hate crimes–there has been no turning back. To this observer (and it may be mischievous to say so), it appears as if the perceived need for more labor here—lots of it, right away—somehow came to matter more than a venerable, even cherished, North American racism. That racism had been carefully sustained for a very long time. It did not go away after 1965; but it became more difficult to protect politically. That this shift occurred near the climax of the civil rights struggle in the U.S. may not be coincidence; and the international context of that struggle cannot be forgotten. It is probably also relevant that the U.S. was locked in the international politics of the Cold War at the time. The Soviet Union was certainly perceived by many nonwhite peoples around the globe as friendlier than the United States. Hence a colorblind immigration policy may have served partly as a positive response to those perceptions. It was as a consequence of the new laws that Anglophone migrants from the Caribbean region, nearly all of them people of color, came to the United States in larger and larger numbers. English-speaking West Indians had been coming to this country for centuries – indeed, even before the United States had become a country. The link between the North American South and the British Caribbean substantially predates the British conquest of Jamaica (1655). What distinguishes the modern period, then, is not the fact of migration, but its volume and concentration. The author tells us that by the 1980s, 50,000 Anglophone legal West Indian migrants were arriving annually in the United States. Though the numbers rise and fall according to economic conditions in particular, there is no reason to suppose that the flow of newcomers will decline sharply in the decades to come. But the experience of newcomers of African origin in the United States has long been distinctive. This distinctiveness has as its

Foreword

xiii

background the fact that the African presence in this country predates the family histories of the vast majority of white North Americans. Moreover, nearly all Africans who arrived here before the Civil War were enslaved, as were the majority of their children, during 250 years. Though there are of course various ways to phrase it, and a diversity of opinions on it, the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. At its end African Americans were no longer slaves; but because of the postReconstruction legislative arrangements made to satisfy an endemic racism, they were by no means the civil equals of white Americans. This history, at least in its bare outlines, is well known, even to many newly-arriving immigrants; and the racism it betokens has by no means altogether disappeared. Accordingly, nonwhite migrants— perhaps particularly, but emphatically by no means only, people of African origin—face a special challenge in becoming (North) American. What does becoming North American mean, when you are black; how different is it from what becoming North American means, when you are white? Caribbean migrants from the entire region discover in new (and often deeply disagreeable ways) “what color they are,” after reaching our shores. This is a challenge that Anglophone West Indians of color confront in their daily lives; and so do their children, though in significantly altered form. The sociologist Roy Bryce-Laporte wrote long ago that upon arriving in the United States West Indians became, as he put it, doubly invisible (1972). He was using the term as Ralph Ellison had defined it by his writing, to mean that black Americans did not exist as individuals for the majority. Bryce-Laporte contended that this was true for black West Indians, as it was for all African Americans. But he added that they were doubly invisible because they were not North American blacks, they were foreign blacks. What this has meant for the people in question is crucial to their identities and future. In this book, Christine Du Bois has employed a piercing “optical” device through which to gaze upon that drama. In brief, she does so by silhouetting the voices of Anglophone West Indian migrants and their children—especially Jamaican—against the image management imposed by “the media” in picturing those same people. By skillfully analyzing newspaper, magazine, television and cinematic treatment of Afro-Caribbean peoples, she is able to show us how the coverage consistently finds what it looks for, rather than uncovering what is there

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Foreword

to be understood about them. She counterposes that treatment against the words and indeed, the emotions, of her informants. In some ways, this is an exercise in what-if—because neither the author nor anyone else can tell us what the consequences would have been had the reporting that she so effectively deconstructs been truly objective, rather than powered by the need to produce an eye-catching (or earcatching) story. A careful reading makes clear, though, how much sensationalistic coverage has set the terms within which white North Americans learn to know their Afro-Caribbean neighbors, and what this means for the assimilation process by which people become American. The author shows how the pride and self-respect of newcomers of color are put at risk by media practices, subtly influencing their selfpresentation and their social “styles” in the course of assimilation. In a culture such as our own, where people are expected to market themselves to succeed, those who are becoming North American have to rely heavily on their own feelings of self-respect. Staying what you are, while becoming someone different, is hard to do, moment to moment, while raising one’s children. All immigrants know this; but native-born Americans have some trouble identifying with it. Here, we have described for us some of the ways in which Anglophone West Indians bring it off. This is solid scholarship, concerned with a central problem of American life in the twenty-first century. It enables us to reflect on genuine problems that have to do with the intactness and coherence of our national life, and to raise questions about how society can best address those problems. In her work here, Dr. Du Bois has made fine use of the fundamental investigative techniques of anthropology, such as participant observation, interviewing, and systematic data collection, in order to address pressing issues. The results are an outstanding example of social science in the best sense, and provide a poignant picture of a people’s struggle for acceptance as equals.

Preface

A kindly man, Balbir Singh Sodhi indulged the children in Mesa, Arizona who stopped by his gas station and convenience store dreaming of treats, even though they had no spare coins. Predictably, he gave them candy. He also let grown-up patrons short on money have gas, asking only that they pay him later. Yet, known and loved as he was in his neighborhood, he was aware after September 11, 2001 that he and his fellow Sikhs could be in danger. On Thursday, September 13, he and his brother met with others at the local temple to discuss their community’s safety. A press conference was planned for Sunday, September 16. On Saturday the 15th, Balbir went to a local store to pick up supplies, on his way out donating $75 to the Red Cross fund for victims of September 11. He later went to his business to meet with a landscaper and work on beautifying the site. While discussing flowers, he was shot three times in the back by an American who believed that the turbaned man he was murdering was a terrorist associated with Osama bin Laden. Balbir left behind a wife and five children.2 The U.S. Department of Justice’s website discusses the postSeptember backlash against people Americans mistook for terrorists: The Civil Rights Division, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and U.S. Attorneys' offices have investigated approximately 350 allegations involving violence or threats since September 11. The allegations include telephone, internet, mail, and face-to-face threats; minor assaults, assaults with dangerous weapons, and assaults resulting in serious injury and death; and vandalism, shootings, and bombings directed at homes, businesses, and places of worship.3 xv

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Preface

Such acts have been inspired, at least in part, by the raw emotions Americans felt after seeing extensive media reports about a tiny group of Arab Muslim terrorists and the very real horrors they wrought. Unfortunately, when Americans have attempted to take justice into their own hands, they have targeted the innocent: Muslims who would never dream of committing terrorism, Arab-Americans in general (77% of whom are Christian, not Muslim4), and Sikhs and Hindus (who are neither Arab nor Muslim, but look to many Americans as if they might be). Yet it could have been worse, far worse. 350 acts of vigilantism is a minuscule number from a population of over 280 million. One reason the backlash was not more severe is that mass media, following the lead of government officials, advocated calm, non-violent rationality and multicultural community spirit. Still, to those who were victimized, the paucity of clear, widely disseminated, accurate information about their communities became chillingly apparent. This book is not about Muslims, or Sikhs, or Arabs, or terrorism. Yet its message seems more urgent since September 11. It is about the varied media representations of an ethnic minority; about journalism dealing with a very small segment of violent criminals who came from that immigrant minority; about the effects of those media representations on the law-abiding members of the group; and about the actions they took to try to correct the negative imagery. It is, sadly, all the more relevant since teenage Jamaican immigrant John Lee Malvo gained notoriety as one of the Washington-area snipers in 2002; once again a West Indian has been in the news in ways that make the vast majority of West Indian immigrants cringe (and the family of Conrad Johnson, a second-generation Jamaican in Maryland who was among the snipers’ victims, permanently traumatized) (Horowitz and Ruane 2003). The book takes an ethnographic approach to the intersection of several broad trends of the last century: global immigration, the spread of mass media, and the stubborn and vicious problems of ethnic and ideological hatreds. The people studied were English-speaking immigrants from the Caribbean who lived in the Chesapeake Bay region during the 1980s and 1990s. But their struggles have a larger relevance, as the wholly unfair death of Balbir Singh Sodhi sadly demonstrates.

Acknowledgments

I extend my heartfelt thanks first to my informants, who shared much about their lives with me. To protect their privacy, I generally have not mentioned their names. But they remain vividly in my mind as unique individuals whose generosity with their time made this study possible. I am thoroughly appreciative of the roles that Dr. Sidney Mintz, Dr. Rolph Trouillot, and Dr. Gillian Feeley-Harnik played in the unfolding of this research. My intellectual debt to them is evident on every page, although the interpretations were ultimately, of course, my own. Dr. Kevin Yelvington also gave me very useful advice about the structure of the book. Many other individuals also deserve appreciation. For furthering my development as a scholar, I thank Dr. Hildred Geertz, Dr. Rena Lederman, and Dr. Loring Danforth. For providing me with advice on this project, I thank Dr. Katherine Verdery, Dr. Talal Asad, Dr. Fred Klaits, Dr. Donald Carter, Dr. Philip Kasinitz, Dr. Milton Vickerman, Dr. Susan Greene, Dr. Nancy Foner, Dr. Constance Sutton, Mr. John Byram, Dr. John Higham, Dr. John Homiak, and Dr. Mary C. Waters. Dr. Waters was especially generous in sending me her thenunpublished manuscript on West Indians in New York (now in print as Waters 1999). For leading me to informants, I am grateful to Dr. Franklin Knight, Dr. Rolph Trouillot, Dr. Hilbourne Watson, the staff of Washington’s Anacostia Museum, and Mr. Rick Nugent (then President of the Jamaica Association of Maryland). For providing me with a variety of information, I am indebted to Ms. Carla Roth (for two months my research assistant), Mr. Michael Maggio (then President of the Washington-Baltimore chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association), Ms. Elissa Krauss (of the National Jury Project), Dr. Ranimore Manning III (of Howard University), Mr. George Lang (of Bethlehem Steel), the Maryland Office of Planning, and the U.S. Bureau of the Census. xvii

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Acknowledgments

For providing me with law enforcement information and assistance in finding informants, I thank the Baltimore Police Department, the Baltimore City Housing Authority, the Maryland office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, Maryland’s Patuxent Institution, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Wicomico County Department of Corrections, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and especially the Maryland office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. I am also grateful to the series editors who helped bring this book to fruition, Dr. Steven Gold and Dr. Rubén Rumbaut. I appreciate their assistance, along with that of Mr. Leo Balk. Many friends and family members also aided me with information, leads to informants, and encouragement. I wish I could thank them all here, but alas, space does not permit. This study is based in part on work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Of course, the opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The anthropology department of the Johns Hopkins University also provided partial funding in the early stages. I am thankful for the financial backing of both these institutions.

CHAPTER ONE

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

In February of 1986, when Kim Saunders was 26 years old, police kicked in the door of her Washington, D.C. home at five in the morning.5 The officers had yelled for her family to open the door but, roused from sleep and unaware of the stereotypes that police held, she and her parents had not grasped what was happening. They were not expecting anyone at that hour! Kim explained to me that since they were innocent, the family was totally unprepared for a drug raid. With consternation she pointed out that shock from the raid could have led one of her parents to have had a heart attack. She explained this police action as “a violation of our rights.” Kim told me that her family neither touched illegal substances nor associated with people who did, although in her neighborhood there were, indeed, plenty of users. She added that a lot of innocent people had been targeted during this police action, the largest Washington had ever known. I asked why her particular house had been assailed. “Because we’re Jamaican,” she immediately replied. She later learned that law enforcement officials had dubbed the action, during which over 500 officers from local and federal agencies had stormed 69 Washington locations, “Operation Caribbean Cruise.” She surmised that the police had asked their Jamaican informers the names of other Jamaican families in the area, and the informers had obliged them with a generic list. “It all boiled down to stereotypes,” she said. Another Jamaican I interviewed argued similarly that “the problem with operations like Caribbean Cruise is that you’re accused [because of] who comes to 1

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

your house or who you gave a ride to. You become guilty by association.”6 Those who for 16 months planned the raid did indeed believe in egregious stereotypes, as the internal training manual for the operation demonstrates. Its opening page read: The Fourth District unit has gathered intelligence which points to an organized group of Jamaican nationals who call themselves Rastafarians who are responsible for a major portion of illegal drug trafficking in the Washington Metropolitan area. Rastafarians are members of a religious cult. ... They have organized themselves for the purpose of distributing narcotics in order to generate funds in [sic] which they plan to use for the violent overthrow of the present Jamaican government. ... [they] are representatives of a highly organized and violent crime family. ... These subjects have a higher-than-normal readiness for the use of violence and favor the use of automatic and semi-automatic weapons, coupled with a willingness to use them under any circumstances. Compared to scholarly understandings of Rastafarianism—including those available at the time (e.g., Morrish 1982; H. Campbell 1985)— this description alternates between simplistic and erroneous, and is significantly exaggerated. Yet because law enforcement officers believed it (see GopaulMcNicol 1993), this sensationalist image had real consequences for Washington Rastafarians, as well as for families like Kim’s, who are Jamaican but not Rastafarian. An African-American convert to Rastafarianism explained to me: ... they had torn up people’s homes. They had—you know, elderly folks ... The ones they showed on the TV were from the Caribbean. Grandmothers—people, you know, who were obviously mothers and grandmothers of people—[were] crying, showing their homes, how much they had been dismantled and destroyed, and everything. And I was really very upset. ... often when they didn’t find any illegal weapons or substances, they did take phone books, deeds, tax—income


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tax returns, photographs, anything that they could find, that they felt was information, they took (transcribed from taped interview). Moreover, other West Indians besides Jamaicans have been affected by the denigrating representations of Jamaicans.7 Operation Caribbean Cruise (OCC) lingers in the memories of Washington’s West Indian population—not only because it led to protest meetings, press conferences, the naming of Caribbean advisers to the police department, several lawsuits, and a police department shakeup—but also because it symbolizes to West Indian immigrants their need to guard their ethnic reputations. When I sought interviews six years after the events, Jamaicans were eager to talk to me about OCC and the negative journalism that followed it. Similarly, when I asked Chesapeake-area8 West Indians what they thought would make a good topic for a book about them, they frequently brought up the problems of stereotypes and unflattering media images. I began to wonder just how negative the media coverage had been, why it had been negative, and when. I also asked myself why West Indian immigrants care so deeply about their reputations in the U.S.9 Why would “reputation” come up again and again in their conversations with me? The stresses of OCC suggest answers to these questions; this work explores those answers and adds to them. It contributes both to the literature on West Indian immigrants and to scholarship on minority-media relations, weaving together the two approaches. It does so by examining a “hidden,” understudied West Indian population. While not nearly as large a population as that of West Indians in New York City, according to the 1980 census West Indians made up ten percent of Maryland’s foreign-born (Phillips 1988:212). The 1990 Census counted approximately 50,000 individuals of West Indian ancestry in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia—surely a significant undercount since undocumented immigrants are rarely willing to provide data to Census workers (U.S. Department of Commerce 1990a; Foner 1987:199). Moreover, in 1990 little Maryland alone had more people of West Indian heritage than any other state besides New York, Florida, New Jersey, and California.10 With the exception of New Jersey, whose West Indian population includes a

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great deal of spillover from New York City, all of these other states are far larger in area than Maryland, and all contain more big cities to attract immigrants. All of them are also substantially more populous than Maryland. The relatively high frequency of West Indian immigrants dispersed throughout Maryland’s population thus makes the state stand out. In addition, among Washington D.C.’s West Indians there appears to be a higher proportion of professionals than in other cities (Palmer 1995:28)—probably because of the employment opportunities for them in government, government-related, and embassy positions. The sizeable Chesapeake-area West Indian community, its experiences of mass media, and the particularities of its development (historically Washington’s Howard University and the West Indian embassies have been transnational proving grounds for West Indian leadership)11 merit study. A CONCERN WITH REPUTATION West Indians’ concern with social esteem partly springs from their Caribbean heritage: they come from ex-slave societies where in the past, struggles for self-worth and social power have been acute. This history has left a legacy of determination among individuals to avoid any diminishment of their social standings, and indeed, to seek to improve their social statuses in a variety of ways. Such determination tends to be especially strong in West Indians who choose to emigrate; they are often the most aspiring and dynamic members of their natal societies. Hence, how these immigrants fit into U.S. social structures, how they are perceived and characterized, and what the social and material implications might be when they are stereotyped are important issues to them. They are especially troubled by the contrast between negative stereotypes and their own senses of themselves as very hard working, law-abiding, valuable contributors to American society. For example, my field notes on my interview with a highly trained Jamaican engineer include this passage: Norman said that “I open my mouth, and people say, ‘Jamaican—oh, how many people have you shot?’” He said that as far as Americans are concerned, if you’re Jamaican,


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“you’re a criminal. If a Jamaican starts to speak in patois, all the Americans will get away from him,” believing that he is “angry and dangerous.” This professional was particularly perturbed that his EuropeanAmerican boss, apparently in all seriousness, asked whether or not he was involved in a Jamaican “posse.” The posses, whose members are drawn from Jamaica’s poor, are notorious for their violence and drug dealing. The likelihood is minuscule that a trained engineer of any rank, much less his, would belong to one.12 Similarly, another informant objected to the treatment of a lawabiding Jamaican friend. The friend made the mistake of returning from a trip to Jamaica with her hair in dreadlocks. At BaltimoreWashington International airport she was subjected to a wholly unnecessary strip search, because, my informant suggested, her hair and nationality have been associated in officers’ minds with drug trafficking. Other Jamaicans complained to me of not being able to sport Jamaican flags in their cars, lest they be stopped by police and questioned, and of being told by neighbors and co-workers that Jamaicans cause trouble. Although the negative stereotypes tend to focus on Jamaicans, Jamaicans were not the only ones who complained. A statement West Indians frequently made to me is that Americans think anyone with a West Indian accent is Jamaican. The story from one woman was typical: when on a bus someone asked where she is from, and she replied “Barbados.” She was then asked, “What part of Jamaica is that?”13 Because of Americans’ geographical ignorance, all West Indian immigrants are to some extent affected by local images and ideas about Jamaicans. A Vincentian woman with degrees in business and health care told me that often at work she’s known people who think that all Caribbean immigrants are Jamaicans, and that all Jamaicans are bad—for example, that they’re in posses. She said this kind of talk has especially stepped up since the “incident in New York” [the Long Island Railroad massacre]. People at work [they are African-American] say, “Oh, I’m not going to mess with

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media Grace. She’s Jamaican. She might do the same thing to us— did you hear about what happened on the train with the Jamaican guy?” [Fieldnotes 12/93]

Another example from my fieldwork also illustrates this point. Aware of Americans’ frequent conflation of Jamaicans with other West Indians, Denise, a nanny from Barbados, responded to my question about whether she’d heard about the Long Island massacre: She said yes, she’d heard on the news that, as she put it, “it was a West Indian.” In fact, she had heard it while also chatting on the phone with Noelle [a Trinidadian nanny]. She had immediately told her that “it was a West Indian” who did it. Denise commented to me, “It’s another setback for us— those Jamaicans are something else!” [Fieldnotes 12/93] Interestingly, journalists reporting on the massacre mentioned that Colin Ferguson is Jamaican; they almost never used the phrase “West Indian” in their reports. Thus Denise apparently used the phrase not because she was echoing the news coverage, but rather in anticipation that Ferguson’s Jamaicanness would put her, a fellow West Indian, in a negative light. There is also a tension evident in this vignette between Denise’s inclusion of Jamaicans as part of her own group (“West Indian”) and her depiction of Jamaicans as outside her group (“those Jamaicans”). Unfortunately, media coverage of the crimes committed by a tiny minority of Jamaicans has exacerbated inter-island rivalry in the U.S. West Indians also worry that negative media images will hurt their job prospects, which will in turn affect their abilities to send money back to the Caribbean, to spend money on trips there, or to save money for a prosperous retirement in their natal societies. They are concerned that the lowering of their reputation in the U.S. could damage their statuses back “home.” Unfortunately, however, U.S. news media and mass entertainment have done much to disseminate a troubling image of Jamaicans.


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MASS MEDIA AND THE CREATION OF REPUTATIONS My informants had two complaints about mass media: first, that the media are silent about West Indians, and second, that of what little media coverage they have received, too much has been negative. My analysis of print journalism, TV, and films available to Chesapeakearea residents in the 1980s and early 1990s reveals that both of these criticisms have a basis in reality. Both are also related to West Indians’ concerns about how they fit into U.S. “race” relations. Media Silence about West Indians Media silence is the backdrop against which sporadic reporting about West Indians is foregrounded. Much reporting about West Indians notes only that these individuals are “black,” without mentioning their national origins. Sometimes this “racial” lumping can work to the advantage of West Indians’ ethnic reputation (although no informant noted this phenomenon). For instance, many news reports about the 1991 disturbances in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn failed to mention that the events took place in a heavily Caribbean neighborhood, and that several of the principal actors were Caribbean immigrants or their children.14 In this case, reporters only infrequently associated West Indians with the violence. Probably more often, however, the silence hurts West Indians’ ethnic reputation. First of all, in the Washington-Baltimore region, journalists in the 1980s and early 1990s usually did identify West Indian criminals by national origin. A reporter sensitive to these issues explained to me that crime reports refer to national origins because police use those origins to identify and track suspects. He added that in an article about taxes, however, a reporter would not likely mention the national origin of a featured accountant. This silence would conform to most newspapers' policy of not pointing out nationalities unless they are "relevant." Because police but not accountants consider origins significant, in the press a Jamaican criminal is identified as Jamaican, whereas a Jamaican accountant is ethnically invisible. Here silence about law-abiding West Indians contributes to the creation of an unbalanced image. Attention is focused primarily on criminals.

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Negative Media Images If the silence is not golden, the negative reporting is even less so. Extensive searching of NEXIS and other databases reveals that for 1980-1994, print media available in the Washington-Baltimore region published 248 articles portraying West Indians in a negative light.15 Over 70% of these articles centered on a West Indian topic—usually Jamaican drug dealers. About a third were published in 1987-88, during a particularly bad wave of negative reporting. The chronological list of headlines below illustrates how print media from across the American political spectrum spread this negativity:16 “Jamaican drug gangs stake out turf in US.” Christian Science Monitor, 8/13/87. (Centrist) “U.S. agents seek to erase Jamaican gangs in 2 days.” Washington Times, 10/21/87. (Conservative) “THIS IS WAR: In the Shadow World of Drugs, Police Battle Violent Jamaican Posses.” Washingtonian Magazine, 4/88. (Moderately conservative) “Jamaican Gangs Spread Drug War: U.S. Says Posses Now Carry Grenades.” Washington Post, 6/29/88. (Moderately liberal) “‘Posses’ increasing activities here: Jamaican gangs deal in drugs and death.” Baltimore Sun, 6/30/88. (Moderately liberal) “Johnny-too-bad and the sufferers: Jamaican drug gangs.” The Nation, 11/13/89. (Liberal) “Rude Boys: by beating the Italian mob at its own games— drugs and violence—Jamaican outlaws have become a brutal, bloody force in gangland America.” Playboy, 10/91. (Hedonist)


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The articles themselves contained gruesome details of killings and torture. Even when the journalists made a nod toward balance by including a few sentences about the reaction of the law-abiding Jamaican community to such killings, my informants found the overall tone of these articles disturbing. Some of my informants argued, however, that the impact of television was worse than that of print media (cf. Entman and Rojecki 2000). To begin with, they were frustrated that, aside from commercials, TV images of the Caribbean are often of the povertystricken areas. West Indians tire of the assumptions that they came to the U.S. because they were hungry, undereducated, or living in huts in their home countries. Many of my informants had encountered these stereotypes among Americans. But they were especially upset by the news coverage of Jamaican criminals. In Washington, Channel 5’s reporting provoked ire among Jamaicans; the news team received angry mail from them, along with a written rebuke from His Excellency Keith Johnson, at that time the Jamaican ambassador to the U.S. West Indians were also troubled that Jamaican drug dealers periodically appear as characters in crime shows (for example, “Miami Vice,” “Cops,” and “Columbo”), that for five consecutive nights in February of 1988 Baltimore’s Channel 13 featured long segments on Caribbean crime in Maryland, and that Jamaican criminals were featured three times on “America’s Most Wanted” between 1988 and 1991 (see Gunst 1995:173; English 1991). In addition, the TV News Index and Abstracts published by Vanderbilt University show that between 1984 and 1992, nightly news from the major networks included 63 stories about West Indian drug trafficking, West Indian violence, or both.17 Although not a large number of stories, it was still more than my informants wished to see aired. Then in 1993 the Long Island Railroad massacre received extensive coverage, with the assailant’s Jamaican origin often mentioned. Adding insult to these injuries, CBS aired the absurd and violent Steven Seagal film “Marked For Death,” which is “about” Jamaican posses, twice on prime time in 1994. “Marked for Death” and “Predator II,” along with the more culturally sensitive and intelligent “The Harder They Come” and “Steppin’ Razor,” are all films depicting a violent side to Jamaican life that my informants wish to de-emphasize. Their concern with their

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reputation in the U.S. makes negative news reports and entertainment images stand out in their minds. What they hardly mentioned to me is that there have also been many articles and films portraying West Indians positively. It seems that for my informants, positive images about West Indians are normal, or should be, and are therefore unremarkable. Yet their frustration with mass media is still appropriate: despite the availability of positive images about West Indians, those images have not been adequate to present a fair portrait of the West Indian community. Positive Media Images West Indians have received positive press in the Chesapeake region because of their music, their food, their festivals, and the beauty of their islands. Such articles have generally dealt with West Indian cultural products or geography, rather than with West Indian people per se. From 1980 to 1994, the period I examined for print journalism, positive articles about the immigrants themselves were few and far between in the Washington-Baltimore media market.18 There were a few articles about Washington’s West Indian community, some about West IndianAmerican sports heroes,19 and a few about Derek Walcott when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. An occasional article portrayed West Indian immigrants in a way they longed for—as hard workers. If one counts the many reviews of West Indian albums in the music sections of newspapers, however, plus recipes in the food sections, there has been more positive print coverage than negative.20 As for television, the series “Going to Extremes” attempted to dispel myths and stereotypes about West Indians—for example, that they are violent or that “black” people in general are not intelligent. Some of my Jamaican informants complained about this show, however, since it was filmed in Jamaica but failed to show the modern, sophisticated sectors of Kingston. Praise was instead reserved for the series “Where I Live,” about a West Indian taxi driver in New York City married to an African-American—but despite critical acclaim this show was short-lived. In Hollywood, West Indians have been portrayed mostly positively in the films “Clara’s Heart,” “The Mighty Quinn,” “Cool Runnings,” “Joey Breaker,” and, via the character of the red crab, in Disney’s “The


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Little Mermaid” and its sequel sing-along films for children. Finally, it should be noted that advertisers in all media have attempted to market their products—everything from vacations, to happy hours in local bars, to Red Lobster’s seafood—with cheerful images and music from the West Indies. One might protest that these images exoticize Caribbean peoples, but with the exception of one intellectual, none of my informants expressed displeasure to me about these ads. On the contrary, a few were interested in how such advertisements could, or did, improve West Indians’ reputation in the U.S. Yet despite these positive portrayals, overall in the WashingtonBaltimore region the imagery about West Indians was unbalanced. This imbalance becomes evident if one asks, “What proportion of the local West Indian population was demonstrably involved in criminal activity?” and then similarly asks, “What proportion of local media portrayals of West Indians focused on criminals?” A comparison between these two proportions is revealing. The Media Imbalance Although inconsistencies between U.S. Census and law enforcement statistics make an exact comparison impossible, the general picture for print media is clear. Using Maryland as representative of my field area, I first note that in 1993 only 1% of the state’s prison inmates listed their birthplace as somewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean. By contrast, 92% of the inmates listed a birthplace in the U.S.21 Since Jamaicans are the most maligned West Indian group—and the group whose media image most affects other West Indians—it is useful next to calculate the number of Jamaicans in Maryland’s prisons as a percentage of Jamaican-born Marylanders per the 1990 U.S. Census (U.S. Department of Commerce 1990b).22 This calculation reveals that approximately 1% of Maryland’s Jamaican residents were incarcerated in state prisons around the time of my fieldwork. Thus, 99% of Jamaicans in Maryland were not incarcerated. One may conclude that the vast majority of Jamaicans in Maryland had not been convicted of a serious crime.23 The question then becomes, have merely 1% of Maryland’s news reports about Jamaicans focused on the criminals? The answer is no. Excluding reviews of Jamaican albums in newspapers’ music

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sections,24 from 1980 to 1994 nearly 60% of articles about Jamaicans in Washington-Baltimore print media dealt with criminals.25 Thus, articles referring to Jamaican criminals have appeared approximately 60 times more often than the criminals’ proven frequency in the local Jamaican population. Why have criminals received far more than their “fair share” of press coverage? There are at least four root causes of this situation. Reasons for the Media Imbalance The most obvious reason is that sensationalism sells. Although the business managers for major newspapers and TV networks do not usually influence the news departments directly, business concerns do indirectly shape journalists’ work. The journalists are aware that their jobs and promotions ultimately depend on capturing the public’s interest, thereby selling their journalistic products and/or winning advertisers’ support. In a world of tremendous competition for people’s attention, they must persuade people to read their papers or watch their shows. A print reporter I interviewed complained, for example, that newspapers must now compete with the sometimes riveting visual images offered by TV news (see Sabato 1991). In turn, TV news producers compete with each other. To triumph over their rivals, journalists too often slip into sensationalism (see Downie and Kaiser 2002). The data indicate that more so than conservative or liberal biases among reporters (both of which exist in different contexts and different media outlets—see Goldberg 2002, Alterman 2003, and Goldberg 2003), it is sensationalism that most distorts the mainstream media. Sensationalism need not imply malicious intent on the part of journalists. Like some of the capitalists that Marx described, they are driven by competition to do what they themselves deplore (Marx 1967:257,514). Indeed, it is not difficult to find journalists’ autocritiques. In 1993-4, the Baltimore Sun published pieces entitled “Reporter cites American newspapers’ flaw—too much hype—and then falls victim to it” 5/23/93 “Trial by Media Circus” 8/18/93


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“Dan Rather rails at TV news business” 10/1/93 “How Killer Journalism Destroys Reasoned Argument” 1/20/94 “ABC News looks at media’s role in fueling public fear” 4/21/94 “‘Tainted Truth’ finds unreliable ‘facts’” 6/16/94 “The Evidence is in: Crime News is Colorized” 8/23/94 Alas, such self-accusatory articles have done little to change the system. They too are “just news.” A second reason why Jamaicans’ crimes are heavily reported is that law enforcement agencies eagerly provide journalists with what they want: exciting stories. An expert on crime told me that the Drug Enforcement Administration, and especially the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) had for several years been exaggerating the threat posed by Jamaican criminals in the U.S. This interviewee told me that the ATF “runs from crisis to crisis and inflates them to get Congress to give them more money.” Part of this “inflation” of crises has been, as my source put it, the judicious “use” of reporters (see Gunst 1995:134-5). Before the Waco disaster, for instance, the ATF invited reporters to come along on their raids. Like such reporters, I found the ATF initially quite willing to assist me in my informationgathering; they promptly sent me copies of old press releases about their operations against Jamaican “posses.” In this way the desire of law enforcement agencies for positive publicity can dovetail with journalists’ need for attention-grabbing news items. That a Washington Post reporter was able to obtain an advance copy of the training manual for Operation Caribbean Cruise, along with a partial list of the addresses to be raided, may partly be attributable to the desire of the D.C. police for publicity (Wheeler and Anderson 1986; Wheeler 1986). This desire to appear “tough on drug-dealers” was part and parcel of the newly emerging “war on drugs” in the mid-1980s. Jumping onto the “war on drugs” bandwagon was an effective way for law

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enforcement agencies to expand their budgets and for journalists to sell stories (see Reinarman and Levine 1997). A third reason for all the reporting on criminals is that the U.S. is plagued by “pack journalism.” Sabato writes that "oddly enough, the intense competitive pressures ... cause reporters (and editors and producers) to move forward together in essentially the same story direction, rather than on different story tracks" (1991:59). As soon as one journalist has found something particularly exciting to write about, all other news teams feel pressure to report the same story (see Downie and Kaiser 2002). Thus at any given time local and national media markets become flooded with the same story all at once, though of course different journalists report the story in somewhat different ways. Journalists’ movement as a “pack” helps explain why a sensationalist examination of Jamaican “posses” appeared in all sorts of media in 1987 and 1988. This concentration of imagery can brand a politician, as Sabato describes, or a whole ethnic group (see Said 1981). A fourth reason for the media emphasis on criminal Jamaicans has to do with the particular status of “black” immigrants. The “black” immigrant is potentially doubly suspect. If a “black” man is a criminal, Americans are unfortunately not surprised. If an “alien” is bad for society, most Americans are likewise not surprised. Thus while “black” immigrants may have few really vehement foes, racism and xenophobia combine such that they also have few real defenders outside their own group. In other words, sensationalism about the misdeeds of “black” immigrants (of whom only a very small percentage are criminals) provokes less outcry than does sensationalism about other topics. A similar phenomenon has been noted for news coverage of the entire continent of Africa (Issue 1994). Yet the news media have had some checks on this kind of reporting: West Indians— the Jamaican community in particular—have risen up in their own defense. In Chapter Six, I detail the forms of protest that Chesapeakearea West Indians have employed against the tide of negative reporting. The next section explores why they have tried to defend their reputation—what is at stake.


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“REPUTATION,” “RACE,” AND “CULTURE” West Indians defend their ethnic reputation in order to avoid discrimination. But the issues of discrimination and the defense against it are not simple; they are complexly connected to the ways that concepts of “race” and “culture” have been understood and deployed both in the West Indies (Alexander 1977; Hoetink 1985; Yelvington 1993; Austin-Broos 1994; Vickerman 1999b) and in the United States (Williamson 1980; Davis 1991; Smedley 1993; Patterson 1997). In the first place, West Indian immigrants are concerned about discrimination against them based on socially salient aspects of their physical appearances—that is, they worry about racism (see Wade 1993a). They quickly learn that in the U.S., the concept of “race” is more rigid and more negative with respect to “blacks” than how it is viewed in their home societies. For light brown individuals especially, the move to the U.S. can entail a distressing drop in “racial” status. There are, however, two caveats to this assertion that West Indian immigrants are concerned about racism. For one, many informants told me either that they had never personally experienced racism or that they had only experienced it in one or two incidents during their years in the U.S. Their largely positive experiences kept them from feeling very anxious about racism.26 In addition, many told me that even if they should experience racism, they would not let it stand in their way. Although they rarely specified what they would do in such a circumstance, most were adamant about their determination to surmount any and all obstacles in their path to “making it” in America. Their worries about racism did not dampen their faith that in the end, they would attain their dreams. These caveats aside, many did express some concern about the possibility of racist discrimination against them. They obviously wish to avoid unfair arrests and hassling from police. They also wish to avoid the loss of jobs, promotions, loans, and schooling opportunities that racism can lead to. Although many told me that the U.S. is indeed “the land of opportunity,” they want to be sure it remains that way for them and for their children. One way to help keep the doors of opportunity open is to distance themselves from the people against whom discrimination is most strongly directed. This need to distance themselves from the least

16


respected group in the society is, as several scholars have argued, an important reason why my informants generally do not identify with African-Americans (Waters 1992:2; Woldemikael 1989:166; Vickerman 1999b). Even those of my informants’ teenage children who were born here, and thus could conceptually qualify as “AfricanAmerican,” expressed ambivalent uncertainty to me about whether or not they belonged to that category.27 It should be noted that there are other reasons as well why most of my informants do not identify closely with African-Americans. One is that they feel rejected by them (see Hintzen 2001). Most of my interviewees told me that “black” Americans “resent” or even “hate” them. They told me that this hostility is grounded in “black” Americans’ perceptions that West Indians take away their jobs and sometimes their potential spouses, that West Indians’ behavior in the job market depresses wages, and as one informant put it, that West Indians “kiss up” to “white” people.28 But such rejection alone would not necessarily impede identification and assimilation; it is not enough to explain West Indian adults’ efforts to remain distinct from African-Americans. After all, despite rejection of them, most West Indian children who go to African-American public schools want desperately to fit in with their peers. In their early years they are isolated in the small, social worlds that are schools; they try to conform. Only later, in their teens, do many begin to see the world as their parents do and to re-create and reassert their West Indian ethnicity. Their parents, however, have more social options all along—and many of them choose not to assimilate into the African-American community.29 Their wider social worlds afford them more possibilities for comfortably asserting West Indian identities, and more economic and social-status motivations to do so. Because of their status concerns, adult West Indian immigrants do not want their ethnic reputation to be conflated with the reputation of allegedly prototypical African-Americans—here I mean a negative reputation common among non-African-Americans in the U.S. Hence in dialogue with me, a “white” researcher writing a book, West Indians spontaneously and frequently made distinctions between themselves and “black” Americans (see Stafford 1987a, 1987b). It was not a topic of conversation that I initiated.


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Specifically, West Indian immigrants told me that their “culture” is different from that of “black” Americans. I was told that 1) unlike “black” Americans, West Indians see receiving welfare as shameful and rarely apply for it; 2) West Indians work harder than their “black” American colleagues; 3) West Indians are not, as one Jamaican homemaker told me, “passive like American blacks.” They will speak out to keep racism, or anything else, from stopping them. Yet they do not go to the other extreme; they are not unnecessarily “militant” as are, according to some of my informants, some “black” Americans. 4) unlike “black” Americans, West Indians save their money; 5) they are better educated than “black” Americans; 6) most of the time they get along better with “white” Americans than do “black” Americans; 7) they put less emphasis on their physical appearances than do “black” Americans; 8) they are more supportive of each others’ economic successes than “black” Americans are amongst themselves; and 9) they are stricter with their children than are “black” Americans (see Foner 1987:206 and Waters 1994:797 for similar lists; see also Hintzen 2001). Not every informant made each of these distinctions, and most informants who distanced themselves from African-Americans nevertheless named an exceptional African-American individual or two whom she or he respected and got along with (Foner 1987:209; Waters 1999). It should also be noted that sometimes an informant generalized to all Americans one of the implied criticisms above. For example, I

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was sometimes told that all Americans—not just African-Americans— are lazy and too permissive with their children. In addition, there are differences, sometimes subtle, in the ways and extents to which West Indians from distinct islands, social classes, generations, and genders distance themselves from African-Americans. These differences partly spring from variations in ideas about “culture” among West Indian societies,30 and partly from variations in the social positions of West Indian subgroups in the U.S. (Waters 1999).31 These nuances aside, a general picture emerges. In dialogue with a “white” American, many West Indian immigrants portray themselves as distinct from African-Americans in the very terms that carry great social weight in the United States. I draw inspiration here from Beriss’s argument that assertions of ethnic identity must draw upon hegemonic ideas about national identity in order to make sense to their intended audiences (1992:254-8, 1993). About Francophone Caribbean migrants to metropolitan France he writes, It is the cultural construction of French national identity, and the understanding of the relationship between that identity and Antillean identity, that provide the terms and concepts Antilleans in the metropole must draw upon if they are to assert an ethnic counter-discourse that will be comprehensible to ... metropolitan French people ... (1993:117) Beriss argues that in France, assertions of cultural difference are comprehensible to the population as a whole when they are expressed through art, through the language of credentialed social scientists, and through religion. I am making a similar kind of argument, adapted to the particulars of U.S. social discourse. In the U.S., assertions of difference can powerfully “make sense” when they are expressed in terms of “values” or “moral character.” Assertions of difference also make sense to Americans when they are expressed in terms of “race”—but “race” is the very category that West Indian immigrants must avoid if they are to distinguish themselves from African-Americans. Instead, then, they proclaim the moral superiority of their “culture” (Foner 1987:208)— how that “culture” has taught them to value the very traits applauded in American public discourse: hard work, financial independence,


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studiousness, cooperative attitudes, and strong families. Highlighting alleged moral differences between one’s “culture” and that of AfricanAmericans is a strategy that, to American ears, makes difference salient. Because so much of U.S. discourse now is about the importance of “values,” emphasizing morality makes difference both comprehensible and striking to a broad audience. Emphasizing distinctions between West Indian and African-American artistic styles, vocabularies, or theologies, while not absent from West Indians’ repertoire of distancing behaviors, are less effective and therefore less important strategies.32 Another strategy that my middle and working class informants could have used to proclaim their superiority would have been to emphasize the class differences between themselves and the AfricanAmerican poor. Although my informants were generally quite conscious of class differences within Caribbean societies, they only occasionally mentioned class when discussing African-Americans (see Waters 1992:7). In displacing issues of class onto “culture,” once again they were adapting to American discourse. As Sherry Ortner has argued, U.S. ideology about individual achievement is so powerful that many Americans find it difficult to talk about class directly (1991; see also DeMott 1990). Thus, as a “cultural” group, African-Americans can serve as a foil for West Indians wishing to escape discrimination. West Indians objectify the moral strengths of their own “culture,” proclaiming its alleged superiority as a trump card against “white” racism (see Waters 1992:27).33 “Culture” is deployed in an attempt to force a crack in racist ideologies —the “white” audience is asked to question whatever assumptions they might have that all “black” people are the same. This nearly Boasian effort34 implicitly challenges the very basis of racism35—that is, it challenges the American concept of “race,” of innate mental and moral characteristics shared by all members of a group with visible physical similarities.36 I should note, however, that none of my informants directly and consistently challenged the concept of “race” itself, although some alternated between questioning its validity and then using it themselves. My informants’ ideas about “race” were uncertain and contradictory. Their social position is so complex that their uncertainty is hardly surprising.

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I should also note that West Indians cannot claim sole or even primary credit for driving a wedge into “whites’” racist ideologies. The Civil Rights movement,37 and less obviously but quite importantly, the 1965 changes in immigration laws, have confronted “white” Americans with alternative ways of looking at the world and with the presence of a variety of highly educated, talented people of color in their midst. The proposition that non-“whiteness” spells inferiority is less completely taken for granted among many “white” Americans (though certainly not among all “white” Americans) than it was before the 1960s. This subtle shift in attitude is evident, for example, in Jhally and Lewis’s study on audience reactions to “The Cosby Show” (1992). The authors found that “white” viewers accepted the fictional, upper middle-class “black” family portrayed on the TV show as worthy of their affection and strong respect. These viewers generally stated that the Huxtables’ skin color was not an issue for them, because they felt that this family was unlike most “black” American families. Jhally and Lewis label this attitude “neo-racism” and argue that it has hidden roots in powerful class prejudices (see also W. Wilson 1980; Waters 1992:27-28; Gladwell 1996). The “black” “phenotype” has remained, among American non-“blacks,” a very negative marker of class and culture—but it is no longer necessarily a socially indelible marker or insurmountable barrier. Based on physical appearance, one is judged guilty of “blackness”—unless one can prove that one’s “blackness” is different somehow, somehow not prototypical. In his study of Colombian “race” relations, Peter Wade calls this attitude among “whites” the “conditional acceptance” of “blacks” (1993b:7,61).38 It is into this social dynamic that West Indians migrate. If they can show that they are “other” than “black” American, and if they can manage to raise their children to retain and proclaim, however subtly, some of that otherness, they or their children can hope to rise even to the social prestige of a four-star general and U.S. cabinet member. Colin Powell’s immense popularity with “white” voters, as indicated by opinion poll after opinion poll, is an instance of this legacy of positive otherness. Is it an accident that Colin Powell provides himself with reminders that his West Indian parents were immigrants (according to the Associated Press, he keeps their framed Ellis Island documents on his office wall), and that he frequently mentions his parents’ origins to


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“white” audiences? If it is an accident, it is certainly a felicitous one for the General. This same sort of dynamic is at work on a less grandiose scale in my informants’ lives and those of their children. Thus a Guyanese office manager told me that her “white” colleagues describe her son, who has had summer jobs at the large firm where she works, as “a chip off the old block” and “different” in a positive way. The colleagues associate the son with his foreign mother. Both his own behavior and his status as the child of a hard-working immigrant —“black” but not like “most” American “blacks”—have accrued to his positive image in the eyes of the company (see Waters 1992:11-13). In sum, then, when interacting with non-“black” Americans many West Indians find it important to maintain the boundary between themselves and African-Americans. An objectified “culture,” currently often conceived in moral terms, is pivotal in maintaining this boundary and in placing West Indians in a positive light. What happens, then, when West Indians’ “culture”—their claim to distinctiveness, their trump card—is subjected to negative media portrayals? When in public discourse negative imagery begins to surround West Indians—when suddenly Jamaicanness is distinct from African-Americanness, but now depicted as distinctly worse (e.g., more violent, more criminally organized)—these immigrants find themselves confronted with another kind of discrimination. Now American xenophobia is the threat. The power of the West Indians’ trump card is taken away; indeed, during such a wave of negative publicity, their foreignness becomes a liability rather than an asset. Is it any surprise, then, that West Indians are concerned with their ethnic reputation in the United States? They start out by emphasizing their cultural distinctiveness in an effort to protect themselves from a pseudo-biological mode of social exclusion (racism). Media silence about West Indians’ accomplishments irritates them because it leaves them “invisible” (Bryce-Laporte 1972) and without their trump card; they seek instead to be noticed as culturally distinctive. Yet this very effort to guard against racism exposes them to another form of discrimination: xenophobia. They protest this second form of prejudice by insisting that their culture has been unfairly depicted; they wish to maintain a positive stream of representation, such as that surrounding Colin Powell.

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Hence, negative media imagery from the late 1980s and early 1990s greatly upset Chesapeake-area West Indians; they feared that negative press could turn their trump card against them. They realized that they could become subject to both forms of social exclusion—the pseudobiological and the xenophobic. At such points they could find their homes unexpectedly raided and torn apart at five in the morning. Thus the possibility of double discrimination prompts West Indian immigrants to pay attention to their press image. The situation of West Indians in the U.S.—their position within the particular social dynamics of “race” and “culture” here—gives their worries about their ethnic reputation a poignant urgency. They dread being pushed from what most of my informants considered a reasonably acceptable, if complicated, social position, down into the bottom of the social hierarchy (see Waters 1992:25-26). West Indians are also concerned that demeaning publicity could damage their (or their children’s) self-esteem, as a Jamaican political activist pointed out on a TV show in Baltimore in the late 1980s.39 As I discuss in Chapter Two, damaged self-esteem can hasten an individual or group’s decline in socioeconomic standing. What I have sketched about the relationships among Chesapeakearea West Indians from different countries, and about their relationships with African-Americans, European-Americans, and the mass media, puts us in a position now to appreciate the complexity in the comments of a Trinidadian professional in suburban Washington. I had asked this man simply to tell me about the West Indian community in the region. He responded with a long monologue, including a portion that I described in my fieldnotes as follows: Spontaneously, in his musings about Jamaicans (which were also spontaneous—I had made no mention of inter-island rivalry or really much of anything! He is a talker) he brought up the Jamaican posses in the area. He said that a Prince Georges County councilman had spoken in a public setting about the Jamaican posses. The councilman was speaking to a Jamaican woman at the time, but he hadn’t realized that she was Jamaican. Mr. Sinclair [my informant] said [to me] that he felt the councilman’s words were “an injustice to the whole West Indian community, which works hard and is very


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productive, not dependent.” Twice later in his monologue, he repeated that West Indians here are productive. Here we see many themes of this work: the concern with negative reputation in public discourse; the feeling of many non-Jamaican West Indians that the way Jamaicans are portrayed here is relevant to them; the point suggested that West Indians are of many sorts (thus Jamaicans may be in posses, but they may also be civic-minded individuals who show up at public meetings); the insistence that West Indians work hard and are contributing to U.S. society—morally laudable behaviors; the implicit distinction made between West Indians and others (here unnamed) who are, by contrast, “dependent”; the way all of these topics come up without prompting simply because a (“white”) researcher is doing a study. THE PROJECT AND THE COMMUNITY Media representations of West Indians depicting them as a lawbreaking, violent community contrast intensely with West Indians’ own senses of their community, as well as with the lifestyles of the vast majority of them. This contrast became quite clear to me during two years of fieldwork. I conducted the research from 1992 to 1994 among immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, including Guyana. In long, semi-formal interviews I conversed with 54 individuals who were either West Indians or their American-born children. I interviewed non-West Indians, too, including several law enforcement officers, social activists, teachers, reporters, employers of West Indians, and judicial employees. I also engaged in participant-observation in a wide variety of activities, thereby repeatedly interacting with some of my interviewees, as well as with 16 other West Indian informants whom I never formally interviewed. This participant observation included a trip “home” to Jamaica with some of my informants. In addition, supplementing my research are 21 taped interviews with local West Indians made for Washington’s Anacostia Museum.40 My West Indian informants were approximately evenly divided between men and women, and were from ten countries, with a majority from Trinidad and Jamaica. Judging by occupation, education, size of

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home, and neighborhood, most were from the middle, lower middle, and working classes. In terms of hegemonic U.S. “racial” categories, all but one of my informants were “black,” although not all identified themselves that way.41 I am native to the Washington area, from the upper middle class.42 I accidentally talk in social scientific jargon from time to time (for example, my use of the phrase “rotating credit association” produced a puzzled query during one interview). These aspects of my social position may be why West Indian informants took seriously my intent to write a book about them. The status dynamics of our encounters brought to the fore issues of “reputation” as part of the politics of “race,” “culture,” and media representations in the U.S. Several of my informants strongly urged me to write about how their community differs from media imagery about them in the period just preceding my fieldwork. West Indians in the region foster their sense of community through ties to local kin and friendship networks, through sensory activities involving food and music, and through participation in festivals, ethnic organizations, and West Indian churches. The community they sustain is loose-knit, sometimes factious, and for the most part geographically dispersed throughout the region; moreover, individuals vary in the extent of their integration into it (see Wade 1993b:303-5). But social and geographical heterogeneity do not prevent West Indians from seeing themselves as a distinct community. Many Chesapeake-area West Indians do have special kinds of interactions with each other, and they do conceive of themselves as having things in common setting them apart from other peoples around them (see Vickerman 1999b:127fn1). Their commonalities reinforce identification with individual Caribbean nations, while at the same time—despite some nationalistic rivalries—they are developing a pan-West Indian consciousness (see Kasinitz 1992). The commonalities begin with kinship. The immigrants live and socialize, share food and money and hard times, with West Indian kin—activities that constantly reinforce their identities as Caribbean people. Most of an individual’s kin come from the same nation of origin, but West Indians are sometimes involved in inter-island romances, which encourage pan-West Indian identification.43 These Caribbean identities—whether nation-based or pan-West Indian—are


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most intensely felt among first-generation immigrants. Yet among the second generation, having grown up with West Indian parents is often an important aspect of their senses of self.44 Many of my Americanborn, teenage informants told me that their parents were much stricter than their schoolmates’ non-immigrant parents (see Foner 1983; Waters 1999:220-233). In general, especially among the young adults, they thought this strictness was a good idea; it was part of what had made them “different” in a positive way. Over time they had come to admire their parents and to feel proud to identify ethnically with their West Indian kin. Family members share not only ethnic pride, but also friends and “fictive kin.” West Indians in the Washington-Baltimore region form a “community of sociality” (Justus 1978). They have many informal gettogethers, they drop by each other’s homes spontaneously, and their children often grow up as close friends. Some of these informal bonds lead to intimate relationships and new West Indian-American families. Others lead, like a series of links in a chain, to participation in rotating credit associations managed by West Indian friends and acquaintances (see Bonnett 1981). An important aspect of their sociality is food. Many informants told me they eat Caribbean food because it reminds them of “home”; food is an enactment of identity, and reinforces it (Feeley-Harnik 1994). Although my female informants were much more involved in cooking than the males, the men were as interested in eating Caribbean foods as the women. As one Guyanese woman stated, food is “a way to preserve the culture.” This same woman pointed out that food connects people from different countries; if she meets a Trinidadian friend of a friend, generally I get drawn into the circle. And then [the Trinidadian says about me] “She’s from Guyana, so she must know to make roti.” It’s always circled around what you could make, or what you could eat, that you share together [from taped interview]. These immigrants find the Caribbean foods they long for in specialty markets focusing on their needs; most local West Indians know their exact locations. West Indians also patronize local

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Caribbean restaurants and carry-outs. These eateries spring up in, and help anchor, two small West Indian neighborhoods in the region: a stretch of Georgia Avenue in Northwest D.C., and a roughly foursquare block area in the Pimlico section of Baltimore. West Indian immigrants also come together to enjoy their music. Although here and in the Caribbean, Jamaicans are strongly identified with reggae and dance hall, and Trinidadians with calypso, soca, and steel band, many West Indians are nevertheless eclectic in their musical tastes. At concerts, in area nightclubs, in West Indian record stores, and in the local performing groups themselves, individuals from differing countries mingle. One Trinidadian leader in Baltimore frequently mused to me that “maybe music [would] be the solution” to nationalistic rivalries among local West Indians. Indeed, according to a longtime Jamaican resident, the most important ethnic unifiers for local West Indians have been the weekly, Anglophone Caribbean variety shows on the radio. For area West Indians, radio, and not newspapers, is creating the “imagined community” (B. Anderson 1983)—in this case, a community larger than the nation-states of origin. Music, often along with elaborate pageantry, is a prominent part of West Indian festivals. Complementing numerous small festivals throughout the year, Trinidadian-style carnivals in both Baltimore and Washington have drawn thousands of spectators and participants each summer. Immigrants from many West Indian countries join the fun. In addition, the Jamaican community has put on a well-attended, yearly reggae festival. Washington has also hosted the large “Caribbean Summer in the Park” event, which is self-consciously pan-West Indian. Recreation and holiday celebrations also build community: basketball, domino, soccer, cricket, ethnic picnics, dances, a Miss Caribbean Maryland Pageant,45 a Comedy Festival, Caribbean fashion shows, bus trips to carnivals in other cities, and Christmas events have all brought West Indians together. Most of these events have been effected by the 20-odd small ethnic organizations in the region. These organizations provide a further field of interaction for local West Indians through board meetings, festival planning, political action, charity work, and fund raising activities. Finally, West Indians come together to worship. In D.C. at the time of my fieldwork there were congregations of the Anglican, Church of God, and Moravian faiths with West Indian pastors and a substantial


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number of West Indian members. There are probably several hundred Rastafarians in the D.C. area, although not even they are sure of their number because there are so few formal structures in their subcommunity. There is also a large number of Seventh Day Adventists. The most notable congregation, because of its size and high concentration of West Indians, is the Metropolitan Seventh Day Adventist Church in Hyattsville, Maryland. The church has about 600 congregants. The pastor estimated for me that in the mid-1990s the congregation had the following profile: Nationality/Ethnicity Trinidadian—20% Jamaican —15% Guyanese—10% other West Indians—35% Africans and African-Americans—20% Socio-economic class “Blue collar workers”—60+% “Professionals”—35% “Unemployed looking for work”—“a few” In this church shared religion is a powerful bond. I asked an elder from Barbados if there is any inter-island rivalry within the congregation. He replied, “No, not really. There’s not a concentration on where you’re from. In elections for officers, an island focus might come up, but when it does it’s discouraged by the church leadership.”46 All of these interactions, then, create and maintain both national identities and West Indians’ senses of themselves as West Indian, as a community with shared interests. The community arrived in the Chesapeake region in two waves. The first wave migrated between the late 1930s and 1965. This foundational cohort consisted largely of individuals who came to study at Howard University and stayed in the area after graduating. During this period most West Indians were emigrating to Britain, however, where by contrast with the U.S., their immigration was unrestricted throughout the 1950s.

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The passage of Britain’s 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act closed the door to West Indian migrants. Three years later, the HartCeller Immigration Reform Act in the U.S. had the opposite effect. The economic strength of the U.S. during that period, cheaper air travel, and the change in immigration law combined to produce a migrant stream far larger than any of the law’s framers had expected. Kasinitz points out that in the ten years after the Hart-Celler reforms went into effect, West Indian immigration exceeded that of the previous seventy years, and the numbers continued to grow ... By the early 1980s approximately 50,000 legal immigrants from the Anglophone Caribbean ... were entering the United States annually (1992:27). This new cohort began arriving in significant numbers in Washington and Baltimore in the 1970s. Some came directly from the Caribbean to the Chesapeake region. Others came via New York City, which they had found overwhelming and unpleasant. Of varied socioeconomic backgrounds, their initial connections to the Chesapeake region were through a very active, Caribbean-focused nanny-placement agency in Baltimore;47 the recruitment efforts of the Bethlehem Steel Company; West Indian embassies and area colleges; and the presence of kin who had arrived before them. Compared to the earlier periods, a smaller proportion of the Chesapeake-area immigrants were students, since now West Indians could take advantage of educational opportunities in places other than the limited number of historically “black” institutions such as Howard University. Instead, there was a concentration of health-care workers, as Petras showed in her 1989 study. Of her sample of immigrant Jamaican women in the health care field, 7 percent had found jobs in Washington. Health care workers were the largest group in my research pool (11%), but others of my informants were employed in government, child care, small business, custodial work, manual labor, sales, secretarial work, accounting, law, science, mass media, education, religion, and beauty services. With ample reason, West Indians view themselves as a positive, productive subcommunity in the region.


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SCHOLARLY ANTECEDENTS Other social scientists have documented West Indians’ concern with social status, though not in the Chesapeake region and not in conjunction with media studies. Such research draws on the pioneering work of Peter Wilson. Ever since Wilson posited a clash between the struggles for “reputation” and “respectability” in Anglophone Caribbean societies (P. Wilson 1973), scholars have grappled with these terms and the cultural patterns they represent. Wilson argued that West Indian men seek status through “reputation,” which requires egalitarianism and sharing of material resources with fellow males, along with the development of personal skills and exploits such as musical talent, experience overseas, and sexual conquests.48 By contrast, women strive for “respectability,” which is hierarchical and intensely concerned with Christian morality; individual abilities and adventures pale in importance compared to the need for sexual propriety, sober living, and financial stability (see discussion in Besson 1993). While Wilson’s schema has been seminal in guiding the thought of other scholars, it has frequently been criticized and modified. Following Wilson many scholars have described a dual value system among Anglophone West Indians (see Burton 1997:160-9), yet their data suggest either different or more complex pictures of the dual values than Wilson’s view. My own informants used the word “reputation” to refer to a wide variety of status concerns, including some that Wilson and other scholars have categorized as matters of “respectability.” My informants thus blurred some of the terminological distinctions scholars have made. Beyond the level of differing words, scholars have disagreed with Wilson about the actual social patterns in West Indians’ values. Based on my fieldwork, I, like Besson (1993), question Wilson’s view of West Indian women. Many of my female informants spontaneously expressed concern about their “reputations” (their word) in relation to what Wilson claimed were the male ethics of sharing and personal talent. This example from my fieldnotes illustrates the phenomenon: Noelle complained that some people had told others she was making money off the food she cooked for carnival. Noelle

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media remarked that it wasn’t true, and that what those people had said “hurt my reputation.” [Here Noelle implied that at least during community events, a woman is supposed to be materially generous rather than profit-seeking.] She then bragged a bit about her skills. She said that Bernice Hall acts like she’s the only one who knows the details of how to cater. Noelle added that she’s mostly quiet when Bernice talks like that, but once she suggested to Bernice a pretty way to cut fish. Now whenever Noelle is at one of Bernice’s functions, Bernice asks Noelle to cut her fish. Noelle said the same holds for making roti.

Conversely, my male informants often expressed what Wilson claimed were primarily female concerns with Christian morality—for instance, many made a point of asserting that they do not steal or deal drugs.49 Similarly, in recounting the history of their ethnic organization in Baltimore, three Trinidadian men expressed their worries about how the association’s previous president had handled its finances: Nat: But in seeing what was happening [with the expresident], and the reputation Trinidadians and West Indians were getting in this town, I Me: The reputation? Nat: Yeah. Of being sort of scams. [Owen laughs] Of being dishonest. I mean, I can't—I couldn't sit down and take it anymore. I had to do something. That's why when Mel called, I got so deeply involved in it. ... Mel: Last year, for instance. I mean, to tell you how the guy's reputation precedes it. Last year I went down to the health department to get a food permit. And as I walked in, the young lady said, "Oh, yes, I want to see you." I said, "Me?" She said, "Yes. Your check bounced." I said, "What check are you talking about?" "Did you come here last week for a food permit?" I said, "No, ma'am, this is the first time I'm comin'


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here for the year." I mean that's the type of reputation, you know ... [Taped conversation, 1993] Here a certain kind of immoral “reputation” was something the men wished to avoid; they wished to be known for upstanding Christian morality.50 Thus Wilson’s rather fixed understandings of which West Indians embrace what values, and in which contexts, seem oversimplified.51 My disagreements with Wilson stem from how he viewed the relationship between “reputation” and “respectability.” First, in explaining value differences his analysis privileges gender, whereas my field data, along with some of the other scholarship (Reisman 1970, 1974; Austin 1984; Eriksen 1992), suggest socioeconomic class as the more important variable. Second, Wilson sees the value systems of “reputation” and “respectability” as deeply antithetical to and largely independent of one another;52 by contrast, based on my fieldwork and that of others (e.g. Eriksen 1992), I view the two value systems as opposed yet profoundly intertwined. Almost all West Indians want to succeed in both value systems, although people from the higher classes generally put more effort into what Wilson called “respectability,” while those from the lower classes often emphasize what he called “reputation.” In any case, in most contexts in this book I will use the term “reputation” as my informants did, to refer to status concerns in general; only where I note the dual system will “reputation” retain the specific meaning Wilson described. The chapters that follow will show that problems with social status have been especially acute for West Indian immigrants who adhere to the Rastafarian faith. Scholars describe Rastafarianism as a messianic religion originating in the 1930s in Jamaica (H. Campbell 1985; Chevannes 1994). Although Jamaica remains its demographic center, Rastafarians consider Ethiopia their true home.53 They believe that “blacks” are reincarnations of the ancient Israelites; that Ethiopia’s former emperor, Haile Selassie, is the messiah, God incarnate; and that believers in him will regenerate the world. They advocate repatriation to Africa to live in joy and plenty. Some Rastafarians have been politically active in repatriation movements and in criticizing colonialism; others have kept their resistance to “white” and elite dominance out of the formal political arena (on the differences among

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various types of Rastafarians, see Morrish 1982:76-80; Homiak 1985; Chevannes 1994). Rastafarians have at times been persecuted in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, particularly because their Afro-centric theology has inspired fear of subversion, because they wear their hair in dreadlocks,54 and because they smoke marijuana as part of their religious observances. They have also encountered substantial negative attitudes about them in the U.S. With their clear sense of belonging to an African diaspora, Rastafarians are among the most transnationally-oriented subgroup within the already highly transnational West Indian immigrant population. In Chapter Two I explore ways that West Indian transnationalism affects their concerns with “reputation” and mass media. This discussion is informed by the growing literature on West Indians’ connections both to their “home” societies and to immigrantdestination countries, such as the U.S., Britain, and Canada (e.g. Stinner, de Albuquerque, and Bryce-Laporte 1982; Gmelch 1992; Olwig 1993; Chamberlain 1998; Olwig 2001). Such studies have stretched common-sense conceptions of the boundaries of “nations” and “states” (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Basch 2001). West Indian transnationalism also stretches our understanding of how large a social and geographical field one must consider when taking stock of how status issues affect people’s behavior. Among my informants, how they spent their money and even how they received performance evaluations for their jobs in America were at times influenced by transnational gossip networks. “Reputations” can thus spread through far-flung social fields. In the U.S., reputations are intimately connected to “race.” Scholars have found West Indians a particularly interesting group to study in relation to America’s “racial” dynamics. Anthropologists Sutton (Sutton 1973; Sutton and Makiesky-Barrow 1987) and Foner (1985, 1987) were among the firsts to tackle this topic; recently several fine sociological works have also appeared on the subject. Kasinitz (1992) explores the patterning of “racial” alliances and West Indian ethnicity in New York City politics; Vickerman (1999b), the coping strategies of West Indians in “racially” charged encounters and the fluidity of their identity choices; and Waters (1999), the variability in “ethnic” and “racial” identities among West Indians of differing social positions, and the way those identities are perceived by both “black”


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and “white” Americans (for more by these authors see also Part III of Foner 2001). A thorough grasp of the issues that these works so ably examine is essential for understanding West Indians’ struggles for social status in the U.S. They inform my effort to expand on an area these studies only touch on: West Indian immigrants’ experience of mass media. Drawing on insights into West Indians’ experiences of “race” and ethnicity can add nuance and complexity to the literature on how mass media in the U.S. have treated minorities. Most such media studies note differences in how media have portrayed “black” women versus men, or “blacks” of varying social classes, or “blacks” versus hispanics or Asians. The stereotypical representations of each subgroup are carefully delineated. Yet very little work has examined the diverging ways that ethnic groups all labeled “black” in America have been depicted (but see Turner 1994:182-205; Vickerman 1999a), much less how they have experienced mass media differently. Moreover, the literature on media and minorities generally comes from the disciplines of cultural studies, American studies, and film, TV, or journalism studies; it is rarely ethnographic and therefore tends not to detail the reactions of “black” communities to the ways they have been represented. The scholarship is discussed where relevant in the chapters to come. Media analysts and social theorists have critiqued a concept central to this work—that of “stereotype.” They argue that the term is too variously used to mean either a universal human process of categoryformation or an ideologically loaded, pernicious form of imagemaking; that analysts’ decisions as to what constitutes a stereotype are too subjective; that the concept oversimplifies and cannot handle textual properties such as irony; that the concept fails to take into account audience interpretations; and that too often scholars assume that the stereotypes they analyze shed light in a direct and unproblematic way on broad patterns of actual social relations (see discussions in Cottle 1997:5-7; Vickerman 1999a:85-6). Nevertheless scholars recognize that during historical periods when representations of a particular group remain crude, and the study of their imagery and production is still in its infancy, the concept of “stereotype” can be quite useful, serving as a “springboard for doing further research” (Vickerman 1999a:86; see also Cottle 1997:6-7). Some of the pitfalls

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scholars have noted can be avoided in such situations because imagery about the subgroup is so often vilifying or demeaning (thus highlighting the ideological functions of stereotypes), so repetitive (thus providing an objective frame for the analyst’s subjective assessments), and so frequently lacking in irony or textual sophistication. One can address the issues of audience interpretation and actual social patterns by doing audience and social-context research. One method for tackling the latter two concerns is ethnography. CONCLUSION The chapters that follow detail the relationship between Chesapeakearea West Indians and mass media in the 1980s and 1990s. I begin (Chapter Two) by exploring why mass media matter to West Indians and why they should matter to anthropologists. Later chapters sketch not only aspects of how certain images have been produced and reproduced, but also the histories of their appearances in the Chesapeake market. The chapters include content analysis for selected cases—from the news (Chapter Three), advertising (Chapter Four), and mass entertainment (Chapter Five)—and an examination of West Indian responses to those contents (Chapter Six). The study thus adds to previous scholarship on West Indian concerns with “reputation” and “respectability,” showing how these concerns relate to processes of image-making for mass audiences. The West Indians that media producers have too often chosen to portray contrast sharply with the great majority of the West Indians I came to know. I offer a vignette from my fieldwork to illustrate this contrast; in reading the negative depictions in the chapters to come, the reader is asked to remember this very different scene: I attended the opening ceremony for a school building erected by the Metropolitan Seventh Day Adventist Church in conjunction with other “black” Adventist churches and located on the property of the Metropolitan Church. Named for Antiguan Seventh-Day Adventist educator and evangelist G.E. Peters, at the time of my fieldwork the school boasted some 230 students, most of whom scored well above the national average on the IOWA standardized tests for elementary schoolers (Phillips 1993). At the jubilant opening ceremony for the


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new building—attended by hundreds of people—the Superintendent of Schools for the Adventists’ Allegheny East Conference commented that when it came to pedagogy and test scores, she never worried about the G.E. Peters school: things were always done right there. Another speaker commented that when the congregations had initially planned the school, some people thought that a group of “blacks” “couldn’t come together to accomplish anything. But we showed them otherwise!” This remark led some in the congregation to clap and add “Amen” to show their agreement. The most impressive part of the opening ceremony, however, was the 15-minute address given by the president of the student body, Miss Gwen-Marie Davis.55 Articulately, she first lauded the sacrifice of her parents’ generation in erecting the new building, both with their money and their physical labor. She stated that whenever in life she is challenged or tempted to be discouraged, she will always remember the accomplishment visible in this building. Bursting with pride, she then spoke of the abilities of her fellow students (I can vouch that their choir, at least, was excellent). At the end of her talk, in a climax that moved virtually everyone in the room, she shouted with confident exuberance, “Watch out world! Here come the students of the G.E. Peters school!” Her experience represented a great triumph, made all the sweeter by memories of the struggles that had been endured, and the cooperation that had been forged, to bring it about. These are the kinds of images West Indians see in their minds’ eyes when they think of their own people. They are the kinds of images they wish they could see more of in mass media.


CHAPTER TWO

Why Media Representations Matter

"... whatever the newspaper and radio say in this country, that is the people Bible. ... Newspaper and radio rule this country. ... It have people living in London who don't know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don't know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.” —Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956:9,77) “Even in the U.S. and other societies where cinema and television are arguably among the most powerful cultural forces at play, they have been virtually ignored as possible research sites for ethnographers.” —Faye Ginsburg (1994:9) Hours after the massive, failed police action dubbed Operation Caribbean Cruise (OCC—see Chapter One), Washington police issued a press release praising the raid. The document used the word “Jamaican” twice and “Rastafarian” once in connection with drug trafficking. One of my informants, who became quite involved in defending the West Indian community’s reputation after OCC, described the impact of that press release and later media reports. As I recorded in my fieldnotes, he traced the beginning of the community’s media problems to that press release. He said it was picked up by the local 37

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media newspapers—and especially to West Indians’ detriment by local TV—in very negative ways. He added that “some of the more vicious things” have been said on TV and that “TV is very powerful.” At one time, Channel 5 was a particular problem. ... Later he and others met with the press to contest reporters’ assumption that anyone with a Caribbean accent was Jamaican (some press reports had stated that suspects were Jamaican without any verification). It turned out that police had told reporters only that certain individuals sounded like they might be from the islands—maybe Jamaica—and that the press was the source of the overly definitive assertions. He said that in fairness to the police, the media was the real problem. “The culprits were not the police; they were the press” [Fieldnotes, 3/93].

Despite some of my informants’ comments that law enforcement officials discriminated against them, the focus of this complaint was common.56 Much of my informants’ anger about their “reputations” in the U.S. was directed towards the mass media. Their complaints about the press ignored several critical aspects of the production of negative ethnic images: 1) Law enforcement agencies are capable of generating highly prejudicial documents internally, as the quotation in Chapter One from OCC’s training manual demonstrates; 2) Law enforcers benefit from publicity that casts them in the role of heroes fighting villains. Hence at times they actively facilitate the production of media reports favorable to themselves; and 3) Criminals sometimes use ethnicity to their advantage, thus heightening the apparent “ethnic” features of their crimes. These processes (and others that affect media representations, such as journalistic work practices) merit anthropological study because they matter—both for West Indian immigrants and for anthropologists. WEST INDIAN IMMIGRANTS’ CONCERNS ABOUT MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS AND DISCRIMINATION West Indians have both affective and instrumental reasons to care deeply about how they are represented to mass audiences—indeed, the two types of motivation are constantly intertwined. Fundamental to


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both is a worry that media representations are not just neutral, fleeting images or fantasies separated from the rest of life. West Indians care about media images because they believe that these images help shape others’ views of them as an ethnic group. Research on audience responses to mass media suggests that West Indians are right to be concerned. While the evidence is inconclusive on just how much people’s views are shaped by media,57 scholarship indicates that media can significantly influence people in three major ways. First, media images reinforce preexisting biases, even when the images’ producers intended to parody those very biases (see the discussion in Wilson and Gutiérrez 1995:50-6). Second, media language and imagery can activate one side or another of pre-existing ambivalences in the minds of media consumers, as recent studies have shown. The authors of The Black Image in the White Mind (Entman and Rojecki 2000) and of The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes (Kellstedt 2003) argue that most Americans are, in fact, ambivalent about “race” relations and racial policies in the U.S. They are, therefore, open to being swayed. Third, media portrayals shape people’s perspectives when they are learning about new topics (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:299; van Dijk 1987:45-6; Gilens 1999). For the latter reason, children are especially impressionable—the whole world is new (Wilson and Gutiérrez 1995:45; Lichter and Lichter 1988). Also for the latter reason, images of new phenomena—such as a new ethnic group in the viewer’s town or state—are especially likely to have an influence, both on adults and children. This “new information effect” can especially create problems for recent immigrants negatively represented in entertainment and the press.58 A “white” male’s editorial in the Philadelphia Daily News expresses this problem well: You have done a great disservice to white ethnics by charging them with racism and hate-mongering ... How easy it is to use epithets like ‘racist’ and ‘bigot’ rather than face the less savory aspects of African-American crime, drug abuse, poverty and welfare dependence that have created a very real sense of fear and distrust among many working-class whites. Why, after being regaled with horror stories about Jamaican

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media drug posses, crackhouses and OK Corral-style shootouts, are white people expected to react with Christ-like levels of tolerance and love for [these] very people ...? (Donovan 1992).

Why indeed? It is thus reasonable for West Indians to fear that mass media depictions of Jamaican criminals (along with West Indians’ association in people’s minds with troublesome African-Americans—Kasinitz 1992:82-3) could lead to serious discrimination against them. Scholars have documented cases in which U.S. media fanned the flames of beliefs and behaviors that were anti-rational (see Showalter 1997 on allegations of satanic ritual abuse and alien abductions) or even violent (see Wilson and Gutiérrez 1995:45-50 on the zoot suit riots).59 Research also suggests that mass media coverage of crimes can prejudice potential jurors against a defendant, undermining the presumption of innocence in the U.S. judicial system (Krauss 1993). My informants often explained their fears about stereotyping in terms of economic impacts. For example, a Trinidadian informant complained about media coverage of West Indians in Baltimore. He said there was recently a violent incident involving some West Indians, and the media “jumped on it. Why can’t they ever do a story on carnival, or on positive contributions of the West Indian community?” ... [Four months later] he stated that because of lower-class Jamaicans’ problems, all West Indians get a bad name. Instead he wants people to feel respectful when they hear the words “West Indian.” He especially wants employers to feel that way. He added, “I have kids comin’ up. They be lookin’ for jobs” [Fieldnotes 9/92 and 1/93]. Similarly, another informant told me about how negative stereotypes had affected her professionally. Several years earlier she had had to take on a “white” American business partner in order to win the trust of “white” clients. When I commented that it was sad she felt forced to do so, she shrugged and added resignedly, “It’s the way of the world.” Later she spontaneously brought up the stereotype of West Indians as


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drug dealers. About the press she remarked, “The media is really a factor in fueling what they don’t like—what they think is big news— things they don’t know about.” She believed that in an environment in which her foreignness and “blackness” had already obliged her to seek out a “white” American business partner, negative media representations of West Indians only exacerbated the problem of ethnic reputation for her career. In these examples we see that concerns with personal economic status (e.g. one’s professional advancement), with family economic status (e.g. the employability of one’s children), and with the status of larger groups with whom one is also identified (e.g. “West Indians” or more generally, “foreigners” and “blacks”) are bound up with one another. My informants were well aware that status changes at any of these levels of identification can have a significant effect on status at other levels. They frequently expressed worry about how the societywide, media-fueled reputation of Jamaicans, as an ethnic group, could affect their personal and family economic prospects. Conversely, they often spoke of accomplished West Indian individuals as a way of asserting that as a whole, West Indians are a competent, employable group. They were especially pleased that one of “theirs”—General Colin Powell—had become a media hero, and they basked in his glory. During the time of my fieldwork they were also gratified that Trinidadian actor Sullivan Walker had played a dignified (albeit small) role in the hit movie, “The Firm.” That media portrayals can have economic consequences is borne out by the fortunes of another “player” in “The Firm.” The cameo role played by Jamaica’s Red Stripe beer in that film led to a 53% increase in its U.S. sales during the summer after the movie’s release (Baltimore Sun 8/3/93). Thus West Indians are not off the mark in deeming media representations a bread-and-butter (or rice-and-peas) issue. These indirect economic effects of mass media matter to West Indian immigrants not only because of how the immigrants’ lifechances in the U.S. may be altered, but also because of the transnational implications of how the immigrants fare economically. My informants were resolute in their efforts to succeed financially in America, in part because they felt they could not return to their home countries unless they had done so.60 To return without having succeeded could drastically diminish their personal reputations.

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REPUTATIONS—THE TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE The migration histories of my informant Grace and her family illustrate these issues. Grace’s grandfather worked many years for an American oil company in Aruba, sending part of his salary back to the family in St. Vincent. There Grace’s grandmother invested the money in land, in a retail store, and in a taxi business. When their son, Harrington, came of age, Grace’s grandmother put him in charge of the family’s taxi business and some of their finances. But Harrington had, as Grace put it, “a wild youth,” fathering many children out of wedlock (including Grace) and squandering money with his friends. Some of the funds he misspent were supposed to have been used for payments on several government loans that Grace’s grandmother had procured. Eventually, as a result of the non-payment of the loans—and to the shock of everyone in the family except Harrington—the Vincentian government threatened to seize virtually all of the family’s assets. Determined not to lose everything, some 20 years before I met Grace her grandmother came to the United States to work; she saved her money and began repaying the Vincentian government.61 She who had had maids, other servants, and spacious homes did domestic work for 13 years and lived in a tiny apartment in D.C. (At first she had moved to New York, but she soon left because too many Vincentians there could see the drastic change in her status.) Sometimes the change in her lifestyle upset Grace’s grandmother greatly. The arrival of her husband after the first three years was a comfort, but he too lost status, becoming a janitor. Grace eventually came to the U.S. to join her grandparents, who had raised her. After a stint as a nanny and some schooling, she became a medical records technician, which is a supervisory job. At the time of my fieldwork she was studying to become an independent medical consultant, a career which requires special licensing. In the meantime, her grandfather died and her grandmother moved back to St. Vincent, where the money Grace and her grandparents saved for years in the U.S. enabled her grandmother to live comfortably. The story of Grace and her grandparents exemplifies the intertwining of economic and transnational status concerns explored by scholars of West Indian migration (Basch 2001; Plaza 1998; Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994). Such concerns affect not only


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those who choose to retire in the Caribbean after years of working in the U.S., but also those returning “home” for visits. Temporary returnees come laden with gifts, sporting fancy clothes (often bought just for the trip), and possessed of many American dollars (because of the exchange rates with West Indian currencies, their dollars make them locally rich). The showering of gifts and display of wealth are partly imposed by the expectations of people “back home” (Olwig 1993:169-171) and the social sanctions that will ensue if the migrant does not appear successful and generous; they are also partly motivated by self-aggrandizement. In an interview for the New York-based West Indian magazine Everybody’s, Barbadian-Canadian novelist Cecil Foster explained that ... many of us still maintain a facade. We send back home the notion that we are doing really well when sometimes we are not. Sometimes when we go home we run up our Visa and other credit cards to create an impression. One of the biggest things for us is having to go back home! You think “geez I can’t go home without taking back a shirt for John and having some money to give friends and family, so I’m not going to take the trip this year, I’ll accumulate some money first.” Then, two weeks before we go, we run up the Visa card and we catching we ass after that to pay (Everybody’s 1995, Vol. 20/3:10). The transnational pressure to succeed is thus strong enough to prevent people from visiting their home countries until they can do so in style (see Levitt 2001:88-90). My informants told me “When you’re in [my position], you’re between the devil and the deep blue sea, like. I can’t go back home and be laughed at” for not accomplishing anything in the U.S. [Teresa, undocumented nanny from Trinidad] “[I can’t go back home because] if you give, you lose ... your manhood, prestige. You give up everything. I don’t give up. I’m a fighter. I don’t want to go back to Trinidad a loser.” [Ivan, Trini health care worker]

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media “There’s Jamaican pride. It’s very strong. You don’t want to go back home the way you came. Once you leave Jamaica and tell them that you’re going to the United States, you’re expected to come back well off.” [Norman, Jamaican engineer]

Similarly, an informant for the Anacostia Museum’s “Black Mosaic” exhibit explained: [When she first came] “what went through my mind was that it wasn’t worth it. And then I remembered that I had prayed about it, and I had asked the Lord not to let me get through if I would not be successful. ... But I really thought that I had made a mistake. I was so lonely ... [I couldn’t turn back, though, because] I knew that my whole village would have been disappointed. They would have been terribly hurt to know that I came back home without what I wanted to accomplish. And I’m sure they would have come up with some reasons ... ‘Well, I wonder what she did over there— why they sent her home.’ ... I just felt that I had to go through with it because of my own pride.” [Dr. Enid Bogle, Jamaican professor]62 The potential loss of status involved became very evident to me when I visited Jamaica with a Jamaican immigrant informant. In my fieldnotes I noted that Deborah lamented several times that she has no money; when acquaintances in Kingston ask her for some, she has to say no. She said three times to me that people are talking about her, calling her “broke foreign.” Her pained facial expression indicated that she felt mocked (Fieldnotes, 12/94). Deborah expressed great relief when at the end of our trip I gave her common-law husband, still resident in Kingston, U.S. $100 to buy a much-needed new mattress. She remarked that at least now someone would see her as bearing gifts.


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These transnational status issues add urgency to West Indian immigrants’ worries about the effects of negative media representations in the U.S. If media imagery hurts their economic fortunes in America, in turn damaging their reputations in the Caribbean, then it will have undermined some of the major purposes of their having made the arduous, often lonely, and disorienting choice to migrate in the first place. FURTHER REASONS WHY MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS ARE IMPORTANT TO WEST INDIAN IMMIGRANTS In addition to economic standing and transnational reputations, stereotypes can adversely shape the quality of social life in the U.S. My informants complained that images of Jamaicans as violent had prompted “white” co-workers to make unpleasant remarks to them (see Chapter One). They also frequently mentioned African-Americans’ negative ideas about West Indians, which contributed to tensions between the two groups in their work sites, schools, and neighborhoods. The problem of stereotypes can add woe to an already difficult immigrant life, as this conversation demonstrates: Having heard from [a mutual friend] about Deborah’s sadness over the way some Americans have treated her, I asked how she thinks Americans see Jamaicans. She had been smiling, but at my question her face dropped. She explained that at the bus stop in her “black” neighborhood, Americans talk about Jamaicans doing drugs and shootings. (Neither she nor her daughters knows how to drive, so they always take the bus.) She added that a bus driver once ordered a Trinidadian friend of hers to get off, explaining, “I don’t like Jamaicans.” Deborah and her daughters later told me they’ve been “hurt by the talk that goes on” about Jamaicans. Deborah objected, “People say Jamaicans, not some Jamaicans” do this or that bad thing [Fieldnotes 10/93]. Stereotypes can mold or even poison casual commercial transactions, friendships, mating, relations among neighbors, and other forms of social interaction.63 To cite another example, one of my informants

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frequently complained that negative views of West Indians among city administrators made it harder for him to obtain government support for Baltimore’s carnival. Of course, mass media are not the only sources of negative stereotypes. Gossip, rumors, prejudices passed down through families, and actual disagreeable experiences all contribute to stereotyping as well. But media are an important source of biased imagery. My field data suggest yet another concern about the media. Unflattering stereotypes can influence not only potential economic and social partners in the larger society, but also members of the disparaged ethnic group themselves. Group members may internalize a disapproving view of themselves to the point of adopting bigoted stances. They may devalue physical characteristics such as their group’s prototypical skin color or hair texture (a well documented attitude in the West Indies—see R.T. Smith 1988:130-1 for a poignant example; also Chevannes 1994:28). They may, too, overgeneralize the morally suspect behaviors of a few within their group, fail to see the positive sides of their own cultural patterns, or assume that their group’s censured behaviors have immutable, biological bases.64 Although during my fieldwork informants usually insisted that, for a variety of reasons, unflattering portrayals of West Indians did not apply to them, in some contexts they did seem to have absorbed demeaning or unbalanced imagery. For example, many expressed a preference for light-skinned mates or children; they considered “blackness” unattractive. Moreover, as I described in my fieldnotes, a rather dark-skinned professional spoke to me about the “black race,” which he said does not get respect anywhere in the world. He said he’d give me an analogy: in his lifetime, 20 years ago, when the Japanese tried to sell a car in the U.S., people wouldn’t buy it—it was seen as junk. The same was true of watches the Japanese tried to sell in the Caribbean. Instead, everyone wanted to buy American products. If his mother gave his brother a shirt made in the U.S. and an identical one made in St. Lucia to him, he would complain that she’d been unfair. Back then, everyone respected America. But then the Japanese started making better and better things—“they stole the ideas from the U.S.


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and changed them a little and then sold the products back to the U.S.” Now everyone wants to buy a Japanese CD player. They got power for themselves, and now they’re respected. In fact, when an American sees a person with “little eyes, a little yellow man with little eyes” walking down the street, he will think, “A Japanese person,” and he will feel respect. [My informant] said that this phenomenon benefits groups that look a lot like the Japanese, such as “the Chinese, Koreans, North Koreans, and Indonesians.” But when people see a black person, they don’t feel respect. Africans don’t have power. “There’s still slavery in Africa—in South Africa—and all those independent black nations—Africa is huge—aren’t doing anything about it.” He thinks if black people all over the world were serious about doing something about their problems, then they’d “get respect.” He expressed frustration that the leaders of African nations can’t seem to unite in common cause, can’t make Africa a place that prompts people who see a black man to say, “Oh, there’s an African,” and feel respect. Instead of getting respect, black people are the ones starving in Africa and Bangladesh— “in Bangladesh they’re black too; they just have straight hair” (Fieldnotes, 11/92). In this conversation, in which the issue of social esteem was paramount, my informant presented a skewed picture of Africans’ accomplishments. He overlooked the great strides that South Africa had made towards majority rule; by the time of this conversation in November of 1992, the reader will recall that Nelson Mandela had been released from prison, both the 30-year ban on the ANC and the basic apartheid laws had been repealed, and “white” voters had formally accepted the negotiated plan to end minority rule. True, South African violence in June and September of that year, and continuing intra“black” tensions in the province of Natal, indicated that the dismantling of apartheid would be a fragile process. Yet hindsight shows that my informant’s pessimism was misplaced. He had an unduly bleak view of Africans’ efforts to win their freedom, and was discouraged because he felt that this (seemingly) depressing situation reflected badly on him. We should note that this informant did not protest the negative media depiction of Africans as disunified and starving.65 He could

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have voiced a desire for journalism that emphasized valued developments, such as the move in the late 1980s and early 1990s towards democracy in Africa;66 instead he expressed no dissatisfaction with the media. On the contrary, my informant complained that Africans are lacking in unity and starving. He was frustrated that Africans and the African diaspora had not, he felt, created the conditions for being treated with respect. He failed to argue that mass media (or others, such as politicians) neglected already existing reasons for according respect to Africans and “black” people everywhere. Thus, like much of the mass media, he highlighted negatives and ignored positives. He also overgeneralized and overlooked media responsibilities. Several months after this conversation, I asked a Jamaican intellectual whether he thought media stereotypes affect West Indians’ views of themselves. He replied, “You can’t escape the media,” pointing out that books, newspapers, TV and movies are all around us. “You can’t cut yourself completely off from them—even if you stop paying attention to one kind” of medium, the others are still “a part of your life, your world.” And, he said, since media are all around us, so therefore are these negative images. “If you hear or see or read them enough, you believe them ...” (Fieldnotes 6/93). Such internalization is not benign. In their study of immigrant children in Florida and California, Fernandez-Kelly and Schauffler found that self-perception, school performance, and occupational expectations were associated with ethnic identity. Among minority children, those who maintained immigrant identities generally fared better than those who assimilated to American identities. For example, phenotypically “black” Caribbean-American children who perceived themselves as ethnically Caribbean performed better in school than such children who considered themselves “black” Americans. The children who did best were those who absorbed their parents’ immigrant attitudes. In my own study, all of the West Indians I spoke with were motivated to stay in the U.S. by a fierce determination to hang onto their dreams. These are not ordinary people. Migration had


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become a part of their senses of self, a story they lived and then told and re-told to themselves67—with an as-yet-unrealized glorious ending. They would do whatever they could (within the bounds of their moral codes) to succeed. This determination was evident among all age groups, generations, countries, immigration statuses, and socioeconomic levels.68 Having studied the children of such immigrants, Fernandez-Kelly and Schauffler infer that “one of the most effective antidotes against downward mobility is a sense of membership in a group with an undamaged collective identity” (1994:682). Conversely, becoming part of a group perceived to be failures appears to predispose a child to actual failure (see also Stepick 1998:120). Hence, parents’ efforts to preserve immigrant identities for their children, and to maintain or bolster their group’s reputation, are important tasks for securing economically successful futures for them. Recent scholarship suggests a specific way in which negative imagery can induce failure. Two psychologists examined the effects on African-American college students of “stereotype threat,” which the researchers defined as “being at risk of confirming, as selfcharacteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group” (Steele and Aronson 1995:797). In one of several experiments, “black” students were informed in advance that their performance on an exam would be diagnostic of their intelligence. These students had significantly lower scores on the exam than “black” students who were not so informed. Steele and Aronson explain that “Black participants performed worse than White participants when the test was presented as a measure of their ability, but improved dramatically, matching the performance of Whites, when the test was presented as less reflective of ability” (1995:801).69 The researchers posit that anxiety about the stereotype of low intelligence among “blacks”—and the strong desire not to fulfill that stereotype—distracted from and impaired performance. The study suggests that the affective impact of stereotypes on stigmatized individuals can change their long-term educational and economic prospects.70 Mass media that create or confirm negative stereotypes contribute to this problem. In fairness to media producers, however, it should be noted that there are many types of mass media, displaying varying degrees of insight and sensitivity. The difference can be vast in tone and depth of

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inquiry between, on the one hand, a highly respectful report on National Public Radio (NPR) about Trinidadian actor Geoffrey Holder’s artistic career (aired in 1999) and on the other, local TV news “sound bites” about Jamaican criminals. We should also note that West Indians are hardly the only group to endure derogatory media representations. Italo-Americans have frequently been portrayed as criminals in cinema and pre-1960s television71 (but not as frequently in more recent television—Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:198-9). Hispanics, when they are shown in the news or TV entertainment at all, disproportionately appear in lowstatus or criminal roles (National Council of La Raza 1997; Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:247-250). At the time of my fieldwork, Hispanic characters in TV entertainment were twice as likely as nonHispanic “white” characters and three times as likely as “blacks” to commit a crime (Lichter and Amundson 1997:70). Moreover, the percentage of Hispanic characters who were criminal was much higher than the percentage of criminals in their real-life population. In addition, working-class “white” males are often shown on TV as buffoons (Butsch 1995), and businessmen—especially wealthy, older “white” males—“now make up the largest group of murderers on TV [entertainment] apart from gangsters” (the gangsters are often Hispanic) (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:20,197-200). Thus, with reference to the media, West Indians do not have more to complain about than many other groups in the U.S.—although their “foreignness” may make it more socially acceptable to portray them harshly than it is to depict African-Americans negatively. (The problem of “foreignness” likely also contributes to the disproportionate depiction of Hispanics in an unfavorable light—National Council of La Raza 1997:27.) Yet the fact that West Indians are not the only ones the media misrepresents is small comfort: equal “access” to mistreatment is no prize. Crucially, too, media misrepresentation potentially affects groups differently. Because of the differing levels of social and economic power that each possesses, misrepresentation is more likely to hurt a West Indian immigrant than a rich, “white” businessman. After all, which applicant is a “white” personnel director more likely to view with doubt after watching negative TV portrayals—his fellow economically successful “white” male, or the “black” immigrant who is


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already disadvantaged with being an “unknown” and with having perplexing, foreign educational credentials? An examination of West Indians’ relationship to mass media is thus valuable because West Indians care about this issue—and rightly so. Negative portrayals make West Indians feel hurt and indignant, perhaps in part because they must fight the danger of internalizing an insulting view of their own ethnic group. They are also concerned in an instrumental way with how media may mold others’ views of them, affecting both their economic prospects and social interactions. A reader unsympathetic to West Indians might wonder, “Why all this fuss about social standing? Why can’t people just be content with their lots—to live as fulfilling lives as they can without fretting about their statuses?” Some thought-provoking, albeit tentative, answers to these questions are suggested by studies done in Britain—the Anglophone West Indies’ “mother country”—on the relationship between social rank and health. While these studies were not undertaken in the West Indies, they do illuminate aspects of the British cultural legacy there—and possibly aspects of general human psychophysiology as well. These studies, which shed indirect light on West Indians’ preoccupation with status, were directed by Michael Marmot of the International Center for Health and Society at University College, London. They detailed the health of British civil servants—over 17,500 men and women in the 1960s and ‘70s (the Whitehall study— Marmot et al. 1984), and over 7,300 in the 1980s and ‘90s (Marmot et al. 1997). This research has shown that with each tiny descent in civil service rank, from senior executive officer down to executive officer, comes more angina, more diabetes and more rough cough with phlegm. In this securely employed population, the mortality gap between senior administrators and clerical workers is even greater than the health divide in the general population (Shweder 1997:5; see Barr 1997:A02).

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Moreover, differences in rank proved to be just as eerily accurate a guide to heart-attack rates at the top of the ladder [as at the bottom] (a senior assistant statistician was twice as vulnerable as a chief statistician), and a similar pattern held for cancer and other diseases that might have been assumed to choose their victims more randomly (Lardner 1998:26A). Marmot’s research has became famous because 1) all of the civil servants studied had access to high-quality nationalized health care; 2) when the researchers statistically factored out differences in life-style among civil servants of differing rank, they found that rank itself was the single biggest predictor of morbidity and mortality; and 3) the argument that sicker people are less likely to rise in rank does not appear to account adequately for all the differences in health among those studied (see Shweder 1997:5; Lardner 1998:26A; Barr 1997:A02). Marmot’s conclusion is that a low sense of control on the job—the inability to make independent choices—elevates unhealthy factors in the blood. Low status, then, matters for health, quality of life, and longevity—perhaps more for the British and their ex-colonials than for other peoples, or perhaps for humans in general.72 Related studies comparing various parts of the non-poor world suggest that the more egalitarian a town or even whole society, the longer its inhabitants live when compared with less egalitarian towns and societies—even when the less egalitarian location is materially richer (see discussion in Lardner 1998:26A). Thus it appears that where people have less experience of being bossed around and demeaned, they are more likely to thrive.73 Surely viewing negative media representations of themselves, and hearing others repeat those representations back to them, reduces a people’s sense of control, affecting their overall well-being. Although my West Indian informants did not cite the British studies, their personal experiences made them anxious about the real possibility that media imagery could have a detrimental impact on them. In the first place, then, mass media are a topic worthy of ethnography because they are both salient to informants and affect their


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lives; paying attention to informants’ viewpoints and experiences is, after all, a hallmark of anthropology. In addition, anthropologists would do well to study mass media because of their importance for understanding the contemporary world. WHY MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS MATTER FOR ANTHROPOLOGISTS Until recently, most anthropologists have neglected to examine the press and mass media entertainment (Spitulnik 1993; F. Ginsburg 1994). Instead, literary critics, philosophers, communications scientists, sociologists, and scholars of British cultural studies have dominated publications on mass media (Ortner 1998:415; Lull 1990:28,14-17). In one sense, this state of affairs does not warrant concern. A communications scientist (e.g. Lull 1991) or a sociologist (e.g. Gans 1979) can write a book that, while not drawing on the corpus of literature anthropologists are trained in, is nevertheless ethnographic. Participant-observation is now a respected method of study in virtually every discipline examining human beings.74 Yet what matters here is not what counts as anthropology or who qualifies as an anthropologist. My concern is that most of those academics who by training accept the label “anthropologist” are neglecting a rich domain for study. I say “most” because there have been some anthropological studies of mass media (see Spitulnik 1993 and F. Ginsburg 1994 for overviews). Notable recent works include Appadurai’s and Hannerz’s theorizings about how media images are globalized and then variously interpreted in different parts of the world;75 Lull’s edited volume on how families in six quite different societies watch television (Lull 1988); Lutz and Collins’s study of how photographs in National Geographic have represented non-Westerners and how a sample of readers responded to those representations (Lutz and Collins 1993); Abu-Lughod’s examination of how Egyptian soap operas portray Islam and Islamic fundamentalists, and how the depictions are differently understood by individuals in distinct sectors of that society (1993); Carter’s examination of popular and press stereotypes about Senegalese immigrants in Italy and the government projects and politics surrounding that imagery (1997; see also Riccio 2001); and Farmer’s study of stereotypes about Haitians among U.S. government officials

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and in the U.S. popular press, and of how the Haitian community in the U.S. has responded to those images (1992:208-228). The present study is similar to Abu-Lughod’s, Carter’s, and especially Farmer’s works, analyzing media portrayals of a minority group, the history of the portrayals, their relation to government activities, and the reactions of the minority group to these representations. Like these scholars, I examine mass media because of their transformative effects and contemporary relevance to virtually all ethnographic topics. Mass media are an undeniably central fact of life in most parts of the world. Their presence changes the way information, including images of ethnic groups, is disseminated. As Post has pointed out, press representations are often a form of gossip— but stripped of much of gossip’s usual social context (1994; see also Hannerz 1992:45-6; Heyman 1998:18-20). Readers and viewers of media images receive the content of gossip without any personal relationship to the people transmitting the images. Thus, mass media depend on the “commercialization of activities once social” (H. Schiller 1996:24). Building on Post’s observation, we might add that the transmitters of images have reduced accountability to those who receive the images. If my neighbor tells me gossip that seems incomplete or exaggerated, I can question him directly about it. By contrast, if my local TV news station transmits a story that seems incomplete or exaggerated, I cannot interrupt the flow of information to seek clarification. I can write the programmers a letter, but it is unlikely that, prompted by my letter, they will produce a second news report with further information (Gans 1979:230-1). If I discover that the news report was completely false, again, I can write a letter—or I can stop watching the program. If enough people stop watching, the programmers will have received negative feedback. If we stop watching and write protest letters, the programmers may even understand why their show is losing ratings, and they may make program changes. But the process is much more cumbersome and indirect than with face-to-face gossip,76 and the danger of unchallenged exaggerations—sensationalism—is probably greater.77 Aware of the power of their profession, many reporters and entertainment producers take care not to disseminate messages they consider biased or inflammatory (Gans 1979; Lichter, Lichter, and


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Rothman 1991:9-17). But in a highly competitive media environment, in which the ante of what counts as “exciting” is constantly being upped (Post 1994:70), even the best of intentions are too often subverted by commercial considerations (Downie and Kaiser 2002). As I noted in Chapter One, journalists themselves now lament the increasing sensationalism of their craft. With television, part of the problem is its appearance of intimacy. On the news we see familiar, smiling, bantering reporters and anchors, creating an illusion of kitchen table conversation. Television “mimics face-to-face communication ... [the] imaginary ‘I’ of the television intensifies the sense of immediacy while rendering the [actual] ‘I’ nonexistent” (Doreski 1998:172). Scholars have termed television’s sense of immediacy its “liveness” (see discussions in Torres 1998 and Liebes 1996). Segments—particularly in the news—seem “live,” direct, spontaneous, unedited, real. Yet in the next chapter I discuss a TV news show in which the editing slighted my informants’ reality, providing a regrettably narrow picture of the concerns of law-abiding West Indians. For now I wish simply to point out that information dissemination through pseudo-social and semi-unaccountable media changes the problems of “respectability” and “reputation” for West Indians. The impression management noted in Chapter One—so often highly personal —takes on new forms in a large-scale, mass-mediated society. The new society is, on the one hand, more anonymous than West Indians’ home societies (thus permitting new freedoms), and on the other, more difficult to challenge when reputations do become sullied. In Chapter Six I trace responses West Indian immigrants have made in the face of negative press imagery; many of their actions in defense of their reputations have had a formal and collective, rather than informal and personal, character. With increasing migrations and dislocations around the globe, the proliferation of mass media, and growing fear of migrants among “host” populations (Weiner 1995), minority populations worldwide will continue to be vulnerable to how media represent them. The forms the problems take will depend on who owns, creates, and regulates media products—which differs from country to country (Abu-Lughod 1993)—as well as on the ways media consumers use, interpret, and react to media products, which differs among cultures (Lull 1990:146-

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173). The widespread impacts of both mass migration and mass media, and the cross-cultural variability in how these processes intersect, suggest that anthropologists have important new fields of study to explore. OUTLINE OF CASE-STUDY CHAPTERS Chapter Three examines print and TV news in the Chesapeake-area market. I delineate the types and histories of news reports about West Indians since 1980 and then explore facets of their production. This is the longest of the case-study chapters, because news media often provide the inspiration for the themes in entertainment media (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:297; see also Turow 1984:175). The news media are, in a sense, the trend setters, and thus merit special scrutiny. I conclude this chapter on journalism with two brief, perturbing case studies, one each from print and TV news. Chapter Four briefly sketches some of the ways Chesapeake-area advertisements have portrayed West Indians. The chapter that follows examines West Indian characters in television entertainment and especially in Hollywood films, as well as some of the reasons for the production of stereotypes in entertainment. I include an annotated list of relevant movies and TV shows. Chapter Six explores a variety of efforts that Chesapeake-area West Indians have made to improve their ethnic reputations. This chapter provides one type of anthropological approach to audience research.78 How a small but significant portion of the audience for images about West Indians actually experienced those images is apprehended through study of their words and actions in a historical, rather than experimental, setting. The premises that underlie their reactions to mass media are also explored.

CHAPTER THREE

West Indians in Print and Television News

Despite the substantial growth in ethnic minority populations in the U.S. in recent decades, few in-depth studies have examined how mainstream news media since the mid-20th-century have depicted them. Van Dijk has asserted that “there [was] not a single full-fledged study of the portrayal of minorities (or of any specific minority group) in the [contemporary] American press until the more general monograph by Wilson and Gutiérrez (1985)” (van Dijk 1987:43).79 Beginning to fill the gap since that time have been Weston’s book on journalism about Native Americans in national and local print news (1996), Lind and Danowski’s essay on the representation of Arabs in electronic media (1998), and Simon and Alexander’s broad study of journalism dealing with immigrants in major print news sources (1993). Wilson and Gutiérrez’s seminal work has also been reissued in updated editions (e.g. Wilson, Gutiérrez, and Chao 2003). Also helping to fill the gap are studies focused specifically on the representation of African-Americans in U.S. news media (e.g. Gilens 1999). Campbell’s research on (primarily) African-Americans in local TV news and selected print sources highlights important themes in this coverage—the marginalizing of “blacks’” lives, the tendency of compressed TV segments to fall back on stereotypical images, and TV journalists’ failures to explore the complex difficulties that “blacks” face in America (C. Campbell:1995, 1998; see also Gilliam et al. 1997; Entman and Rojecki 2000). As Lipsitz has pointed out, such shortcomings continue to be repeated because media companies reap profits from selling stories that fit the preexisting “conventions and core grammar” of consumers’ expectations (1998:110; see also Gray 57

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1995b; Entman and Rojecki 2000). Yet the coverage has not always been antithetical to African-Americans’ interests. Julian Bond details how, despite the overly cozy relationship between the FBI and certain news media outlets in the earliest years of the Civil Rights Movement, for the most part journalists were quite helpful to the Movement during the early period (Bond 2001)—particularly in their roles as political agenda-setters (see also Walker 2001 on press coverage of the Civil Rights Movement). The findings in Martindale’s pioneering study of how “white”owned presses have depicted American “blacks” (1986) provide an intriguing comparison with my own work. Reviewing the older literature on her topic, she finds that in many newspapers before 1950, reports about African-American criminality or other anti-social behavior accounted for some 50% of all coverage of “blacks” (Martindale 1986:66-7). She demonstrates that by the 1970s, however, the situation had improved. For example, articles in the Chicago Tribune about “black” anti-social actions dropped from 41% during the 1950s to 6% during the 1970s (Martindale 1986:121). By comparison, my statistics show that if one looks at coverage during my research period of just the West Indian portion of the “black” population, the numbers resemble the coverage ratios for African-Americans in the 1950s and earlier: around 50% of the stories dealt with criminals and anti-social behavior.80 Apparently, during my research period “white” presses felt they had tacit social permission to report on West Indians in an imbalanced way that no longer applied as much to AfricanAmericans. The imbalance derived in part from the news media’s lack of interest in law-abiding West Indians. This kind of omission is the backdrop against which crime stories stand out. WEST INDIANS IN THE NEWS: THE BACKGROUND OF SILENCE The predominant approach of Chesapeake-area journalists towards West Indians has been silence. Like most news media in the U.S., journalism in the region has focused heavily on politics and government (Gans 1979). The focus on government is especially true in Washington, D.C. Since few West Indian immigrants or their


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offspring—with the spectacular exception of Colin Powell—have been high-level actors in the region’s government or politics, like most other “ordinary” people they have been neglected in news reports (Gans 1979). My informants frequently expressed frustration with their invisibility,81 and the invisibility of their countries of origin, in locallyavailable media. Only criminal West Indians have received significant—indeed, quite disproportionate—attention in the press. Although a Baltimore Sun reporter told me that this situation is changing, as journalists become interested in wholesome “community news,” my research on actual reports on the region’s law-abiding West Indians indicates that much about their lives has gone untold. As Gray has noted (1995b:170-2), news coverage that functions as “spectacle” makes some dramas and kinds of people hyper-visible while pushing other people and social contexts further into invisibility (see also Entman and Rojecki 2000). Sometimes media silence about West Indians has benefited their ethnic reputation. I noted in Chapter One that many reports about 1991’s Crown Heights disturbances in New York omitted mention of the Caribbean origins of principal players in the drama, including the accused murderer of an innocent bystander. In this case, silence enabled the West Indian community largely to avoid a stain on “the altar of ... Caribbean good name and respectability” (W. Anderson 1993, cited in Doyle-Marshall 1994:38). More often, however, silences have been selective in ways damaging to West Indians’ reputations. Reporters more often mention the national origins of criminal West Indians than those of their lawabiding compatriots. This imbalance occurs because when journalists write about ordinary or commendable people, they often do not consider national origins “relevant” to the story, unless the story is biographical (very rare for ordinary people). In addition, when journalists turn to “official,” government sources of information82 about law-abiding people, silence about West Indians is the norm. Over and over again when I requested statistics compiled by local governments, I was told, “We don’t break the category ‘black’ down. We can’t tell you anything particular about Caribbean people here.” Thankfully, the 1990 U.S. Census provided me with imperfect yet valuable local demographic data.83

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By contrast, in the case of felons, police tracking of ethnic crime networks prompts reporters to pay attention to immigrant background. When law enforcers speak to journalists about criminal aliens, they use national origins as identifiers: “the Jamaicans,” “the Nigerians,” and so on. Moreover, unlike many government agencies, law enforcement offices can provide journalists (and researchers) with statistics on immigrants. I, for example, received data from the Baltimore City police; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF); the Immigration and Naturalization Service (numbers of criminal aliens deported); and Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Much of this data was either very narrowly focused or sketchy—but it did exist, for journalists and researchers to report on. For these reasons, although the journalistic convention of mentioning suspects’ national origins is changing somewhat in the Chesapeake-area market,84 it was still apparent during my fieldwork. What change has come has probably been accelerated by West Indians’ protests. Thus, because reporters seek out the perspective of law enforcers more often than the views of ethnic leaders, and because local governments have not generally noticed West Indians as a separate group (or groups), the way U.S. journalists “cover” ethnic life tends to “cover up” and suppress many of its realities (see Said 1981). While being counted as part of myriad government statistics and charts is a mixed blessing (see discussion in Carter 1997), my non-criminal informants actively wished they were more heeded and counted in ways they valued. They wanted to appear on government charts, in press reports, and in popular entertainment as hard workers, high achievers, and creative artists. In such contexts they wanted to be noticed as West Indians. As one nurse told me, the media “doesn’t differentiate” among different kinds of achieving “blacks.” This lack of differentiation bothered many of my informants. When successful West Indians are not “counted” as West Indian, the reputation of the immigrant group as a whole cannot be elevated. The utility of parading their heritage as a badge of honor—and as a marker to distinguish them from demeaned AfricanAmericans—is lessened. Unless successful West Indians are counted as West Indian, their ethnic “trump card” loses its power.


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Because of their attention to the media silences about them, my law-abiding informants would probably look favorably on Trouillot’s recent argument about the production of history. He asserts that “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences”; indeed, “silences are inherent in the creation of sources” (1995:27,51). Yet he also notes that the inevitable fact of silences does not imply that any particular omission is “natural.” On the contrary, which specific events “are noted from the start” (Trouillot 1995:29) and which are not is always contingent on the exercise of power. The West Indians I spoke with want more power—power to become sources, to voice their perspectives. Bryce-Laporte, himself a Latino/West Indian immigrant, captures their mood: Caribbean immigrants—residents and citizens, business people and politicians, artists and scholars—must begin to exercise and enjoy a right they share with all other American ethnic groups: to participate in a respectable way in determining the visibility they want to have in their city of settlement (1987:66). PRINT AND TELEVISION NEWS—A LOCAL HISTORY OF THE COVERAGE Before 1980, news reports about West Indians in the Chesapeake area were few and far between. The region’s West Indian community was smaller then, and reporters considered it even less worthy of notice than in more recent years. My study of news coverage of West Indians therefore begins in 1980. It ends in 1994, when my fieldwork ended. Via extensive computer searches and other sources, I found 439 relevant articles published during those years (see Appendix for my methods).85 By dwelling on crime, over 56% of these articles portrayed West Indians in a largely or wholly unfavorable light. For Jamaicans specifically, 59.8% of the articles mentioning them were negative. Yet at the time of my fieldwork only a tiny fraction (some 1%) of Maryland’s Jamaicans had been convicted of serious crimes. Compared with law-abiding Jamaicans, Jamaican criminals received about 60 times their “fair share” of coverage.86

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In over 70% of the articles making negative reference to West Indians (from any nation), the immigrants were the central topic. Negative articles were often longer than positive ones, detailing weaponry, locations of corpses, and other aspects of violence.87 Journalism placing West Indian criminality in a larger context was unusual. As van Dijk has stated, based on his study of prejudice in Holland and San Diego, “Both socially and cognitively, [his 180 informants had] no antiracist attitudes and models that [were] as developed as the prejudiced ones. For the rejection of wrong beliefs, people must sometimes have considerable knowledge, which, however, is hardly provided by the media” (1987:344). The negative articles about West Indians were published by locally-available newspapers and journals from across the American political spectrum (see sample headlines in Chapter One; also Harrison 1989:115). They reached a wide variety of readers. About a third of them were published in 1987 and 1988, during a wave of adverse reporting. In 1988, the year with the highest number of negative articles, the circulations of the major newspapers in the Chesapeake market were: The Washington Post — 796,659 daily; 1,112,802 on Sundays The Washington Times — 104,890 daily The Baltimore Sun — 223,334 daily; 489,771 on Sundays The Evening Sun — 187,304 daily (Gill and Boyden 1988) Thus, using only the daily circulation figures, in 1988 at least 1,300,000 of the region’s people received word via print news that dangerous West Indians were in their midst.88 During the same period, television news also spread this disturbing message. Vanderbilt University’s TV News Index and Abstracts show that between 1984 and 1992, major network newscasts aired 63 stories about West Indian drug trafficking, violence, or both (about 8 stories per year). Then in 1993 the Long Island Railroad massacre was widely reported, with the mass murderer’s Jamaican origin frequently mentioned. Moreover, national shows such as the reality-based “America’s Most Wanted,” which featured Jamaican criminals three times between 1988 and 1991, and the news magazine “West 57th,”


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which did a long segment on Jamaican drug dealers, also reached viewers in my market. Local TV news likely carried even more stories about Jamaican crime, although this probability is virtually impossible to verify after the fact. Archived stories are often only available in the video libraries of local stations; for liability reasons they do not release them to researchers. We do know, however, that local TV in Washington, D.C. reported on Operation Caribbean Cruise in 1986. In 1988, Channel 5 in D.C. reported sensationally on Jamaican crime, and on five nights in February of that year, Baltimore’s Channel 13 broadcast long segments on Caribbean crime in Maryland. A reporter who worked on these latter segments told me they had been quite controversial, especially because they were aired during Black History Month. Informants also mentioned local TV news coverage of several specific crimes involving West Indians (mostly Jamaicans illegally in the U.S.). I was able to watch videotapes of some of these old reports, thanks to some of my West Indian informants (who because of their intense concern with these issues had taped and saved the reports) and to the gracious access the Maryland office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) gave me to their informal archive. A timeline of news reports about West Indian life in the Chesapeake region reveals the “ambivalent welcome” towards new immigrants that Simon and Alexander have chronicled. Their study of articles on immigration from 1880 to 1990 in 16 major, national print news sources found that the press has often vilified recent immigrants (Simon and Alexander 1993), making their integration into society more difficult. They document an alternation between praise and an excess of harsh portrayals, a finding that applies as well to Chesapeakearea coverage of West Indians in the 1980s and early 1990s. The timeline below highlights the most important features of that coverage. Note that topics mentioned are examples, not an exhaustive listing. NEWS REPORTS ABOUT WEST INDIANS IN THE CHESAPEAKE REGION Pre-1980 —West Indians rarely appear in Chesapeake-area news reports. Nationwide they enjoy a positive reputation, even in cities where there are relatively few of them (e.g. see Arnold 1987:192-200).

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Chesapeake-area West Indians benefit from the common view that they are hard workers and high achievers. During my fieldwork some of my informants looked back with nostalgia on their ethnic reputation in this period. 1980 — Jamaica endures an unusually high level of pre-election violence, with 700-800 political murders (Headley 1996:x; Harrison 1989:121). With the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) ushered into power, underclass hitmen affiliated with the now-opposition People’s National Party (PNP) flee to the U.S. as illegal immigrants (Gunst 1995:xv,10,42; see Harrison 1988:272).89 These men form the first Jamaican “posses” in the U.S. They will soon be rivaled by JLP thugs eager to share in the profits of the drug trade and fleeing a police crackdown in Jamaica (Gunst 1995:xv; English 1991). The arrival of the “posses” will eventually greatly affect U.S. media coverage of Jamaicans. During this year, however, media representations of West Indians are still infrequent in the Chesapeake region. The Washington Post does note that Jamaican-American basketball player Patrick Ewing is considering enrollment at Georgetown University. Destined to become a sports superstar, over the next two decades Ewing will be mentioned in countless media reports. Yet very few will note his Jamaican origins.90 1981 — Media representations remain infrequent. In print, scattered positive stories and references to West Indians deal with festivals, entrepreneurship, Caribbean foods, and Patrick Ewing’s enrollment at Georgetown University. A few positive articles honor reggae superstar Bob Marley at the time of his death. This year and the next each includes one respectful article about Rastafarianism. In this year, there are many more positive than negative articles. 1982 — Positive print articles discuss Patrick Ewing and West Indians’ entrepreneurship, work ethic, and reggae. But there is a sudden jump in the number of negative articles, which now make up 66% of the total for the year. Many of these negative articles appear in the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore’s Evening Sun, Baltimore’s Afro-American and smaller Baltimore papers. They deal with confrontations between local police


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and Jamaicans alleged to be trafficking in marijuana in the Pimlico section of the city; the confrontations intensified following the death of a Jamaican national, Rupert Campbell, while in police custody. Many of the articles identify the alleged drug dealers as Rastafarians and suggest that they can be violent. The Rupert Campbell incident and ensuing controversy are also covered by local TV news. 1983 — Scattered positive print articles and brief references to West Indians deal with Patrick Ewing, Shirley Chisholm, West Indians’ strong families, and their delicious food. More prevalent negative articles (73%) discuss illegal aliens’ entry into the U.S. via Canada, and especially, a shooting outside a Jamaican nightclub in Washington, D.C. Coverage of the shooting repeatedly quotes police about the dangerous activities of “Rastafarians” without further clarification. This shooting at the Carib II club is also covered by local TV news. From 1983-1989, national news programs on CBS, ABC, and especially NBC air numerous stories about drug smuggling through the Bahamas and the arrest of that country’s prime minister for drug trafficking. 1984 — Positive coverage is once again more prevalent than the negative, although the press has mostly returned to silence about West Indians. Positive topics are Patrick Ewing, entrepreneurship, passing references to West Indian participation at multi-ethnic festivals, and, especially, the world championship, lightweight boxing match between defender Ray Mancini and St. Kitts/Virgin Islander, Rastafarian fighter Livingstone Bramble. Some articles depict Bramble as rather strange, however, pointing out that he brought a “witch doctor” from the Virgin Islands to place a hex on his opponent. In later press reports, Bramble states that the witch doctor stunt was “just hype” (Dimeo 1984), apparently enacted to increase his visibility and the excitement (and therefore ticket and advertising sales) surrounding the match. The Washington Post also publishes one article noting Rastafarians’ efforts to improve their image (2/6/84). TV newscasts cover the Bramble-Mancini match, and CBS Nightly News airs a program sympathetic to exploited West Indians working on temporary visas in U.S. agriculture.

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1985 — Coverage increases and remains more positive than negative. Positive articles deal primarily with Patrick Ewing’s recruitment to the National Basketball Association, and with boxer Livingstone Bramble. Some articles about Bramble include a negative note, however, when he is found to have had a stimulant in his urine during a return match against Mancini; Bramble’s manager is fined $5000.91 TV sportscasts also cover Bramble’s match against Mancini, in which Bramble retained his championship title. Negative print articles discuss passport and green card fraud, and Jamaican violence. On May 15, the Washington Post once again quotes police sources as blaming violence on “Rastafarians” without further comment. 1986 — In this year there is a large increase in the number of negative stories or references to West Indians; the print coverage is now 81% negative. This is the peak year for proportion of unfavorable stories. Most of the negativity appears in coverage of Operation Caribbean Cruise (OCC). Although many articles about this police action (see Chapter One) note that Jamaicans were upset by it, overall the articles’ tone is unfavorable towards Jamaicans. OCC is also covered in local TV news. 1987 — Negative coverage about West Indians jumps again, although positive reporting also increases. Print coverage is now 71% negative. Positive print articles deal with Colin Powell, entrepreneurship, festivals, and a retrospective on Marcus Garvey.92 The Washington Post prints several articles defending devout Rastafarians and distinguishing them from criminals. On March 29, the Washington Post Magazine reviews several West Indian restaurants in the D.C. area. The headline “Caribbean Cuisine—It’s Hot, It’s Weird, It’s Here” appears on the cover. Some West Indian restaurateurs object to the word “weird” and to the lessthan-complimentary reviews they received (for instance, the cassava cakes at one establishment are described as tasting like fermented sawdust). A few rebuttal articles appear in small-circulation, shortlived West Indian newspapers (Iere 4/87; Caribbean Sun 4/87). In one, a Jamaican restaurateur protests, “This is just like Caribbean Cruise.


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They’re trying to hurt us.” Other restaurateurs, however, are happy with how they were described. This year, numerous articles on the aftermath of Operation Caribbean Cruise continue to place West Indian-Americans in a somewhat unfavorable light. Most negative articles are, however, fresh stories about West Indian (primarily Jamaican) violence and trafficking in crack cocaine, including the efforts of the ATF to apprehend members of Jamaican “posses.” The ATF’s work against the posses is featured on local and national TV news (NBC, ABC, CBS). In this year the U.S. government begins a major push to deport Jamaican criminals. By 1992, some 3500 Jamaicans convicted or suspected of crimes will have been sent back to Jamaica (Headley 1996:10,38). (Note that Jamaican drug dealers in the U.S. are vastly outnumbered by native-born American dealers—Harrison 1989:119— and that they represent less than 1% of the Jamaican population in the U.S.93). Probably because of their departure, media coverage of Jamaican drug dealers will eventually subside. In this year, however, negative coverage prevails. Also in this year, national TV newscasts air segments referring to the Bahamas with such labels as “Cocaine Islands” (NBC). 1988 — This is the peak year for the absolute number of negative articles in print media in the Chesapeake-area market. Coverage remains 71% negative. Positive articles discuss West Indian artists, Colin Powell, Patrick Ewing, Jamaicans’ efforts to combat the harsh new stereotypes about them, West Indians’ charity work, and festivals. Trinidadians are positively mentioned several times in connection with festivals. Negative articles focus on Jamaican “posses” and on the related murders of five people in Landover, Maryland and two on Meridian Place in Washington. These murders are also extensively covered by local TV—for instance, on January 28, Channel 5 in Washington broadcasts a sensationalist report on drug-related violence in the D.C. area. Channel 13 in Baltimore airs five nights of long segments on Caribbean crime in Maryland. Occasionally Anglophone West Indians from islands other than Jamaica are mentioned in connection with drug dealing as well. In addition, the nationwide raid coordinated by the ATF in October of this year is covered in print media and on TV,

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including national network news. Also in this year, “America’s Most Wanted” airs programs about the Landover and Meridian Place killings. 1989 — Coverage of West Indians drops overall and becomes slightly less negative (now 64%). Positive articles discuss reggae music, Jamaicans as professionals, soccer, Harry Belafonte, Colin Powell, and West Indian respect for government. Negative articles deal with Jamaican drug dealers, a conviction for the Landover murders, and an arrest for the Meridian Place killings. 1990 — Overall coverage is down again, but negative coverage still exceeds positive (77%). Positive articles deal sympathetically with a Jamaican accused of crimes in Boston, and with Caribbean foods, soccer, and boxer Livingstone Bramble. Negative articles focus on Jamaican drug dealers and on a very active, illegal nanny-importing ring. The nanny scandal is featured on local TV news (e.g. Channels 2 and 13 in Baltimore). While some reports portray the mostly Trinidadian nannies rather sympathetically, their status as illegal aliens who sneaked into the country is constantly mentioned. 1991 — Overall coverage and proportion of negative articles remain approximately the same. A few articles place Rastafarians in a favorable light, making mention of their unfair treatment during OCC. Positive articles also deal with West Indian students in the region, with Colin Powell, and with U.S. Representative Mervyn Dymally, a California Democrat originally from Trinidad. Negative articles discuss a disruptive Jamaican-owned bar in Washington, the sentencing of the nanny-importing business owner, a Florida gang of Guyanese drug dealers, and the Jamaican “posses.” 1992 — By now deportations of Jamaican criminals have helped reduce negative media coverage of “posses.” Coverage of West Indians is up from the year before, and for the first time in seven years, positive coverage outweighs negative. Derek Walcott of St. Lucia wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, inducing positive print and TV reports (and great pride) for West Indians. In addition to Walcott, positive


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articles discuss West Indian entrepreneurship, cooking, track and field, religion, festivals, Patrick Ewing, and Colin Powell. Negative print articles (32%) deal primarily with Jamaican drug dealing and violence. Along with local print media, national TV newscasts report on a mass shooting in a Miami nightclub believed to be the work of a Jamaican gang. 1993 — Because of two men named Colin (Powell and Ferguson, the mass murderer on the Long Island Railroad), this is the peak year for overall print coverage, which has nearly doubled from the year before. Coverage is now back to being more negative (59%) than positive, largely due to the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) massacre. The massacre is extensively reported in local and national TV news, and on local and national radio programs such as NPR.94 Positive articles this year discuss West Indian nannies in a sympathetic light (in the aftermath of Zoe Baird’s “nannygate” scandal), Colin Powell, festivals, artists, cooking, West Indians’ work ethic and strong families, boxer Livingstone Bramble, charity work, and football player Rohan Marley (one of Bob’s sons). In addition to Colin Ferguson’s LIRR spree, negative articles deal with the Jamaican Black Mafia, an atypical Baltimore heroin ring whose leader is half-Jamaican, half-Nigerian. Negative articles also discuss West Indians in the federal prison system, and masked home invaders in Baltimore with apparent Caribbean accents. 1994 — Overall coverage is down somewhat; negative print articles have dropped to only 31%. Positive articles discuss Colin Powell, the Miss Caribbean Maryland pageant, cooking, festivals, West Indian entrepreneurship, artists, Patrick Ewing, West Indian passion for education, reggae, rotating credit associations, dreadlocks as fashion, Derek Walcott, the “Black Mosaic” exhibit at the Anacostia Museum, and West Indian immigrants’ home ownership. Negative articles deal with Colin Ferguson, the Jamaican Black Mafia, and other Jamaican crime. Postscript — 1995 witnesses tremendous positive publicity for Colin Powell, including prestigious interviews on national television (e.g.

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Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters). Powell often mentions his parents’ Jamaican background. The acclaim accompanies Powell’s book tour after release of his autobiography. By late 1995, public opinion polls indicate that 62% of American voters have heard of Powell and rate him favorably (Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press 1995). This rating is much higher than that of any national politician at the time.

Negative and Positive Articles about West Indians in Chesapeake-area Print Media 50

number of articles

40

ATF sweeps

2 Colins

30

20

# positive

OCC

# negative 10

0 1980

1985

1990

1994

year PRINT AND TELEVISION NEWS—THE PRODUCTION OF IMAGES Chapter One explored four critical factors shaping story selection and the production of imagery about West Indians in Chesapeake-area journalism. These factors were sensationalism, prejudice, “pack” journalism, and close working relationships between reporters and law enforcement officers. I touch again on each of these factors and follow with a fifth: West Indian criminals’ strategic uses of ethnicity to enhance their “reputations.”


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Sensationalism in the Production of Images Chapter One sketched the intense market competition pushing reporters and news editors towards sensationalism, despite their own frustration with this trend. Journalists struggle to capture Americans’ attention with stories about crime, violence, and immorality.95 A West Indian I spoke with, who managed a business office for a major publication in the Chesapeake area, told me he once phoned an editor friend at the same publication and asked, “Why don’t you ever do articles on people like me?” His friend replied, “Frankly, immigrant success stories are boring.” This response provokes a question: Why should immigrants’ courage, struggle, world travel, loneliness, fierce determination, and triumphs be construed as boring? After all, Americans have in recent years placed the Chicken Soup series of books—composed of vignettes about these very themes of courage, determination, and triumph—on best seller lists. Yet in news departments, immigrant and minority achievements are often deemed lacking in newsworthiness (see C. Campbell 1995:30). Stories about achievements are frequently edged out by those more conducive to controversy and outrage.96 Is this imbalance appropriate? To what extent do Americans want their news media to fulfill a different role from that of inspirational books?97 Through sustained research, one can document the media imbalance, answering the question of how lopsided a view of the world American news media present. It is much more difficult, however, to unearth why Americans pay attention to crime-heavy news products (see Entman and Rojecki 2000:92). Do Americans actually want to hear about violence and mayhem? If so, have media producers created this interest? Or, as the producers argue, have they only responded to a pre-existing fascination (see Gerbner 1995:547)? Or are both processes constantly occurring in a vicious circle? In other words, how is the “sensational” socially constructed? In Israel, building a house in this or that place can cause a sensation. Here, not usually. Here we are obsessed with street crime (along with the sexual transgressions of celebrities). Our high rate of crime is surely a major cause of this preoccupation with interpersonal violence. Factors that help explain our fixation on and propensity towards violence are the history of U.S. "race" relations (both “white” brutality towards “blacks” and the concomitant fear of retaliatory violence); the

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history of our "wild west"; the tensions between American individualism and community needs (especially as related to gun control); and the American craving for, yet suspicion of government and police (especially our desires both to catch and punish offenders and to protect the privacy and civil liberties of those who might unfairly be accused). The reduced importance in many Americans’ lives of intensely dramatic religious stories may also play a role in whetting our appetites for violent mass media. News and mass entertainment have become our morality tales98 and meditations on the surprises of fate. Thus I, an American, found myself engrossed this morning in a Philadelphia Inquirer article about a Pennsylvania auto mechanic suspected of having murdered ten blonde prostitutes in two years. I am not a blonde prostitute, so why should I be so drawn in? I found myself thinking about the accused killer and wondering, "Why didn't I turn out that messed up?" I read about the dead women and mused, "That might, in other circumstances, have been me." My recounting of my interest in this story provokes another question about sensationalism: why do Americans have little shame about their interest in violence and crime —by contrast, for example, with Spain, where such fascination is much less socially acceptable (Machin 1996)? Research is also needed on how perception of and interest in different types of scandals varies among differing portions of the U.S. population.99 Thus, although some careful scholars have turned their attention to the social construction of scandal in the U.S. (e.g. Lull and Hinerman 1997; Patterson 1998:233-280), much remains to be investigated. Prejudice in the Production of Images Historically “blacks” in the U.S. have been central characters in many sensational media stories. For recent decades, one can make a reasonable statistical argument to explain why news reports about violent criminals show African-Americans at a higher rate than people of other “racial” and ethnic backgrounds (although one cannot statistically defend the excessive media representation of murder in general—Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991). American “blacks’” participation in murder in the U.S. seems significantly to outstrip their


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proportion of the population, even when racism by police is considered as a possible factor in the imbalance among types of suspects (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:198; Patterson 1997:41). Of course, journalists have a responsibility to clarify underlying causes for this behavior, such as poverty and stymied educational and economic opportunities, so as not to encourage “racial” explanations among media consumers (see Entman and Rojecki 2000). While articles about “blacks’” poverty are common, they are too infrequently linked to specific crime stories. Stories about “blacks” and crimes also tend to emphasize “black” criminals, not the disproportionate number of crime victims in the U.S. who are also “black” (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:198; Glassner 1999).100 Beyond the matter of proportional representation, however, lie the problems of anxiety and prejudice. For American “blacks” and “whites,” menacing members of the other “race” evoke deep-seated fears. Since in most U.S. news media organizations, the owners, producers, editors, and reporters are preponderantly “white” (C. Campbell 1995:4,31,38), and since most of the audience is also “white,” news stories about dangerous “blacks” command special interest. This morbid fascination arises because “Blackness and difference continue to function as markers of ‘scandalous’ threats to the moral and social boundaries” of the society (Gray 1997). In other words, for the largest “racial” group in the U.S. (“whites”), “blacks” represent the most plausible and dreaded villain101—even though a “white” person is far, far more likely to be killed by another “white” than by a “black” person (Patterson 1997:41).102 Underlying dread is why “white” child-murderer Susan Smith’s lie, that a “black” man had kidnapped her little ones, seemed believable to “white” Americans—a background of fear of which she was well aware (Page 1997:101). Yet “white” journalists are often sensitive to the need to avoid racist reporting (C. Campbell 1995:38).103 If the “white” male Baltimore Sun journalist I interviewed at length is at all typical, then journalists are uncomfortable with frequently having their crime reports deal with African-American suspects (a “white” female police reporter, a friend of mine, expresses the same discomfort). The Sun journalist told me that he and his colleagues worry that their crime reporting has encouraged “white flight” from large urban centers. All the same, police reporters must turn in stories—exciting stories. And in

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the narrative structure of the news (D. Schiller 1981:1; Bird and Dardenne 1988), many publishers and producers feel that there need to be villains (see Downie and Kaiser 2002:237). How can this conundrum be resolved? On the one hand, 1) a good story requires heightened emotion, 2) a morality tale requires a villain, 3) the largest portion of the audience finds “black” villains especially frightening, and 4) there are a fair number of impoverished “black” Americans whose life stories make them candidates for the villain role. Yet on the other hand, many journalists would prefer not to write about African-American villains all the time, because 1) many of them are sincerely concerned about how their stories may affect the quality of African-Americans’ lives; and besides, 2) they are tired of being accused of racism. Appearing to “pick on” African-Americans is a political risk.104 Enter the foreign “black” criminal. This “black” villain is not one of “our own” historically oppressed people, not one of the AfricanAmericans from whom we currently derive so much of our popular culture (Gray 1995b:148-9).105 He is an outsider whom even many African-Americans view with suspicion. This “black” man can fulfill the role of the villain at lower political risk for journalists than can African-Americans. The foreign “black” is the “black” man whom “white” Americans are allowed to hate (or paradoxically at times to idolize as a way of scolding “our” “blacks”). The permission to demonize is more apparent in certain Hollywood productions than in news reporting. But it probably has also unconsciously underpinned some of the Chesapeake-area news media’s focus on Jamaican drug dealers. Thus a law enforcement officer told me flat out, “No one is more violent than the [criminal] Jamaicans, but many are just as violent. But Jamaicans get much more airplay for their crimes than black Americans.” As the journalist I interviewed stated, sometimes the media “hyperventilate” about a topic. Clearly such hyperventilation


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occurs when a topic has great dramatic appeal: the violence of darkskinned aliens fits that bill.106 There are several ironies in this subtle casting of Jamaican criminals as a quintessential threat. First, Jamaicans from the destitute areas of Kingston suffer in large part from the legacies that “whites” inflicted on their people: forced migration from Africa, slavery, underpaid wage labor, undermining of the peasantry’s efforts at selfsufficiency (Holt 1992), and the role their impoverished country plays as a supplier of cheap raw materials to the wealthy United States. They are victims as well as perpetrators. Second, criminals from these Kingston neighborhoods often find the support they need from American sources. For one, they find inspiration in violent American movies. For low-income Jamaican males, Hollywood’s heroes—cowboys in Westerns and tough-guys in action films—become role models to emulate. The characters’ gunslinging maleness impresses these Jamaican viewers. Life has imitated art as Jamaican drug dealers have dubbed their gangs “posses” after the language of the Westerns.107 Moreover, Jamaican criminals have obtained from the U.S. not only their self-image, but also their guns (Gunst 1995:42,138; ATF 1992:15-16)108 and the bulk of their drug customers (Headley 1996:8,19; ATF 1992:11). A final irony in the view of Jamaicans as hyper-dangerous lies in the Jamaican and U.S. crime rates. Jamaican criminologist Headley explains that the U.S. crime rate significantly surpasses that of Jamaica: Inherent to the Jamaican crime data are, of course, numerous measurement and reliability problems—as is true for crime data for any number of countries, developing and developed [including the U.S.]. Be that as it may ... In 1980, with a total population of approximately two million people, [Jamaica’s] overall crime rate (i.e. for all offences109) stood at 2,580 offences per 100,000 population, a figure which was among the highest in the English-speaking Caribbean. That figure, however, was still way below the U.S. overall rate of 5,900 per 100,000 population for that same year, despite 1980 being an abnormally high violent crime year for Jamaica. ... Both Jamaica’s 1988 and 1991 overall rates per 100,000 population were, again, significantly below the U.S. rates ... for those

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media identical years, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Uniform Crime Reports (1996:8).110

Yet, despite these ironies, it would be foolish to pretend that Jamaican criminals have not committed horrific crimes in the U.S. My informants themselves took the possibility of violence seriously. Kim Saunders, the middle class Jamaican whose victimization by Operation Caribbean Cruise I described in Chapter One, told me in no uncertain terms that “there are folks” among Jamaicans in the U.S. whom she would definitely not want to run into. A working-class Trinidadian informant warned me not to try to conduct a census of West Indians in the Park Heights neighborhood of Baltimore, lest someone imagine me to be with law enforcement and harm me. In addition, when I was in a rough Kingston neighborhood with my informant Deborah, she implored me protectively not to join the crowd forming at the site of a shooting. Mass media producers have had a right—arguably even a duty—to report on the drug deals, tortures, and murders committed by Jamaican criminals in the U.S. The men they discuss are indeed chillingly aggressive (see Gunst 1995).111 Journalists also have a duty, however, to place their reporting in context—both the context of the gunmen’s lives, and crucially to my informants, the overall context of West Indian immigration. The overwhelming majority of West Indian immigrants are productive, hard-working contributors to U.S. society, a fact which the mass media ought to make consistently obvious. “Pack Journalism” in the Production of Images A third factor affecting imagery about West Indians in Chesapeake-area news reports is “pack journalism.” Chapter One noted that intense competition drives journalists from many different media outlets to report a “breaking story” all at the same time. A reporter cannot afford to neglect an apparently commanding story, lest his or her editors consider the reporter incompetent. Neither can editorial staff choose to ignore the story, lest it appear to the public at large that the media outlet is behind the times. Because everyone is scrambling to stay up to date, exciting stories that may ultimately turn out to be less important than they initially seemed receive inordinate attention.


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Journalists also gravitate in “packs” towards particular stories at particular times because of contacts amongst themselves. As Turow explains Journalists from different papers meet each other often in the course of assignments. They file similar stories after viewing the same events, speaking to the same sources, reading the same press releases, and sharing ideas about it all. ... Often, too, reporters get ideas of what is important by reading the same elite newspapers and tuning to the same wire services [that is, by turning to other journalists] (1984:141; see also Gans 1979; Downie and Kaiser 2002). Pack journalism helps to explain the heavy concentration of stories about Jamaican “posses” in Chesapeake-area mass media in 1987-88. So also do the relationships between journalists and law enforcement officials. Journalists and Law Enforcement: Partners in the Production of Images In his in-depth study of American news media, Gans details the criteria journalists use in deciding whom to turn to for information. Because they labor under tight deadlines and budgets, they gravitate to sources who “make themselves available ... at short notice, give them the time and information they need, and do so at no cost to the journalists” (1979:122). Reporters further appreciate sources who can do all this concisely, dramatically, and in standard English (Gans 1979:131). When they find such a source, they repeatedly return to him or her. These criteria favor as sources “organizations that carry out the equivalent of investigative reporting,” such as law enforcement agencies (1979:121). Law enforcement agencies also make good sources because they can tell stories whose other experts, the criminals themselves, are potentially dangerous to the reporters. In addition, law enforcement agencies carry the aura of officialdom, and for their own publicity purposes are usually willing to provide quotable, on-the-record statements. Gans explains that

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media When reporters can explicitly attribute information to a source, they do not have to worry about reliability (and validity), the assumption being that once a story is “sourced,” their responsibility is fulfilled, and audiences must decide whether the source is credible. A magazine writer once pointed out that “we don’t deal in facts but in attributed opinions” (1979:130).

This passing of responsibility is why journalists in Baltimore and Washington in the early 1980s could justify quoting police statements about dangerous “Rastafarians” without further time-consuming research into the actual religious affiliations, if any, of the individuals under scrutiny.112 Within a few years their reporting on Rastafarians and Jamaican criminals would become more sophisticated, but in the interim, quoting government authorities sufficed as “explanation.” Thus for multiple reasons, news reports about crime lean heavily on law enforcement points of view.113 One officer I spoke with bluntly claimed, “The press is very gullible. You can lead them by the nose if you want. Especially the electronic media—they just want a story and hardly care whether it accurately reflects the situation.” He later added, “A lot of [government] agencies have learned that you should be open with the media and orchestrate the story a bit. I don’t mean that manipulatively. After all, it’s our story. We have things we’re trying to get across.”114 Weissinger’s study of his fellow INS enforcement officers similarly states that the INS defines the parameters of the illegal alien population and the media reports these definitions. ... The relationship between the INS and the press is somewhat symbiotic. The media receives what the INS thinks the media wants (1996:412; emphasis in original) —and, we might add, what the INS wants the media to broadcast (see Heyman 1998:37). Nevertheless, at the time of Weissinger’s fieldwork in the early 1980s, many INS enforcement officers felt that reporters too often portrayed illegal aliens with sympathy and the officers as “the Gestapo.” One officer told Weissinger, “If the INS devoted more time


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investigating the criminal element of the illegal alien population, we would get the [positive] press coverage we deserve” (1996:118). His wish would come true. But the INS was not destined to become the most active federal law enforcement agency in seeking positive publicity through the pursuit of criminal aliens. That distinction would belong to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). Gunst has published an account of the ATF’s involvement with the Jamaican posses that accords squarely with views strongly expressed to me by law enforcement officers outside the ATF (see Chapter One). She explains that The posses’ American debut, deadly though it was, was a serendipitous windfall for the [ATF]. The drug crisis had engendered a struggle for supremacy and funding in the federal law-enforcement bureaucracy, and the Justice Department, under Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, was winning. The Bureau is part of the Treasury Department, with a colorful history that goes back to Prohibition. By the mid1980s, however, the ATF seemed to have outlived its purpose and there was pressure from the Justice Department to terminate it. Then the Jamaican posses arrived on the scene and gave the embattled bureau a new reason for being. Besides murder [and drug dealing], their major violation was interstate gunrunning, an offense that clearly came within the ATF’s historic domain; its agents hoped that [their] Operation Rum Punch would give them some good, flashy publicity (1995:134-5). Unfortunately for the ATF, at the time of Rum Punch’s 1987 raids, journalists were far more preoccupied with the days-old stock market crash of October 16, and the following Black Monday, than with Jamaican gangs (Gunst 1995:135). Still, the ATF’s contacts with media producers in that year apparently did have an effect on news reporting. For example, a few months after Operation Rum Punch, Baltimore’s Channel 13 presented its five nights of reporting on Caribbean crime in Maryland. I discussed these reports with a non-ATF officer who tracks Jamaican criminals but feels the ATF’s stance on the “posses” is self-servingly

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melodramatic (Channel 13 declined to speak with me). This officer characterized the broadcasts as too “focused on the idea that Jamaican criminals are everywhere and that they're very violent. She [the lead reporter] was big on the posse stuff—ATF shit." Of course, the concurrence of major ATF raids and peak reporting about Jamaican criminals in the Chesapeake market in 1987-88 was not solely a function of the ATF media blitz. The raids were, aside from publicity efforts, genuinely newsworthy, and Jamaican criminals were engaged in violent turf battles during that period. Nevertheless, the ATF’s public relations efforts clearly heightened media interest. Gunst further argues that “the ATF stayed with the posses like a rodeo bronc rider” (1995:135), positioning itself as the law enforcement agency with expertise on Jamaican criminals. The year after Rum Punch they coordinated similar raids, providing journalists with copious information about their work. For several years the agency also co-sponsored a national conference for law enforcers on the topic of Jamaican crime; the conference was held in Baltimore. As the quote above about Channel 13’s broadcasts indicates, the ATF’s relations with reporters have occasioned scorn from some officers in other agencies. A journalist I spoke with aptly stated, “The politics in law enforcement are incredible—because of the dollars involved.” Like some of my law enforcement informants, the reporter characterized the ATF’s bids to improve its image as the scramblings of “an agency that’s trying to save its ass.”115 This assessment, by people in both journalism and law enforcement, did not indicate general disapproval of police-press partnerships. For example, one of my law enforcement informants spoke approvingly of how the U.S. Army has “managed” the press. Concerned about a link between the ATF and negative journalism about Jamaicans, I spoke with two ATF officials. The first, an expert on Jamaican crime, confirmed that the ATF formerly took reporters along on some raids.116 When I asked why, he replied, “Because of media requests, and to inform the public of certain problems when the media doesn’t [otherwise] care.” As an example of regrettable media indifference, he told me about the circumstances surrounding the 1990 arrest of “posse” leader Jim Brown in Jamaica. Brown was wanted for five murders in Florida, and the U.S. justice system sought his extradition. My ATF informant


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added that Brown had been tried 14 times in Jamaica under earlier governments and released each time because the witnesses kept being murdered. The ATF specifically asked the Miami Herald to cover the arrest, hoping that coverage would add political pressure to the Jamaican government to facilitate Brown’s extradition. The Herald refused, saying the arrest was not newsworthy. A year later, the officer added, the Herald published a story stating that the five murders had never been solved. “Typical media,” he remarked.117 He then complained that in other instances, the press had been “too sensationalist and irresponsible.” I also spoke with the national public relations officer for the ATF. In response to my questions, he asserted that: 1) The ATF gave one-on-one briefings to key reporters about Jamaican crime before undertaking Operations Rum Punch I and II in 1987-88. They did so because such operations “require more exposition” than just a press release. They wanted journalists to understand the background for the raids. 2) The agency brought journalists along with them on these raids because, in general, doing so discourages reporters from finding out about a raid ahead of time by other means (always a possibility with large, multi-agency operations in which many, many people have information118) and then staking out the raid site before law enforcement. He asserted that such premature actions of reporters can tip off criminals, as, he stated, eventually did happen in the failed raid at Waco, Texas. Thus, to protect the integrity of an operation—and the lives of their officers—law enforcement agencies must include in their plans the presence of journalists. The best way to plan for journalists is to direct their presence. 3) Despite rumors in law enforcement circles to the contrary, the ATF never hired a Madison Avenue PR firm to handle its press relations. The ATF’s PR personnel, like him, have been crimefighting agents who rose to management positions. 4) “Other agencies” have a “far more egregious reputation for currying media favor.” When I asked which “other agencies” he

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media meant, he immediately replied, “the FBI is a good example.” (Our interview took place in November of 1993, shortly after a proposal to merge the ATF into the FBI and IRS was circulating on Capitol Hill.) 5) In Hartford, CT, where he worked previously “on the streets,” early police records on Jamaican criminals had filed them under “Rastafarians.” He remarked, “Of course that wasn’t right—they had nothing to do with Rastas. But the police weren’t knowledgeable. A few years ago, the posses were buried in an ethnic haze with the Rastas.” I asked if the ATF had helped to lift that haze, which he seemed to be implying. He replied yes, he thinks its lifting was “to a large extent” due to the ATF.119 6) Law enforcement officials from other Maryland agencies who contend that the ATF overdramatizes the importance of the posses have a limited view. He emphasized that the ATF has a national perspective, and that “local views of the elephant” can be very different from the big picture. 7) Controversy leads to distortion of statistics, both in the media and in information from advocacy groups. For example, the ATF did a study on the guns found by police in Colombia, South America. The study found that of the Colombian guns that came from the U.S., 70% had been purchased in south Florida. He stated that Handgun Control, Inc. took this statistic and distorted it, claiming that 70% of the guns in South America came from south Florida. He added that the NRA, by contrast, reported that 7% of the guns in South America were from the U.S. The distortion by Handgun Control was closer to the truth, but both claims were inaccurate. Thus he implied that the ATF is a more careful arbiter of truth than enterprises with mass audiences.

Fully contextualizing the many assertions, counter-assertions, and assignments of blame in this section on police-press relations would require a research project of its own. My point is simply to suggest how close and complex these relations are. They are embroiled in the exigencies of work regimens, battles for money and status, public


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safety concerns, and genuine misunderstandings. The production of knowledge about crime is an intricate and historically contingent process. Unfortunately, the complexity of ties between media and law enforcement personnel is not obvious to the general public. Thus van Dijk has found that Dutch media consumers often take crime reports at face value: Many interviewees, especially women, refer to the media [to explain their] fear [of foreign criminals] and ... their hesitation to go out at night or to visit the inner city. Compared to other cities in the world, Amsterdam is one of the safest. This suggests that fear, and in particular fear of “ethnic crime,” is largely the result of crime construction by the authorities (the police) and the media. ... A brief study [on this topic] ... suggest[s] that the general score of “crime concern” among readers is directly correlated with the amount of crime news in the press [they read] (van Dijk 1987:155-6). Consumers apparently acquire most of their views on ethnic crime from journalism. Journalists, in turn, acquire their views from law enforcement officers. A critical question, then, is how do law enforcers see the world? Specifically, how do law enforcers in the Chesapeake region view West Indians? Law Enforcement’s Skewed Perspective All professions produce skewed views of the world. One must bear in mind that such distorted perspectives can be quite useful: when an electrician friend notices a dangerous defect in my home of which I was unaware, I am grateful for his trained eye. In a similar way, the tendency of law enforcement officers to see criminals and their misdeeds everywhere can serve a useful function. Their vigilance can be highly protective. The officers I spoke with risk their lives to create a safer environment for anthropologists, readers of anthropology, lawabiding West Indians, and everyone else in the Chesapeake region. One officer I spoke with had had his car firebombed by Jamaican criminals; I heard about another local agent who narrowly escaped a

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Jamaican murderer’s attempt to run over him with his car. First, then, I want gratefully to acknowledge the debt I owe law enforcers in the Chesapeake region. The slanted view of humanity among law enforcers is, however, is troubling because of their critical role in supplying information to journalists. Although journalists realize that police perspectives are, like anyone else’s, limited, the tremendous convenience of writing a story largely based on police information puts that information into wide circulation. A disturbing and often narrow picture of the world thus becomes common currency. Some law enforcers are aware of their limited view. Thus, my interview with one federal agent had two distinct phases. First the conversation centered around the misdeeds of Jamaican criminals; I had begun by asking how many Jamaican drug dealers there are in Maryland. She had replied, shaking her head, “So many, so many.” Upon further questioning she said they number in the hundreds.120 This interchange set a tone of concern about criminality for much of our discussion. We spoke about document forgery, bribery, drug dealing, violence, and money laundering. She then remarked that “if you wanted to go somewhere to see Jamaican dealers, you’d go to” a particular eatery in northwest Baltimore. I replied that my boyfriend and I had eaten there and that the food was delicious. She exclaimed, “I can’t believe you went in there!”; she had never set foot in the place. Of course, as someone who has questioned many Jamaican criminals over the years, she might be recognized there. She was thus in more danger there than I. But she was still surprised that I had dared eat there. Yet her perspective was not all negative. She mentioned other Jamaican “hang outs,” and when I asked twice how these places relate to the topic of drugs, she said they did not necessarily have drug connections. She added that “unlike some,” she does not assume that just because a Jamaican runs a beeper business or a nightclub where there have been shoot-outs, he or she is surely involved in illegal activities. She tries to maintain an attitude that one is innocent until proven guilty, and she is aware that there are many law-abiding Jamaicans in the region, even though she rarely interacts with them. She was helped in this attitude a few years earlier when she went to a local hospital to see a friend and encountered a Jamaican nurse. She


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was struck then with the realization that there are worlds of Jamaicans in the region that she knows nothing about. The views of another expert on Jamaican crime went beyond the federal agent’s: he had had personal, positive experiences with lawabiding West Indians. In the first place, his wife both worked and was friendly with a Trinidadian immigrant. Second, that immigrant’s mother ran a small roti shop in the rough police district where the officer worked, and he and his colleagues were friendly with her and looked after her safety. Most importantly, the officer’s own mother, who slowly degenerated with Lou Gehrig’s disease from 1968-1973, had had a series of much-appreciated Jamaican caretakers.121 This officer’s understanding of the West Indian community in Baltimore was unusually even-handed. For instance, when I asked what West Indians in Baltimore’s impoverished Park Heights neighborhood are like, he immediately replied, “Most are very hard working and family-oriented.” When I asked what the law-abiding West Indians do for a living, he readily answered, “All kinds of things—laborers, office workers, cab drivers, secretaries, and some lawyers, doctors, and musicians. ... There is a high percentage of laborers and musicians. Some of the women also work as nannies, and with food.” His perspective was more balanced than that of any other law enforcer I interviewed, probably both because his work was neighborhood-based and because of his life experiences. Unfortunately, however, many American law enforcers do not have this officer’s wealth of experience with honest, decent West Indians. Instead, for years they had the ATF-sponsored national conference on Jamaican crime.122 I managed to obtain a “For Law Enforcement Use Only” copy of the 49-page conference booklet for 1992. It both illustrates and promulgated a generally fact-based yet highly skewed view of the world. The preface begins, “Jamaican Posses continue to plague our nation’s communities.” The following page states Jamaican posses are one of the most insidious, ethnic-based crime groups in operation today. They pose a major threat in virtually every major city in the United States. The scope of their activities is international. They have grown faster than any other drug trafficking network. The configuration of the

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media groups, the methods of operation, and the identities of members may alter, but what is constant is their greed, a need to reap monetary benefits of drug trafficking, and the pervasive violence that accompanies their trade.

The booklet details many Jamaican criminals’ felonies and atrocities in the U.S.123 Its assertions are possibly true. But the booklet balances them with absolutely no mention of the law-abiding West Indian population in the U.S. One might argue that the conference on Jamaican criminals was not about law-abiding people, and that this booklet was never intended for anyone other than law enforcement officers, so why should decent West Indians have been mentioned? I offer three rationales for providing a balanced picture: 1) “Community policing,” which has proved helpful where it has been seriously applied (see Headley 1996), requires a broad view of who lives and works in geographic and ethnic communities; 2) Law enforcers would better help journalists produce responsible coverage of crime if they themselves understood the larger community context; 3) A broader perspective would discourage law enforcers from consciously or unconsciously slipping into a stance of “guilty— because you’re Jamaican—until proven innocent.” This third point is especially important in light of the ATF’s “national Jamaican data base, Gang Busters” (ATF 1992:39). The database currently houses over 12,000 subject records with approximately 20,000 names, including aliases and nicknames of suspected Jamaican posse members, and is growing daily. In addition to subject, event, and weapon records, the data base is set up to track every inquiry made by law enforcement offices. This inquiry log automatically records the name of the suspect being queried, something about the suspect (if


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known), and the requestor and his/her agency and phone number (ATF 1992:39). Gang Busters can be searched by name, nickname, business, address, telephone number, social security number, scars and tattoos, and FBI number. According to Kasinitz (1992:81-2) and Gunst (1995:158), the list includes Jamaicans arrested for any offense in the U.S., including some individuals who “had been arrested for nothing more serious than a traffic violation” (Gunst 1995:158). When in 1989 the press reported that the list existed and was being used by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, New York’s Jamaican community and the American Civil Liberties Union protested furiously. The list “also drew the ire of Jamaican prime minister Manley, who, while noting the ‘duty to smash’ the ‘brutal phenomenon’ of the posses, expressed grave concern about the stigmatization of Jamaicans in New York” (Kasinitz 1992:82). A focus on crime, conferences for law enforcement officers, and lists of known felons are likely all necessary for competent police work. But when these aids block the law enforcer’s larger vision, and when a dramatic, cynical view of an ethnic group is wittingly or unwittingly passed on to journalists, there is a real danger that rights will be violated and prejudices in the general population reinforced. The skewed view of one ATF official, who told me that “Jamaicans have a high rate of criminality,” can come to seem unquestionably true to media consumers. But media producers and law enforcement officers are not the only ones generating an image of Jamaican criminality. Criminals themselves have been busy in this process. Criminals’ Production of Their Image West Indian criminals, like their law-abiding counterparts, strive to enhance their “reputations” and their “respectability”: they wish to “bet on both horses” at once (Eriksen 1992:155). Their efforts have had a significant impact on American imagery about Jamaicans. Clearly, Jamaican criminals have often been flagrant seekers of “reputation.” They assert their “maleness” through plentiful procreation with multiple partners, through great acts of generosity

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towards their allies in the slums of Kingston, and through utterly unforgiving, send-them-a-message violence towards opponents. These tactics were all hinted at in a home video Gunst viewed at an FBI office. The tape had been seized from New York’s “Gully” posse. It showed an Easter beauty pageant for preteen girls in the Kingston ghetto to which the Gully was tied: ... each one was wearing a satin sash across her budding breasts, inscribed with the name of whichever posse soldier had sponsored her. ... [The FBI agent] is visibly rattled by the girls’ prepubescent sexual vibe, and I too recognize that unsettling mixture of innocence and vampishness that lets you know how mercilessly short their childhoods are going to be. ... [The sound track includes] Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” his ballad for a gunfighter. ... Just before the winning beauty queen is announced, a little girl steps up to the microphone with a prepared speech ... for Eric Vassell [the Gully’s leader], even though he is far away in Brooklyn. ... “We can remember the first day we had this treat like it was yesterday,” she trills. “This is the fifth year since Barry [Vassell] and the Schenectady Crew” ... “have shown their love and care for us citizens of McGregor settlement. We are grateful for this kind of togetherness, and we pray that this will never cease. The Schenectady Crew, words cannot say how much we love and care for you. Barry, you are extremely loving and caring, and that’s what makes you one in a million” (1995:12-13). To many of the Kingston poor, the Jamaican drug dealer in the U.S. is a virile hero who sends shoes, clothing, food, guns, VCRs, Walkmans, and other “treats.”124 But he is no hero to his enemies, who learn the hard way that he demands respect and strict obedience. In the late 1980s, Jamaican drug dealers in the U.S. became notorious for copious violence—especially “message” violence. For example, Jamaicans sometimes murdered an informer with “a telephone scar” (the Jamaican term)—a cut from one ear down through the neck, symbolizing the individual’s treachery via telephone. Similarly, sometimes an informer was strangled with


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telephone cord.125 The method of murder was designed to send a message to other potential informers. Other kinds of traitors (e.g. drug workers stealing more than their share of the profits) were tortured and killed, both in retaliation and as a warning to the tempted (Gunst 1995). Thus the Jamaican drug dons cultivated an intimidating image to keep their workers in line and rival dealers out of their territories. As one federal agent explained to me, the Jamaican criminals “wanted their reputation” as a useful tool for sustaining business and their egos. For this reason, Baltimore’s hybrid Jamaican/Nigerian heroin ring dubbed itself the Jamaican Black Mafia (JBM), not the Nigerian Black Mafia. As a police officer who tracked them explained to me, they “wanted people to see them as Jamaican, to create the Caribbean mystique. ... Jamaicans are known as violent but also as providing a good product.”126 The Jamaican image of violence became so useful, in fact, that non-Jamaican criminals began pretending to be Jamaican too. Thus in June of 1988, public housing tenants in Annapolis, Maryland, were gripped with fear of Jamaican gangs. Rumors circulated wildly, and the ATF warned the mayor, a strong advocate of local anti-drug programs, of death threats against him (McCord 1988; Thompson 1988). By the end of the summer, however, law enforcers were reassuring the public that only one incident in Annapolis had involved a Jamaican criminal. Most of the problem incidents had been mere rumors, but there had been some Trinidadian drug dealers posing as Jamaicans in the city (Thompson 1988; McHugh 1988). Similarly, law enforcement agents and West Indians told me of African-Americans who try to imitate Jamaicans in dress and speech in order to seem intimidating. I should note that intimidation is not the only aspect of Jamaican drug dealers’ image that they care about. Although other aspects of their social esteem rarely affect their media image, I include them to provide a more balanced picture of these individuals. As my law enforcement source noted, Jamaican drug dealers have also been known for selling good products and for convenient, reliable customer service. They aimed to become “the 7-Eleven of crack.” Perhaps because of Christian upbringings (see Gunst 1995:13,136), some have also cared enough about justifying their acts to seek out a religious ideology that would give their lifestyles a vague

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respectability, an explanation beyond mere selfishness. Ironically for a religion so often deemed unrespectable, the creed they used for this self-justification was Rastafarianism. Highly selective in their appropriation of that religion’s teachings (e.g., they focused on the doctrines surrounding rejection of “white” authority—not on those dealing with family life or healthful living), they were not genuinely committed Rastafarians (Lyman 1989:87; Gopaul-McNicol 1993:48-9). Herein lay some of the confusion among law enforcement officers and journalists about Rastafarianism in the early 1980s. In certain contexts, West Indian criminals have also sought to portray themselves as clean-living, education-loving immigrants just like their law-abiding counterparts. Such bids for respectability were brought home to me by my visit to a prison in Wicomico County, Maryland. I had asked Maryland’s office of the INS if they could put me in contact with a Jamaican criminal. They requested that I write a detailed letter about my purposes and the questions I would ask. I did so and was allowed one hour with a man I will call Edward Dice. I began by asking why he was the only one of 20 Jamaicans at the facility willing to grant me an interview. He explained that he was desperate to stop his deportation and would speak to anyone, whereas the other inmates had been too offended by my letter to meet me. Surprised that they had seen my letter, I asked what offended them. He said that I had requested to speak with a Jamaican “criminal” and that the men there do not like being branded that way.127 He then launched into a long explanation of his woes in the U.S. The gist of his story was that he was not imprisoned for any crimes other than having come to the U.S. illegally and having been at the wrong place at the wrong time. He was at the scene of a “disturbance,” he said, and although he had done nothing unlawful, the policeman who arrived suspected him because of his accent. He was asked to produce identification, which he did not have. He was therefore taken to the INS, but eventually released on bail. He missed his court hearing because of a clerical mistake on the part of a bail bond agent. When he found out he had missed the date, he quickly married his beloved African-American girlfriend and mother of his children (as he described her, a very poor, very virtuous woman seeking to further her education). Soon the bond company’s workers found him in New York and hauled him back to Baltimore. The only thing that stood now


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between him and freedom was $500 for a lawyer to request a “block of deportation,” which would allow him to be released and tie his case up in the courts, possibly for years. Those would be years when he could be a father to his son and daughter, he noted mournfully. Currently they could not even come see him, three states away, because of the cost. He added that his son, a toddler, cried himself to sleep each night because he did not understand why Daddy was gone. He did not directly ask me for $500, but he hinted. He gave me a phone number where I could reach his wife, explaining that she is too poor to have a phone of her own. He begged me to contact the Catholic Immigration Law Service for him. I did so two days later, but they had a year-long waiting list for their pro bono services. I considered giving his wife part or even all of the $500 (I could ask friends to chip in), but decided first to ask my law enforcement contacts more questions about this man. Was he as innocent and upstanding as he sounded? If I involved myself in his life, what might I be getting into? My main law enforcement contact told me that Mr. Dice was “criminally involved,” caught during a drug raid. He could not tell me more because of the federal Privacy Act, but he added that Dice is “no sweetheart” and that he, like all criminals, has “a good cover story.” One well told, I might add. I will never know whether or not he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, as he asserted. But I concluded that there were enough West Indians who did not have criminal records and needed my help that I had best direct my efforts elsewhere. It was entirely possible that this man was indeed a career criminal—one who knew exactly how to complain in the way that lawabiding Jamaican immigrants do, with the same intonations, nuances of emotion, and emphasis on family values. Like them, he protested that Jamaican immigrants’ respectability has been ruined by criminals here and by media sensationalism, and that he has unjustly suffered as a result. If he really was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, his complaints about wolves were artfully strategic—and cynical.128 But perhaps he was a person caught in the middle—neither an egregious criminal nor fully on the straight and narrow. After this meeting I wrote in my fieldnotes: I had thought that when I went to the prison I would, at last, meet a Jamaican who didn’t give a shit about the negative

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media images of Jamaicans in the U.S.—who was too busy with his own agenda to care about such niceties. The cops I’ve interviewed told me that hard-core Jamaican criminals are basically like that. So I was not expecting, in the depths of the penal system, to come across the same familiar upsetness about sullied respectability.

But I did. Perhaps the law enforcers never fully see Jamaican arrestees’ underlying concerns with respectability, family life, and unfair media images. Or perhaps they never see Jamaican criminals playing on the sympathies of potentially gullible researchers. What Jamaican criminals often trade with law enforcers in order to lighten their sentences is information about other criminals. What they might trade with researchers with the hope of receiving aid is also information, but of a very different kind. Thus my and others’ research suggest that Jamaican criminals in the U.S. have cultivated a negative ethnic reputation as violent drug traffickers;129 for them, this reputation often has positive connotations and uses. At the same time, in certain contexts they decry that reputation as unfair and disrespectful. They thus attempt to have their cake and eat it too. The criminals’ roles in the production of images must not be overlooked. Without even speaking with many journalists, they have had ample indirect access to the mass media, through which to convey a message. It is to this topic of media access that I now turn. ACCESS TO THE MEDIA “BULLETIN BOARD” The one journalist willing to speak with me at length about his work takes exception to the term “pack journalism.” He explained: My model of the press is a passive instrument—a bulletin board where people stick and read messages. That’s not its only function; sometimes the press is very clearly an active instrument—investigative journalism. But most of what we do is stand there and write down what people say. Clinton or [Baltimore mayor] Schmoke sets an agenda by the issues they focus on in speaking to the press ... This country is famous for


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immigrant-bashing. There’s a larger issue, too: this culture thrives on images; it’s image-driven. It’s more unequal even than David and Goliath—you have an isolated and unsophisticated community against these GIANT institutions that have ways of talking to each other. ... Is this a problem, or is it simply the way this society functions? It doesn’t stop until the immigrant population assimilates itself, gets into the machine, fights fire with fire. ... If you’re not in the arena, you’re not in the game. While I doubt that journalists are as passive as this reporter feels—and if they are, I contend they are shirking their responsibilities—the reporter’s “bulletin board” analogy is useful because it highlights the problem of access. Journalism critic A.J. Liebling is cited as having “once quipped that in America there is freedom of the press for the man who owns one” (Turow 1984:98; emphasis added). The aptness of this statement is clear from Turow’s outline of court and regulatory rulings pertaining to the media industry. Such rulings have limited the power of ordinary citizens to insist on greater access to media outlets. Even the Fairness Doctrine, applied to radio and television from 1949-1987 (Landay 1995), was only vaguely enforced and rarely actually gave “people filing fairness or equal time complaints ... a chance to present their views on the air” (Turow 1984:100). For example, in 1973-4, the FCC only resolved 0.4% of such complaints in favor of citizens demanding access (Turow 1984:100). Thus, in order to have one’s views disseminated, one must be a press owner or reporter.130 Because it is private enterprise, the U.S. press can rarely be forced to report in any particular way (beyond avoiding libel). Of course, purchasing a TV station is out of reach for most people. As for print media, Turow notes that individuals or companies wanting to successfully start or take over substantial journalistic enterprises in the United States pretty much have to be part of the establishment to begin with. Gone are the days when near indigent entrepreneurs could found daily newspapers aimed at “the masses” and succeed. The costs of technology and labor for the industrialized

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media production and distribution of messages are such that financing even mid-sized newspapers can cost millions of dollars (1984:125).

Thus, the means of information production for mass audiences remain in relatively few hands, and there is little real obligation to report with intellectual or moral balance. Market forces such as “sensationalism sells” have far more effect on production than the forces that unfairly depicted or ignored citizens normally can muster. West Indians in the Chesapeake area have therefore been dependent on the goodwill of media producers to broadcast a countermessage to the image of Jamaican violence. They are particularly dependent because of the low proportion of “blacks” (C. Campbell 1995:4,31,38)—and especially of West Indians—working as journalists for major enterprises. Fortunately, as I detail in Chapter Six, some mainstream media producers have given West Indians a limited public voice. But these efforts have not gone far enough. How might this situation be remedied? Gans offers suggestions for making the news more “multiperspectival,” to bring balance to the information available to the general public. He recommends encouraging development of more, and more varied, media outlets; increasing the lengths of stories to allow more points of view within them; fostering more specialization and in-depth sociocultural training for journalists; establishing more independent agencies monitoring the news media; and creating a government funded, largely independent Endowment for News to help finance these suggestions (1979:304335). His aim is greater access to media outlets for a wider variety of people. The proliferation of public-access cable TV and internet sites in the two decades since he wrote has moved the market in some of the directions he recommended. Many law-abiding West Indians still worry, however, that their perspective will be drowned out by sensationalist news when co-nationals commit crimes. They have seen progress in this area in recent years but wisely take nothing for granted. Two case studies illustrate why careful attention to media representations will always be in their best interest.


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PROBLEMS IN PRINT AND TELEVISION NEWS—TWO CASE STUDIES The first case involves the statistical portrait of criminal aliens in the U.S. In 1989 The Washington Times published a headline proclaiming that “Rising Crime Among Aliens Puts Strain on Justice System in U.S.”; the text came from the Associated Press. Although the end of the article included a mitigating quote from the National Council of La Raza, its general tone was alarmist. I focus specifically on its headline and the statement within the article that “aliens account for 20 percent of the federal prison population.” The Baltimore Sun published a similar statement in a 1993 article entitled “Aliens Taxing the Limits of U.S. Prison System” (LoLordo 1993). The Sun article was longer and even less balanced than the one from the Washington Times. Misleading statements in these articles were not benign. A Baltimore police officer showed me the first article in support of his perception of pervasive Jamaican crime. As for the second article, I heard its statement that “inmates who are not U.S. citizens account for 26 percent of the estimated [prison] population” repeated back to me by a doctor friend who heard it from a lawyer friend of his. The issue came up when I was describing my research topic. My friend was concerned that I was underplaying the gravity of the criminal alien problem in the U.S. I also heard this figure casually mentioned in my conversations with INS officials about Jamaican crime. The figures of 20% and 26% aliens among federal prisoners in 1989 and 1993 are actually correct. The flaw in both articles is twofold: 1) in their texts, they failed to put the federal prison population in statistical perspective, and 2) they carried headlines that seemed, to a naive reader, to refer to the entire justice system in the United States.131 The Baltimore Sun article also included similarly sensationalist phrases in the text. Crucially, both articles failed to note that the federal prison system is not representative of the American justice system as a whole. The federal inmate population is much smaller than those of state prisons,132 and noncitizens make up a much smaller proportion of the state prisoners. In 1991, there were approximately 13 times as many people incarcerated in state prisons as in federal prisons.133 In state facilities across the U.S., only 4% of the inmates were not U.S. citizens

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(U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics 1993:8). When federal and state inmate populations are added together, non-citizens compose 5% of the total.134 Unfortunately, citizenship data on prisoners in local jails, and on the large number of people sentenced to probation or on parole is rarely available in any state.135 However, the data that are available—those dealing with federal and state inmates—strongly suggest that noncitizens are no more likely to be criminals than Americans. As noted above, in 1991 non-citizens made up approximately 5% of the studied inmate populations (in federal and state prisons combined). In 1990, non-citizens made up nearly 5% of the whole population, criminal and non-criminal, of the U.S.136 Thus the percentage of incarcerated noncitizens was approximately same as the percentage of all non-citizens living in this country.137 To reiterate, then, non-citizens are no more responsible for crime than are citizens. Rather, as several of my West Indian informants pointed out, there are “good and bad people in every group.” What about West Indians, specifically? Although the 20% and 26% figures discussed above were mentioned to me in conversations about West Indians, in fact West Indians represent only a tiny proportion of the criminal alien population.138 In 1993, West Indian inmates made up less than 2% of the total federal inmate population.139 Moreover, in 1991 only 0.2% of state inmates were from the West Indies (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics 1993:1,8). Thus neither aliens in general, and certainly not West Indians in particular, were “taxing the limits of [the] U.S. prison system” as the Baltimore Sun suggested.140 My second example of perturbing journalism comes from television. I have noted the five nights of reporting on Caribbean crime on Baltimore’s Channel 13 in 1988. Despite the reporters’ manifest concern about the “threat to the general population” that Haitian and Jamaican criminals posed, the shows did make some attempt at balance. Each night began with the title “Caribbean Connection”; soon thereafter a disclaimer stated that the show focused only on “an element” in these ethnic populations, not on their communities “as a whole.” The very brief disclaimer was followed by many minutes of dramatic footage—ambulances, close-ups of semi-automatic weapons, weeping women, body bags, worried law enforcement officers, and


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scenes in Kingston slums. Many segments of action footage were repeated throughout the week. The disclaimer was also often repeated midway or near the end of the show. On the fourth night (only), the show took a different tack, ostensibly allowing Jamaicans a voice and demonstrating the reporters’ sympathy for the law-abiding community. The “angle” the show took was that there are “two groups hurt by this more than any other, and they are the Haitian and Jamaican communities.” While the program did note several times that Caribbean peoples in the U.S. feel victimized when “criminals give them a bad name,” the overall emphasis was on Caribbean peoples as victims of Caribbean crime, not of American reporters. This emphasis was especially clear in the footage chosen—stretchers, the story of a Jamaican woman in Baltimore whose two children were killed during a drug shoot-out, and carefully edited interviews with Jamaican activists that watered down their usual strong critique of the media. Such slanting of TV news is especially important because of TV’s influence. Research by the Roper Organization (1993) indicates that most Americans continue to turn to television instead of newspapers for their news, that they find television news more credible than newspapers, and that they believe television journalists perform their duties more ably. Earlier Roper studies (1982) found that 70% of Americans believe that local television journalists perform their job in an excellent fashion, a higher ranking than newspaper journalists, police officers, politicians, school officials, or members of the clergy (C. Campbell 1995:6). Moreover, van Dijk reports from Holland that high-prejudiced people especially mention concrete examples of events that show how criminal ethnic group members may be. In [our interview transcripts] we find retellings of such press stories ... a single instance of a TV story may be interpreted negatively and then be generalized by viewers (1987:157).

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Of course, Americans may interpret TV news differently from the Dutch—but in the absence of evidence along these lines, concern about inflammatory representations of immigrants in U.S. news programs makes sense. When news programs give a nod to the concerns of lawabiding immigrants only by portraying them as heartbroken victims of their fellow nationals, rather than as critics of media sensationalism, the viewpoints of highly prejudiced TV viewers are at best only weakly challenged. Fortunately, Chesapeake-area Jamaicans have had some access to television in which to air their criticisms of the media more fully. I discuss the program in question in my chapter on West Indian responses to media coverage. First, however, I touch on a more positive, although still ambiguous, set of representations of West Indians. These are the images in the multi-billion dollar advertising and marketing industries.

CHAPTER FOUR

Images in Chesapeake Advertising and Marketing

During my fieldwork I collected advertisements featuring West Indian people, music, and products. They fall into two major categories— those intended for the public at large, and those disseminated within the West Indian community. Analysis of selected ads illustrates their iconography and emotional appeal.141 ADS TARGETING THE GENERAL PUBLIC In the late 1980s and early 1990s in the Chesapeake region, mainstream ads featuring West Indian imagery were not abundant. They were noteworthy, however, for the way their symbolism sometimes corresponded to and sometimes contrasted with the imagery already identified by scholars in ads depicting African-Americans or foreigners (O’Barr 1994; Seiter 1995; see Wilson and Gutiérrez 1995:109-138 on the history of minority images in U.S. advertising). In ads for the general public, I did not find West Indians representing the comforting mammy figure so familiar in the U.S. as Aunt Jemima (Kern-Foxworth 1994; Manring 1998; Deck 2001). Although in some travel ads West Indians appeared as waiters and servants, as have Aunt Jemima and other African-American images in U.S. advertising, in my sample the West Indian woman as hard-working cook and wise nurturer was absent. (Mammy imagery did, however, appear in West Indian form in the Hollywood film, Clara’s Heart.) Instead, the category that West Indians were made to fit was that of the happy-go-lucky, fun-loving

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(Turner 1994; Kern-Foxworth 1994; O’Barr 1994), sensual outsider from a distant, sunny land (O’Barr 1994). Most of the ads I collected touted travel to Caribbean destinations, emphasizing luxury, relaxation, family recreation, and sex. Interestingly, these images contrast with those that Entman and Rojecki found in their study of African-Americans in television advertising (2000). Native-born African-Americans tend to be associated neither with luxuries, nor with sex: those are apparently the provinces of alluring, mysterious, foreign “blacks” (Entman and Rojecki 2000:162181). O’Barr has detailed the relevant sexual symbolism in a particularly creative print ad for luxury vacations in the Bahamas, featuring a “black” woman in the surf: New Providence Island, Nassau, is represented by a woman whose slopes and curves rise out of blue water. Her beaches are likened to “cream colored silk.” Her hotels are “great” and “big.” All around her are “sleek white yachts with rich men inside.” The tourist is invited to partake of the available sensuality of this nearby but nonetheless exotic foreign destination. It does not take much effort to think of conquest, domination, subordination, and submission. The Bahamas represent a receptive and willing potential partner in a relationship. The tourist is enticed by the images with which the woman/the destination describes herself. She promises a thrilling seduction. The excitement is heightened by lure and tease. “Let’s assume I’m an island,” the copy beckons (1994:83-86). One of my informants adamantly criticized such imagery. He asserted that such ads lead to American sexual activity in the Caribbean offensive to local residents. He argued that when tourists think they can “get anything” in the West Indies, they behave immorally and exploitively.142 I encountered other ads that drew upon West Indian themes in order to sell non-West Indian items or experiences. Their imagery centered around food, music, beaches, and especially, parties. While none of these symbols bothered my informants, and indeed taken individually seemed innocuous enough, as a whole they typecast West


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Indians in narrow roles. In these advertisements, the West Indian became a symbol only of pleasure143—not of struggle, hard work, devotion to family, thrift, thirst for education, or any other parameters of West Indian-American lives. For example, an ad in the Baltimore City Paper144 trumpeted a “CARIBBEAN FEVER ... the NEWEST & HOTTEST HAPPY HOUR! hosted by the HYATT REGENCY & Billiards EDGAR’S Club.” The ad promised live steel bands and the “Best Piña Coladas and Daiquiries in Town!” Similarly, a flyer for Bohager’s Bar & Grill announced its “Back to Barbados Party.” I asked a Bohager’s waitress if the party would feature Barbadian food. She said no, “it’s a happy hour that really doesn’t have anything to do with Barbados. Barbados just sounds good” on the flyer. But the crass appropriation of others’ symbolic worlds is not always so thin, nor even necessarily a disappointing sign about intergroup relations. Merely a marketing tool it may be, yet Mattel’s decision to make toy “Hot Wheel” vehicles that look like Rastafarian fruit and vegetable trucks is still noteworthy. What a long way Rastafarians in the U.S. have come since the early 1980s! The toy Rasta trucks illustrate an important trend in the 1990s and beyond: although memories of Jamaican violence remain (in part because of Hollywood representations), West Indian “culture” is becoming increasingly fashionable. The Grammy awards have increased reggae’s popularity,145 steel band music livens Disney films, major supermarkets carry frozen Jamaican patties, Rasta caps and dreadlocks signify countercultural “style” and individuality (sported even by classical pianist Awadagin Pratt), restaurants from the humble to the elegant serve jerk chicken, and reggae band Steel Pulse played at President Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. To those seeking wisdom from the realm of the paranormal, images of Afro-Caribbean spirituality can also be alluring—as the more recent advertisements and lawsuits involving “Miss Cleo” demonstrate. A self-proclaimed psychic with a “vaguely Caribbean accent” who has claimed Jamaican birth (Gaines 2002), Miss Cleo is apparently not actually from the Caribbean at all. Heavily advertised in emails, on TV, and at her websites, Miss Cleo’s alleged knowledge of the future was marketed to all willing to pay. But the advertising—and the billing for calls made to her psychic hotline—were all-too-often deceptive or

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fraudulent, landing her parent company into legal trouble in several states (Gaines 2002). Here a sense of supernatural mystery surrounding Afro-Caribbean religions was tacitly invoked in order to make Miss Cleo’s “ability” to see the future seem plausible. West Indianness represented a special kind of power—one outside the bounds of both conventional religion and everyday rationality, and therefore exotic and valuable (worth paying for). Advertisers, pop culture, and marketers have thus latched onto versions of West Indian cultural “traits.” Such traits often reflect actual areas of creativity through which, in part, West Indians themselves construct their identities. In this way, West Indians’ constructed knowledge about themselves affects the larger society’s knowledge about them, although America’s understanding of West Indian creativity is often limited, distorted, or syncretistically re-cast in familiar forms (such as frozen Jamaican patties). The converse is also true: West Indians may internalize images about themselves that emanate from the larger society (e.g. “blackness” as inferior, but also Jamaicanness as hip). There is thus a dialectical relationship between the different constructions of identity. ADVERTISING WITHIN THE WEST INDIAN COMMUNITY In pockets of fairly dense West Indian settlement in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., signs and symbols inside and outside of small businesses reach out to the West Indian consumer. For the West Indian immigrant, a palm tree on the menu of a Caribbean eatery does not signify the exotic, the way it often does for non-West Indians in the Chesapeake region (although the struggling entrepreneur would probably be quite happy if a non-West Indian who wandered in found the décor exotic enough to entice a purchase). For the immigrant, the palm tree evokes a transnational longing for “home.” As one Jamaican entrepreneur explained to me, for grateful West Indian customers “we’re selling nostalgia.” Moreover, as Hintzen shows in his book on West Indians in San Francisco, small West Indian businesses sometimes operate not only to satisfy the longing for “home” of the immigrant customers, but also such emotional needs in the entrepreneur him- or herself (Hintzen 2001).


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This immigrant nostalgia is frequently understood and expressed through sensory experiences—music, food,146 smells, pictures, tactile sensations (see Hintzen 2001). A St. Lucian/Guyanese woman explained the connections to me: Noreen: I have yams in the refrigerator right now. ... I think it’s sort of—if I were blind, just to feel it would make me feel um the inner child is coming out. I go to the Caribbean market and I buy these green bananas, and I look at them, and I bring them home, and I put them all on the counter, and I purposely leave them there, so that my picture could look like this [she points to the cover of a Caribbean cookbook with a photo of fresh produce on it]. ... And I buy my pumpkin, and I like to see how it’s sitting there and looking and—to make pumpkin soup. Me: So when you say the inner child comes out, you mean that you feel Noreen: I’m in touch. Me: comforted, or playful, or both? Noreen: Oh yes, yeah. I’m in touch with home, yeah. I remember home, I remember the smells, and I remember my mom. ... (Taped conversation, 03/93). Advertisers, too, draw on these connections. For example, an Air Jamaica poster I saw both in a small Caribbean food market and in the apartment of a devout Rastafarian showed a dazzling array of fresh West Indian produce. The large caption invited, “Come hommmmme,” enticing the purchase of an air ticket with the promise of a delectable, remembered sensory experience. Transnationalism of the skies can be sold via the transnationalism of the palate. West Indians thus market aspects of yearned-for “culture” to each other in the U.S.; in my experience, they are quite willing to sell exemplars of their “culture” to Americans as well. Such salesmanship is a matter of economic survival for the immigrant entrepreneurs. For

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instance, because of what one manager referred to as “the birth of jerk” chicken for Americans beginning in the mid-1980s, especially in the D.C. area, West Indian restaurants and carry-outs were able to stay afloat during the recession of 1991. Local Caribbean-foods wholesalers in turn were able to remain basically sound financially. Not all sales of their “culture” are helpful, however. West Indians at times resent Americans’ appropriation of their creativity without compensation—if someone is going to profit from Caribbean cuisines or art forms, they reason, it should be them. There is the problem, too, of imagery surrounding West Indians in the products Hollywood sells. The representations have been decidedly mixed and have at times contributed to an injurious view of West Indian immigrants. These representations merit a chapter of their own.

CHAPTER FIVE

Hollywood’s West Indians

The scholarship on how mainstream U.S. TV and cinema have portrayed minorities is richer than the literature covering portrayals in the news media or advertising.147 While some works address such representations in all types of mass media, the discussions dealing with TV and film tend to be longer and more detailed. Scholars of mass entertainment repeatedly note the pervasiveness of stereotypes about minorities. For example, Ramírez Berg (in Rodríguez 1997) identifies six stereotypes that Hollywood has commonly used to portray Hispanics: the bandit or drug runner, the half-breed harlot, the male buffoon, the female clown, the Latin lover, and the mysterious “dark lady.” Similarly, Patricia Turner documents longstanding and prevalent depictions in popular culture of AfricanAmerican women as mammies—asexual women who devote their entire lives to serving “whites” (Turner 1994; see also Manring 1998). She also explores “Uncle Tom” imagery (including its differences with the original Uncle Tom character in Stowe’s novel), pointing out how much more comfortable “whites” are with representations of “black” men as faithful servants than as individuals with compelling lives and agendas of their own (see also Gray 1995b:169-170). Her analysis of the movies Lilies of the Field (1963) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989) notes that this comfortable “black” man, with some updating, has also appeared in films widely separated in time, into the contemporary period. Such imagery has not escaped West Indians—in Caribbean form, the mammy appears in Clara’s Heart (1988) and the faithful “black” male in Islands in the Stream (1977). Turner argues,

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media “Sameness” is a frequent lament for those of us who monitor the roles awarded to black actors in Hollywood. ... As AfricanAmerican critics before me have noted, the merits of individual performances and films becomes secondary. The first thought that runs through our heads is: Where and how often have we seen this characterization before? (1994:217).

REASONS FOR AND PROCESSES OF STEREOTYPING There are several reasons why representations of West Indians have often fallen into predictable categories. First, the movie and TV industries are small. Turow notes that only a handful of “powerful distribution firms” control the movie industry (seven of them in the early 1980s). These major companies “provide cash for the making of films to their own production firms” or else subcontract production out to smaller companies (Turow 1984:45-6). What the “majors” want— what they think will sell—is most of what ends up being made. The “majors” then “direct about ninety per cent of Hollywood’s product to the overwhelming number of American movie theaters ... the theaters generally have little to say in this matter” (Turow 1984:45). Similarly, Butsch argued in 1995 that in the TV industry ABC, CBS, and NBC still account for the development of the overwhelming majority of new drama series, the programming that presents the same characters week after week—and year after year in reruns. This is the case because the broadcast networks still deliver by far the largest audiences. ... [These TV dramas are produced by] a ... closed community of proven creative personnel (about 500 producers, writers, directors) closely tied to and dependent on the networks (1995:405-6). While the FOX, WB, Lifetime, USA, and other networks have increased their development of original programming in recent years, the TV industry remains small. Such smallness limits the range of ideas and images in American TV entertainment. As Gray points out, it particularly limits the representations of “blacks” (and other minorities), since the collaborative conventions of TV writing and the high proportion of producers who are “white” frequently serve to


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constrain the creativity and the genuine, nuanced “black” cultural input of “black” TV writers (Gray 1995b:71-2). Too often, the representations of “blacks” that make it onto TV are only those that are “white-authorized” (Gray 1995b:72). Financial risk also imposes limitations. In order to minimize their enormous monetary risks, these two industries hire proven talent to churn out predictably marketable images (see Entman and Rojecki 2000). Creative personnel generate such “safe” images through careful use of stereotypes. Stereotypes are “vehicles for getting work done quickly, efficiently,” and with a reduced chance of failure, since most viewers will not find stock images jarring or distracting from the main plot. Producers and writers will often disrupt viewers’ expectations only when a role reversal is central to the story (Turow 1984:169; Butsch 1995:409).148 Not only stock characters, but also stereotypical plot lines minimize financial risk, albeit sometimes in a way counter-intuitive to those not familiar with the industry. For example, although Nielsen ratings suggest that violence in TV entertainment is not what Americans most enjoy (Gerbner 1995), violent TV entertainment is copiously produced (see Lichter, Lichter and Rothman 1991:187). This discrepancy occurs because violence sells well internationally in syndication. Violent plots depend less on the culturally-specific details frequent in humor and nonviolent drama shows. Producers are therefore motivated to create stereotypically violent shows because of their international potential to reap profits (Gerbner 1995). Another reason for repetitive plots and characters is the time pressure writers and producers work under, especially in the TV industry (Turow 1984:172-3). Butsch explains that their schedules impel “the production team to simplify the amount of work and decisions to be made as much as possible. ... creators will stick to whatever is familiar to them whenever possible” (1995:409). Sensitive, multidimensional portrayals of relatively small immigrant communities are thus unlikely. Reliance on stereotypes has not been without restraints, however. In the early 1930s, the film industry feared growing threats of both federal censorship of movie content and the legal destruction of Hollywood’s

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media [monopolistic] economic structure, within which major studios dominated all three phases of the movie business—production, distribution, and theatrical exhibition. In an attempt to appease government and public critics, studios accepted selfcensorship via the Hays Code (Cortés 1993:60).

The code steered movie makers away from “negative national and ethnic group epithets— ‘Chink, Dago, Frog, Greaser, Hunkie, Kike, Spic, Wop, Yid’” (Cortés 1993:60). It also forbade cinematic representation of miscegenation (Cortés 1993:61). It remained effective until the mid-1950s, when its influence began to wane. By the mid-1960s, writers and producers no longer consulted it, although some of its norms had by then become standard in the profession. While the avoidance of epithets benefited West Indian-Americans, along with many other groups, the attitude against miscegenation was so strict that as late as 1968 it damaged the career of West IndianAmerican singer and actor Harry Belafonte. Dates recounts that Belafonte touched the arm of Petula Clark, a British singer, after a particularly emotion-rending duet the two had performed on her television show, “Petula,” sponsored by Chrysler ... After the sponsors made a big issue about the incident, Belafonte vowed to use his creative energies in other media and rarely returned to network television. This outcome would not have been predictable at the beginning of Belafonte’s network appearances, for he had been one of the “darlings” of television in the fifties and sixties (1993:313). Thus in the early years of film and television, efforts were made to bypass grossly derogatory ethnic and “racial” labels; yet at the same time an underlying racism, as evidenced in stereotypes149 and sexual anxieties, prevailed. By the 1990s, however, the “dialectic of white cultural domination [of mass media] and [“blacks’ response of] cultural resistance [had] become increasingly entangled in more complex social conflicts. ... the primacy of the ‘color line’ is being challenged by generational, gender, and class differences” (Dates and Barlow 1993b:527). Stereotyping


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and symbolism have become more complex. Thus, lower-class “blacks” now appear in mass entertainment in symbolic contrast with middle and upper-class fellow “blacks” as much as in contrast with “whites.” In addition, Hollywood has taken note of a dimension of intra-“black” differentiation that scholars of mass entertainment rarely even mention in passing: ethnicity. Hollywood has realized that “foreign blacks” can fill specialized niches in mass entertainment. Some of these niches are updated versions of old stereotypes about American “blacks,” such as the mammy who devotes her life to her little “white” charges (S. Hall 1995:21; L. Anderson 1997). Others are new, such as the menacing “black” immigrant. In either case, the stereotypes tell the thoughtful observer at least as much about those who have created them as about the lives of those they purport to depict (see Ortner 1998:432-4; Ross 1996:xxi). The “figure of blackness ... [serves as] the site of projection, demonization, repression, desire, nostalgia, spectacle, and fear” (Gray 1995b:164). Thus the mammy (see Ross 1996:9), as updated by Whoopi Goldberg’s portrayal of a Jamaican nanny in the film “Clara’s Heart,” not only represents West Indian females’ livelihoods in the U.S., but also a vision that many “white” Americans have about a saintly acceptance of suffering considered appropriate for “blacks” and women (the movie makes no effort to explore how the nanny’s troubles might have been prevented by different economic, geopolitical, or gender relationships). In parallel fashion, the Jamaican criminals in the movie “Marked for Death” not only represent actual drug dealers, they also stand for “white” Americans’ worst nightmares about “black” males and “aliens.” The role of West Indian characters and actors as fulfillers of “white” Americans’ fantasies begins with the cinematic careers of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. These men command a Caribbeanstyle “Queen’s English” often perceived by Americans as educated150 and refined. Belafonte and Poitier would modify their accents as needed for their roles, making themselves sound like “black” Americans so highly educated as to be exotic (and thus “safe”).151 Probably in good measure because of their diction as well as their acting talent, these two men—especially Poitier—came to symbolize the “black” man that “white” Americans could actually respect (Bogle 1994:175-183,215-219). Poitier was, as Bogle states, a “hero for an

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[evolving] integrationist age” (1994:175).152 While Poitier rarely played a West Indian character, he became so famous that his origins in the Bahamas were widely known. By contrast, other actors with Anglophone Caribbean origins have received much less attention. Such actors have occasionally played West Indian characters in Hollywood productions, but they and their backgrounds are much less prominent than Poitier’s. They include: Jimmy Cliff (Jamaican), Sister Carol East (Jamaican-American), Eek-a-Mouse (Jamaican), Geoffrey Holder (Trinidadian), Rawle D. Lewis (Trinidadian), Delroy Lindo (Jamaican), Carl Lumbly (Jamaican-American), Sheryl Lee Ralph (Jamaican-American), Oliver Samuels (Jamaican), Lorraine Toussaint (Trinidadian-American), and Sullivan Walker (Trinidadian). In addition, Cedella Marley, whose name is renowned because of reggae superstar father Bob, played a Jamaican in the Hollywood film “Joey Breaker.” We should note that sometimes African-Americans without West Indian heritage have been cast as West Indian characters, and conversely, that the actors and actresses listed above have often been cast as African-American or African characters in other productions.153 Milton Vickerman has published the first detailed analysis of West Indian characters in film (1999a). Drawing on and adapting Bogle’s typology of stereotypical “black” American characters in cinema (Bogle 1994), Vickerman finds movies portraying • “Paradoxical Islands: Beauty and Danger” in films about tourists, plantations, and horrors; • “The Underdeveloped Region/‘Coon’ Theme” in comedies; and


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• “The West Indies Abroad—Immigrants” in movies that abound with Rastafarians and present “extremes of clownishness or criminality” (Vickerman 1999a:91). He reviews at some length films such as “Wide Sargasso Sea,” “Club Paradise,” “Cool Runnings,” “Thelma and Louise,” and “Marked for Death.” My interpretations of some of these films diverge a bit from his,154 and I have chosen to include and categorize Hollywood (and rival) productions somewhat differently.155 I also include certain films he was not able to, and as many relevant TV programs as I could find and view. Yet our analyses are compatible, despite his background as a “black” Jamaican sociologist and mine as a “white” American anthropologist, and despite my not having discovered his article until after I had constructed my categories and evaluated most of the films in my list. The rough convergence of our understandings suggests that although, as he notes, the analysis of stereotypes inevitably involves subjective assessments, significant points of agreement are possible among in-depth observers. My annotated list of relevant TV programs and movies illustrates various stock Anglophone West Indian roles in TV and cinema entertainment. I have chosen 1965 as the beginning date for this thematic timeline, as this was the year the new wave of West Indians began emigrating to the U.S., providing a social impetus for more productions with West Indian immigrant characters. Note that a particular production may appear in the list more than once if its West Indian characters belonged to more than one “type.”156 The categorizations and annotations below make the repetitiveness, narrowness, and all-too-often dehumanizing character of the stereotypes quite clear. FILMS AND TV ENTERTAINMENT WITH AFRO-WEST INDIAN CHARACTERS, 1965-1999 WEST INDIANS AS DIGNIFIED PROFESSIONALS OR WORKERS (excluding musicians): 1965—“Thunderball” 157 1967 —“To Sir With Love”

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1977—“Islands in the Stream”—Joseph is the Bahamian employee who stands by his “white” employer through all kinds of adversity, calming him when he is drunk, advising him on family matters, cooking for him, urging him to eat when he is upset, and cradling him in his arms when the “white” hero is dying. Joseph functions as a male “mammy.” 1983—“Never Say Never Again” 1983—“Eureka!” 1984 —“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” 1986—“Something Wild”—Dottie is either a waitress or the owner of a diner in a small part. The last scene shows her dancing to the song “Wild Thing.” 1988—“Married to the Mob”—In a small role, “Rita” is a kindly illegal alien and a beauty parlor owner or manager. 1988—“Clara’s Heart”—A wise, loving, and longsuffering Jamaican nanny is the central character. Brief scenes at a West Indian beauty parlor and a West Indian party are positive. Set in Baltimore. 1988-1991 (relevant episodes)— “The Cosby Show”—Sullivan Walker played a doctor, Jim Harmon, on four episodes of this enormously popular TV situation comedy. On the fourth episode a West Indian character named Carleton also appeared. On two other episodes in 1991 a student from Barbados was featured.158 1989—“The Mighty Quinn” 1990—“Marked for Death”—In one of their attempts to balance this film’s depiction of Jamaicans (see below under “Violent and/or Criminal West Indians”), the writers included a laudable Jamaican policeman, Charles. Set in the U.S. and Jamaica. 1992—“Boomerang”


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1992—“Prelude to a Kiss”—Romantic fantasy with scenes in Jamaica. Several Jamaican characters appear in small roles as waiters, workers, and servants for the “white” tourists. 1992—“Wide Sargasso Sea”—Set in Jamaica in the mid-19th century, the film includes hardworking and loyal servants to a rich, “white” family. One important character, Christophine, has a mammy relationship with the “white” heroine. 1992-3—“Going to Extremes”—Short-lived TV show featuring West Indian doctors and administrators, as well as working people. The West Indians are sometimes portrayed as bizarre on the surface, but actually more humane than several egotistical American characters. Set in the mythical Anglophone isle of Jantique. 1993—“The Firm” 1993—“Weekend at Bernie’s 2” 1993—“Joey Breaker” 1993—“Cool Runnings”—Disney family comedy about the Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Winter Olympics. The Jamaican athletes’ efforts are portrayed as heroic, but they are also often clownish (see below). One of the athletes is a Rastafarian who behaves in a childlike manner throughout the film. Minor roles show Jamaican professionals. 1993—“Where I Live”—Acclaimed but short-lived TV sitcom about a West Indian cab driver in New York City, his African-American wife, and their children. 1995—“Earth 2”— TV 1996—“Daylight” 1996—“To Sir with Love II”—A made-for-TV sequel.

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WEST INDIANS AS MUSICIANS: 1965—“Thunderball” 1972—“The Harder They Come”—A poor Jamaican has a hit reggae song after turning to a life of crime. An independent Jamaican film set in that isle, it has had limited U.S. distribution. 1984—“Zombie Island Massacre”—West Indians are shown playing steel pans and other instruments. Reggae music (including references to “Jah”) provides the sound track for a couple of creepy scenes. 1985—“Water” 1986—“Club Paradise”—Ernest is a reggae artist and owner of a small hotel/nightclub in the mythical Anglophone isle of St. Nicholas. The movie also features scenes with benevolent, ganja-smoking Rastafarians. It includes a brief scene of an “iabinghy” ceremony.159 1989—“The Little Mermaid”—Very popular animated Disney film, featuring Sebastian, a singing crab with a West Indian accent. The character’s soca/steel pan tune “Under the Sea” won the Academy Award for best original score and song. 1990—“Under the Sea”—Sequel to “The Little Mermaid,” this sing-along short feature includes the title song and the West Indian crab who sings it. According to a Blockbuster employee in Baltimore, “The Little Mermaid” and its sing-a-long sequels were so popular when they came out that “we couldn’t keep them on the shelves.” 1991—“Sebastian’s Party Gras”—Another sing-a-long sequel to “The Little Mermaid.” 1991—“Sebastian’s Caribbean Jamboree” “The Little Mermaid” also led to a show on cable TV’s Disney channel. The program again featured Sebastian the crab and was still being aired in 2002.


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1992—“Stepping Razor”—Documentary about reggae star Peter Tosh. 1992—“Prelude to a Kiss” 1995—“The Fabulous Reggae Dogs”—Children’s show on Black Entertainment Television set on the fictitious island of Jellimoca. The West Indian singing puppets teach allegorical lessons about Caribbean history and the perils of neo-colonialism. WEST INDIANS AS REBELS AGAINST OPPRESSIVE AUTHORITIES: 1965—“The Hill”—Jacko King is a West Indian member of the British military who is incarcerated at a brutal British military prison camp. This anti-racist, anti-authoritarian film shows Jacko enduring many racist insults without internalizing them, defending men who are unfairly harassed or punished, sharing his limited supply of food with a “white” fellow rebel, standing up for the truth about a man beaten to death while in custody, refusing to take unreasonable orders, and finally helping to beat up the cruelest of the guards. 1976—“Swashbuckler” 1977—“Islands in the Stream” 1982—“Countryman”—Produced by Blue Mountain Films in London, the main character of this drama is a Jamaican, Rastafarian superhero who rescues, cares for, and shepherds to safety a “white” couple whose death is sought by corrupt Jamaican politicians and military officers. The superhero and the inhabitants of a Rastafarian village are frequently seen smoking marijuana. 1985—“Water” 1986—“Club Paradise” 1991—“Thelma and Louise”—In an 80-second scene providing muchneeded comic relief, a Rastafarian blows ganja smoke into a hole in the trunk of a police car. He thus knowingly provides a puff of ganja to an

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authoritarian state trooper whom Thelma and Louise had locked in the trunk of the car. 1992—“Wide Sargasso Sea” 1993—“Sankofa”—Film about the brutality of slavery on a sugar plantation. Shango, the most rebellious slave, has a West Indian accent and speaks in patois with subtitles. At one point he says “I and I,” an allusion to contemporary Rastafarians. The location of this plantation appears to be nowhere in particular—or rather, everywhere that New World slavery occurred. Produced and distributed independently, this movie has been seen by many African-Americans in meeting halls, theaters, college auditoriums, and—despite its anti-Christian message—churches. WEST INDIANS AS BUFFOONS, IN COMEDY, OR AS COMIC RELIEF: 1980—“Fridays”—An episode on this ABC comedy included a skit with “Nat E. Dread, the Rasta gourmet.” We laugh at this silly Rasta whose cooking show ends with a peanut butter and ganja sandwich. He explains that “one way to enjoy this Jamaican delicacy” is to smoke it, which he messily proceeds to do. 1983—“Cheech and Chong: Still Smokin’”—The middle of this teenhumor film features a spoof of “The Harder They Come.” A character in dreadlocks and Rasta cap buffoonishly attempts to sell hashish to passersby. At one point, the character sings the word “dope” to the tune of the classic West Indian folk song “Day-O.” Towards the end of the skit, the “Rasta” admits that he’s actually an American in disguise. The “humor” in this skit partly derives from stereotypes about West Indian Rastafarians. 1985—“Water”—The fictional island of Cascara is filled with buffoonery, incompetence, and backwardness. A DJ with dreadlocks and Rasta cap responds to the capture of his radio station not with alarm or resistance, but rather by simply enjoying the song the guerrillas sing on the air (the music is more important to the DJ at that


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moment than the destruction of the station’s roof or the potential danger he is in). Later, the two guerrillas are spared imprisonment for their crime because the jail is being repainted. The isle is described as “one of the hell holes of the world,” though (or because?) it has abundant marijuana, which various characters smoke. Its cultural claim to fame is a soup made from rope. The Caribbean in general is portrayed as the site of political turmoil where, somewhat paradoxically, people don’t work very hard. 1986—“Club Paradise” 1988-1991 (relevant episodes)— “The Cosby Show”—TV 1990-1993, plus later reruns—“In Living Color”—Award-winning comedy/variety TV show with a majority African-American cast. Periodically it included skits poking fun at the work ethic of West Indian immigrants. For example, in one courtroom scene a West Indian-American is the judge, a lawyer, a witness, and the accused. He has many jobs! In another skit, a West Indian-American father and mother are distressed that their daughter plans to marry a fellow West Indian with only 98 jobs, rather than the 100-job man they picked out for her. We laugh at the immigrants (albeit for characteristics they are proud of).160 1991—“Thelma and Louise” 1992—“Boomerang”—West Indian advertising director Nelson creates absurd ads, intertwining sexuality with “voodoo,” for a new perfume. He is incompetent and ridiculous. We laugh at this character. 1992—“Captain Ron” 1992—“The Lunatic 1993—“Cool Runnings” 1993—“Where I Live”—TV 1995—“Cleghorne!”—TV

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WEST INDIANS AS HIGHLY SEXUAL: 1965—“Thunderball” 1983—“Eureka!”—A symbolic scene mingles an Afro-Caribbean religious ceremony with dangerous sexuality. Shots of interracial sex are interspersed with images of snakes, breasts, fire, blood, and the sounds of moaning and terrified screaming. 1987—“Hot Pursuit” 1989—“The Mighty Quinn” 1992—“Boomerang” 1992—“The Lunatic” 1999—“How Stella Got Her Groove Back”—Winston is a young, deliciously sexual, intelligent, romantic, and faithful-to-his-lady Jamaican. This was a breakthrough film for the representation of Jamaican men in Hollywood cinema; all the male characters are positive, and the man is central to the plot. It was also a career breakthrough role for Taye Diggs, the African-American who played Winston. WEST INDIANS INVOLVED IN THE OCCULT: 1972—“Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” 1973—“Live and Let Die” 1982—“Countryman” 1983—“Eureka!” 1984—“Zombie Island Massacre”—Set on the fictional island of San Marie, this horror film plays with contemporary American ambivalence about African influences on Caribbean spirituality. A group of American tourists watching a nighttime ceremony in the jungle are told, “What you are about to see is not black magic, but truly a religious ceremony. Maintain a respectful silence.” But the ceremony— involving drums, candles, flames, dancing, a screaming woman, the


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slaughter of a sheep, and an individual on a stretcher who is coated with sheep’s blood and then mysteriously rises—frightens several of the tourists. The leader of the ceremony has an Anglophone West Indian accent. The tourists later speak (some jokingly) about the “voodoo” and “zombie” they witnessed. Throughout the rest of the movie, the tourists are viciously attacked and killed, one by one, by a leaf- and feather-covered, human-size creature that smells of rotten meat. The movie plays upon viewers’ fears that the “voodoo” participants are behind the attacks and that they involve cannibalism. In the end, the attackers turn out to be disguised Colombian drug dealers who are conspiring with (and perhaps also double-crossing) two “white” American characters. 1985—“Three Sovereigns for Sarah”—PBS mini-series on TV about the Salem witch trials. The slave Tituba is portrayed as West Indian and as one accused of practicing “voodoo.” The narrator argues, however, that Tituba’s doings were “harmless,” and Tituba is shown in a sympathetic light. 1989—“The Mighty Quinn” 1990— “Marked for Death”—Violent Jamaican “Rastafarians” engage in ceremonies with lit candles and a sound track creepy to American ears. They leave “an African black magic symbol” on a carpet as a warning of impending doom: the home is now “marked for death.” Killings are ritualistic. There is a reference to the Jamaicans’ “voodoo.” 1990—“Predator II”—Jamaican drug dealers engage in occult practices. 1992—“Captain Ron” 1992—“Wide Sargasso Sea” 1993—“Weekend at Bernie’s 2” 1993—“Only the Strong” 1995—“A Vampire in Brooklyn” 1998—“Caught Up”

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VIOLENT AND/OR CRIMINAL WEST INDIANS: 1965—“The Hill” 1966—“I Spy”—An episode of this TV show featured an angry Jamaican outlaw who attempts to “create an electrical blackout in Los Angeles that will allow his coconspirators to go on a crime spree” (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:238). 1973—“Live and Let Die” 1973—“The Harder They Come” 1977—“The Deep” 1981—“The Island”—This adaptation of a Peter Benchley novel features an extortionist Afro-West Indian police officer on the island of “Navidad.” According to one character, the island of Navidad has “no decent airports, no Holiday Inns. ... [it’s] the asshole of the Western world.” 1982—“Countryman” 1984—“Miami Vice”—In the show’s premier episode, AfricanAmerican officer Tubbs is undercover, disguised as a Jamaican drug dealer with ties to Brooklyn. Later episodes of this TV show also featured West Indian criminals. 1984—“Zombie Island Massacre”—Although the West Indian characters do not turn out, in the end, to be the main villains in this film, neither are they harmless. A religious leader demands a briefcase full of drug money as payment for his release of an innocent, wounded American tourist. 1985—“Water” 1988—“Clara’s Heart” 1989— “The Mighty Quinn” 1990—“Marked for Death”—Screwface is a violent, dreadlocked Jamaican drug lord in this movie of nearly unremitting gore and


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fascination with weapons. In an early scene, dreadlocked men with strong Jamaican accents offer free crack to high school students on school property. In later scenes Screwface is portrayed as fanatically vengeful and eager to murder innocent family members of his enemies. The filmmakers attempted to balance their very negative depiction of Jamaicans with a Jamaican-cop character and with a reporter’s statement that less than 1% of Jamaican immigrants are involved in the posses. The reporter then describes the posses in language very similar to the ATF’s real-life descriptions. The film thus supports Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman’s assertion that Hollywood takes “issues and ideas that have filtered into the national news media and further simplifies and dramatizes them for distribution to a viewing audience” (1991:297; see also Turow 1984:175). A non-ATF expert on Jamaican criminals described this film to me as “overdone.” In theaters the movie grossed $5.1 million the weekend it opened and $46 million total. In 1993, a Blockbuster video employee in Baltimore told me it was a “very popular” rental; by 1999 it had garnered at least $20 million in video rental fees worldwide.161 In 1994 CBS aired this movie twice on prime time. 1990—“Predator II”—Features very violent Jamaican drug dealers. Some scenes resemble war movies. There are no positive Jamaican characters in this film. 1991—“Whore” 1991—“New Jack City”—Features West Indian, Rastafarian drug dealers, as well as African-American ones. Also includes an AfricanAmerican police officer who pretends to be a Jamaican dealer as his cover for penetrating the underworld. Unusually, in this film the West Indians are victims of (African-American) violence, rather than perpetrators.162 1992—“Malcolm X”—“West Indian Archie,” a numbers operator, tries to kill Malcolm Little. West Indian Archie also uses drugs and introduces Malcolm to cocaine.163 1992—“Stepping Razor”

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1992—“Deep Cover”—Ivy, a Jamaican-American drug dealer, shoots a 12-year-old drug sales boy in the back.164 1992—“Wide Sargasso Sea” 1992—“The Lunatic” 1993—“Only the Strong” 1995—“A Vampire in Brooklyn” 1998—“Caught Up” 1998—“The Long Island Incident”—Made for the cable channel “Lifetime,” this program explored the violent crime of Colin Ferguson and its aftermath. It has been rebroadcast on later occasions (e.g. May 2002). Such “made-for-television movies based on dramatic news stories” (Gray 1995b:66) are cost-effective to produce: they are relatively inexpensive to put together yet attract a large enough audience to satisfy advertisers. Stories of this type thus appeal to producers in this age of increased TV competition (Gray 1995b). Late 1980s and early 1990s—My informants also told me about episodes of the TV programs “Cops,” “Wise Guy,” and “Columbo” that featured Jamaican drug dealers, as did the “America’s Most Wanted” reality-based crime show. A law enforcement officer told me the “Wise Guy” episodes were “heavy-handed” in their depiction of Jamaican criminals—this despite the show’s having been rated extremely liberal by a conservative media research group (PR Newswire 1990). The listing above shows, once again, an imbalance in media portrayals of West Indians. Even films and TV shows with hardworking, noncriminal West Indian characters often include unflattering stereotypes as well—e.g. buffoonery,165 servile relationships with “whites,” backwardness, vulgar or out-of-control sexuality, occult practices, marijuana use, or illegal alien status. Moreover, 49% of these TV and cinema products feature West Indian felons,166 a proportion far in excess of their number among West Indians in the United States. Hollywood’s West Indians, as with West Indians in the news in the 1980s and early 1990s, are generally a rather unsavory lot.


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The ways they have been portrayed contrast, at times strikingly, with their actual lives in the Chesapeake region. For example, whereas Hollywood’s Rastafarians are usually either ridiculous or dangerous, what I learned about the life history of a local Rasta leader shows a different picture. For those who are not familiar with Rastafarianism, I present him here to show, by way of comparison, how exaggerated and/or inappropriate Hollywood stereotypes are. RAS BASIL QUINN: A RASTAFARIAN ORGANIZER IN WASHINGTON, D.C. The third of six children born to a carpenter and a homemaker, at age five Basil Quinn moved with his family from Jamaica to London. In Britain he succeeded in school, eventually won a scholarship, earned a degree in the sociology of religion, and became a Rastafarian. In the meantime, his parents moved to New York City, where they found better economic opportunities. Ras167 Basil’s siblings joined them there, and eventually his parents implored him to come to the U.S. as well. Somewhat reluctantly, he applied to Howard University and came on a soccer scholarship. At Howard he obtained a bachelor’s degree in nutrition. At Howard he also met the Jamaican woman who later bore his son. She went on to become an obstetrician. In the mid1990s, their son was at a boarding school in Jamaica, where they felt he would obtain a better education and more of “a chance to have a childhood.” By the time I met him, Ras Basil had held a number of different jobs in D.C. He had been a paid counselor for an emergency shelter. He had been a quality control technician in data processing (when the company moved, he had declined to relocate). He had taught physical education at the private Academic Enrichment Center, coached soccer for other local schools, and been a courier. When we met he was running a small spring water and fruit juice business; his company provided home delivery of all-natural products to fellow Rastafarians and to non-Rastafarians. The co-owners of the business were Jamaican (but not all Rastafarian). Explaining why Rastafarians prefer to go into business for themselves, Ras Basil commented that they are very, very independent. Historically this preference sprang from the discrimination that Rastafarians suffered in the job market (Gopaul-

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McNicol 1993:45), but it also reflected Rastas’ desire “to tend [our] own destiny.”168 The desire to own a small business was also cited by others of my informants as a particularly Jamaican characteristic.169 Rastafarians thus appear to be a highly entrepreneurially inclined subset of an already business-minded nationality. An organizer of the Rastafarian community in the D.C. area, Ras Basil has helped coordinate the observance of Rastafarian holidays and ceremonies, such as the 1993 niahbinghy170 event at Banneker field along Georgia Avenue. Attended by some 500 people, this ceremony of spiritual renewal involved hours of singing and night-time drumming. Ras Basil was also active in defending the reputation of Rastafarians in the aftermath of Operation Caribbean Cruise. During that period he helped establish the Rastafarian Community of Washington, D.C. and Adjacent Areas, an organization that at the time of my fieldwork was still sending speakers to local college campuses and hosting religious events. Although the area’s Rastafarians have no formal hierarchy and no membership rolls, Ras Basil confidently told me that the local community of committed Rastafarians numbers in the several hundreds. They are Jamaicans, West Indians from other islands, some AfricanAmericans, and a few Euro-Americans. Ras Basil asserted that the West Indians among them tend to be legal immigrants: illegal immigrants hesitate to stand out by embracing a religion with attentiongrabbing symbols such as long dreadlocks and outdoor night-time drumming. Most local Rastafarians are from a working class background, although a few come from more privileged homes. They live dispersed in the Chesapeake region. These Rastafarians form two overlapping groups: the Niahbinghy and the Twelve Tribes of Israel.171 Ras Basil explained that the Niahbinghy, of which he is a part, is the older, more orthodox group. The Twelve Tribes of Israel is “a more recent creation” appealing to the younger generation, including some reggae artists. Members of the Twelve Tribes are more interested in honing their business skills and are willing to question or modify Niahbinghy doctrines; for example, they entertain ideas about succession to the Ethiopian throne, which the Niahbinghy will not discuss.172 Ras Basil’s activities, his courteous and thoughtful demeanor, and the decoration of his apartment all reflect his commitment to the tenets


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and ethics of Rastafarianism: love for peace, vegetarianism,173 avoidance of food additives and pharmaceuticals, Afro-centric education, travel to Africa, “black” solidarity, respect for elders, and economic independence. Understanding his life highlights the inappropriateness of so many Hollywood depictions of Rastafarians. Fortunately, Rastas and other West Indians have found ways to dispute the caricatures and misrepresentations of them in mass media.


CHAPTER SIX

Local West Indian Responses to Media Imagery

HISTORICAL AND CARIBBEAN BACKGROUNDS West Indian critiques of U.S. mass media began over a century ago. In the 1880s, law school dean and Barbadian immigrant David Straker wrote articles for the Northern press criticizing Southern reporters. Straker “chided [Southern] white newspapers for their crusade of sensational journalism against blacks” (Phillips 1981:133). He decried the bias of newspapers that in earlier years had not hesitated to speak ill of “blacks” yet had “ignor[ed] the ... ruthlessness of the raging Ku Klux Klan” (Phillips 1981:133). Although Straker wrote in defense of all “black” people in the U.S., rather than just on behalf of West Indian immigrants, his Caribbean background was significant.174 His double cultural vision gave him much-needed perspective on his adopted society. He had arrived in the U.S. with “a desire to dedicate his life to the establishment of an effective judicial and legislative process”—one that would “reshap[e] attitudes of the postemancipation society, as it had done in postemancipation Barbados” (Phillips 1981:128). He sought more favorable journalism towards “blacks,” even founding his own newspaper, the Detroit Advocate, in 1901.175 Straker’s West Indianness spurred him to activism, which he pursued both through the courts and the press. West Indian immigrants today share Straker’s double cultural vision.176 They come from societies where “blacks” are not minorities, and where the press and popular culture are largely “theirs” in content, 127

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if not in financial ownership. For example, Despres described the press in British Guiana as staffed primarily by “educated, middle-class AfroGuianese” whose outlook has clearly been reflected in the contents of the four major newspapers (1967:132-3). More recently, Eriksen has argued that since the national symbols and art forms of Trinidad are “associated with the blacks,” for East Indian Trinidadians “to be successful ... in the media, they must relinquish their [Indian] cultural identity” and “become thoroughly creolized [culturally “black” Trinidadian]” (1992:133,137-8). Thus, Afro-West Indians as an aggregate are accustomed to media supremacy. As immigrants, many can easily imagine a press more balanced, even laudatory, towards them than what they have recently seen in the U.S. Their perceptions of and responses to U.S. media are not uniform, however. VARIATIONS AND SIMILARITIES IN WEST INDIANS’ PERCEPTIONS OF U.S. MEDIA Although many of my informants complained spontaneously and vociferously about unfair imagery in the media, some did not. Even after I questioned them directly about the press, a few said they had no complaints other than a desire for more information about events in their countries of origin. With a single exception, the small minority of non-complainers shared one characteristic: they were from countries other than Jamaica. Their non-Jamaicanness had apparently insulated them from the demeaning remarks that Jamaican informants heard after media coverage of Jamaican crime. Unfortunately, this insulated experience was by no means universal among my non-Jamaican informants—demeaning views of Jamaicans did affect many of them from time to time. As for the one Jamaican non-complainer, having been in the U.S. continuously only since 1991, she missed the peak years of negative reporting about the posses. Moreover, much of her two years in the U.S. had been consumed by the common pattern among new immigrants of working, working, and working in order to earn money (I interviewed her in 1993 during her shift at a nursing home, in snatches between her caretaking tasks). She was far too busy to pay much attention to media representations.


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Most of my other Jamaican informants differed greatly from her, expressing sentiments echoed in a reggae song aired on Baltimore’s Caribbean radio show in 1992: ... Every little thing up in a foreign, Jamaicans get the blame ... Pick up your paper, watch the evening news ... if a one get shot down the lane ... bound to be a Yardie [Jamaican]177 who get the blame. If you just smart drive a new car, person dem a say, “You a druggler? Are you a don?” ... In a New York, or even D.C. ... it’s just the same. ... And if that sun wasn’t to shine, bound to be a Yardie who get the blame. ... They never talk about the good things only ‘bout the bad to make us look bad. ... (Excerpt from “Every Little Thing” by Carlton Livingston).178 Yet Jamaicans were not my only informants who expressed distress at their negative renown in the U.S. Often immigrants from other isles, too, are affected by media imagery about Jamaicans. In the wake of inflammatory statements about Jamaicans appearing in the press, a 1988 memorandum from Washington’s Council of Caribbean Organizations (COCO) to the D.C. police noted that, the average U.S. citizen cannot distinguish between Jamaican, Barbadian, Guyanese, Trinidadian, Grenadian, or St. Vincentian accents. The practical outcome is that whenever one island group is targeted, all island groups become victims of that attention. Already we are receiving reports of harassment of persons of Caribbean background simply because they are adjudged to speak with a Jamaican accent

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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media [see also Chapter One; Richardson 1989:221; Bonnett 1990b:161fn32].

Thus, despite some variation in their perceptions of the media, West Indians of all countries have had reason to be upset by negative images. Those who have indeed found the media images upsetting have manifested a number of responses to them. The most common response that I observed was “distancing.” THE RESPONSE OF “DISTANCING” Frequently my informants distanced themselves from the perceived targets of unflattering representations.179 While occasionally they dismissed negative media representations as simply false, usually they argued only that these representations did not apply to them. They protested that journalists overgeneralize negative statements, or they 180 warned against the temptation to do so. In this manner, in a 1988 statement Jamaican Ambassador Keith Johnson bemoaned news reports about the rise of so-called Jamaican Posses in the U.S. ... The concerns felt by the Government and People of Jamaica at the growing drug problem in societies around the world, is shared fully by the vast community of law-abiding Jamaicans in the greater Washington area. ... Leaders and concerned members of the Jamaican community throughout this land have joined in deploring most strongly these horrendous acts in which a minuscule and evidently largely nomadic segment is involved. [We all] join in condemning these acts of violence that would tend to cast a shadow on the longstanding record of exemplary contributions to the building of America by Jamaicans in all walks of life. These dastardly acts of a misguided few must not be allowed to tarnish the record. More forcefully, in a 1988 letter to the journalists at Washington’s Channel 5, COCO voiced


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our strong objection to the tone and contents of your January 28 newscast dealing with drug related violence in the Washington Metro Area. ... To present the [drug] problem as being peculiar to any one group of persons, to imply that all members of a particular national group are participants in these nefarious activities, and that all Jamaicans who are born or reared in the ghetto have lesser regard for human life than the average American—these are erroneous and unfortunate contributions to the struggle [against the drug problem]. ... Newscasts such as the one in question impact negatively upon our unrelenting efforts [against discrimination] and hence cause us deep concern. In such ways, law-abiding West Indians have criticized media emphases and asserted that “we” are not like those “others” causing trouble. But who has counted as the “others” has varied, depending on the perspectives of different types of West Indians. Distancing Among Non-Jamaicans For many of my non-Jamaican informants, the group held at arm’s length was Jamaicans in general.181 Many told me that Jamaicans are “aggressive.”182 They found it unsurprising that the roughest Caribbean criminals in the U.S. should be Jamaican. They asserted that their own nationalities were much more peaceable. Explanations for Jamaican “aggressiveness” included the stresses poor Jamaican immigrants were under, their maroon183 heritage, the colonial use of Jamaica as a dumping ground for the most recalcitrant slaves (see also Gopaul-McNicol 1993:40-42), and even a Trinidadian’s “racial” interpretation: He claimed that Jamaicans are more “aggressive” because they descend from “the more aggressive Arawaks,” who, he said, went down to the southern islands and raided them for women [Fieldnotes 9/92]. [This explanation reverses the longstanding scholarly view of belligerent, southern Caribs who traveled to the more northerly isles inhabited by Arawaks and captured their wives.]184

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Some non-Jamaicans did, however, hasten to point out that the Jamaicans causing problems were a lower-class minority. One Vincentian added that Jamaicans are extraordinarily loyal to their friends, and a few non-Jamaican informants half-admired Jamaicans’ boldness in insisting on and marketing their music and foods. Yet not all Jamaicans may have been bold. Among the variety of strategies Jamaicans use to distance themselves from criminal conationals, one option is to hide their own origins. But the hiding of Caribbean origins is motivated by other factors as well; the choice of identities is complex. Distancing Among Jamaicans—Hiding Their Origins Jamaicans may sometimes choose to dissociate themselves from negatively depicted conationals by situationally denying their own Jamaicanness. Informants told me that there are more Jamaicans in the Chesapeake region than first meet the ear because some adopt AfricanAmerican accents when conversing with non-Jamaicans. Those who emigrated as children are especially adept at this code switching. They are also especially motivated to learn AfricanAmerican accents because in American schools they are teased for “talking funny.” The stance of hiding origins often continues into adulthood because of African-Americans’ rejection of West Indians. It should be noted that the rejection is more a matter of competition over jobs than an effect of “posse” imagery. Discreetness about origins long predates the posse phenomenon (see Kasinitz 1992). It has historically been common not only among Jamaicans, but among all West Indian immigrants. In certain contexts, it continues today. The phenomenon was very clear to me at a 1994 public forum of the Prince George’s County Human Relations Commission. Among the presenters—an Hispanic, an Ethiopian, a Rabbi, a Catholic priest, a West Indian professional, a Filipina, an Arab-American, two African-Americans, and a EuroAmerican woman representing the Chamber of Commerce—only the West Indian tried to make the group he represented seem undistinctive. Although he spoke with a Grenadian accent, he strikingly downplayed his ethnicity. In a county heavily African-American (and in many areas


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affluent), this man felt most comfortable stating that his ethnic group wants to blend in, not be treated any differently from anyone else, and not be identified as a group per se.185 Yet tensions between West Indians and African-Americans may not be the only factor affecting West Indians’ choices of accents and self-presentation. The problem of negative media images about Jamaicans may also affect West Indians’ choices. Although having a West Indian accent has historically been an asset for a “black” person dealing with “whites” (see Waters 1999), in some cases, West Indians—especially Jamaicans—may find “whites’” views of Jamaicans as drug dealers a reason to lose their accents. This possibility contradicts Rumbaut’s finding, however, that JamaicanAmerican youth are less likely than other second-generation West Indian immigrants to self-identify as American “blacks” (Rumbaut 1994). His findings come from a 1992 survey of South Florida and Southern California eighth and ninth graders. Clearly more research is needed on the complexities of Jamaican self-identification. In-depth linguistic study is needed on the contexts for codeswitching and on exactly which “reputation” or “respectability” issues affect it. Do code-switchers speak with Jamaican accents to “whites” and African-American accents to African-Americans? How do they speak to groups that include both “white” and “black” Americans, as in a work place? If they do sometimes drop their Jamaican accents when speaking to “whites,” has posse imagery ever had anything to do with this choice? Has posse imagery had anything to do with the choice of dropping a Jamaican accent when speaking with American “blacks”? Distancing Among Jamaicans—Class Divisions The most common distancing response among my Jamaican informants was to retain their speech forms while denouncing their poorer compatriots. This response emphasizes class differences. It reflects the disparity in how members of distinct social classes balance the often competing desires for “reputation” and “respectability.” Many impoverished Kingston males devote the bulk of their efforts for social esteem towards building “reputations” as dangerous, freespending, virile men. The middle-class immigrant, by contrast, spends much more energy on acquiring and maintaining the characteristics of a

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“respectable” person—education, refined manners, responsible behavior, and financial stability. Middle-class Jamaicans do not want to be thought of as ghetto drug dealers whose quests for “reputation” are, as they see it, excessive. So the middle class immigrant makes a point of noting class differences. Working-class Jamaicans also often describe posse members as belonging to a social class inferior to theirs. Distancing Among Jamaicans—Personal Morality A further form of distancing was a more personal approach among poor Jamaicans. Unable clearly to distinguish themselves from the criminals by class position, and having a more nuanced picture of the Jamaican poor than their middle-class counterparts, they simply pointed out that “good” individuals should not be confused with “bad” ones. They explained criminals’ misdeeds as a matter of individual choice, or sometimes of family patterns. Thus one Jamaican woman attributed her grandson’s extensive juvenile delinquency to the bad ways of his father (also a Jamaican). Distancing Among Jamaicans by Generation or Geography Yet another form of distancing that I heard among Jamaicans was generational. A few older informants lamented the wicked ways of youth, arguing that young people were poisoning Americans’ views of all Jamaicans. Finally, some Jamaican informants noted that the Jamaicans who had committed heinous crimes in the Chesapeake region had mostly come from New York. The criminals were not permanent residents in the region (an argument confirmed by my law enforcement sources). They thus used U.S. geography to distinguish themselves from the outlaws. Interestingly, none of my female informants distanced themselves from criminals on the basis of gender. OTHER JAMAICAN APPROACHES TO NEGATIVE MEDIA— A CASE STUDY In addition to distancing, Jamaicans have dealt with negative imagery through several other types of counter-assertions and rhetorical strategies: shifting blame away from Jamaicans onto someone else;


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discrediting media competence, honesty, or priorities; discrediting law enforcement’s honesty or priorities; invoking racism; criticizing media reports because of their effects on ordinary people’s attitudes; evoking sympathy for specific ways that reporters, law enforcers, or American criminals have hurt Jamaicans; asserting that the Jamaican government is taking strong action against Jamaican criminals; and, occasionally, attempting to humanize the drug dealers by describing the harshness of their socioeconomic backgrounds. These strategies were all evident in a 1988 episode of Baltimore’s “City Line” TV show, an hour-long, non-prime time Sunday program on Channel 13. The show featured panelists, questions from a studio audience, and two African-American hosts—a woman and a man. The panelists on this occasion were a representative from the Jamaican embassy; a Jamaican community activist (who eventually would become one of my informants); the leader of COCO; the local president of the Jamaica Progressive League (JPL);186 an African-American defense lawyer and former judge who is an ardent admirer of the Jamaican people; and an Hispanic spokesman from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Interspersed with my notes on selected portions of the program, below, I include bracketed comments on the panelists’ strategies to salvage Jamaican respectability: The hosts make opening remarks which predictably fail to mention any media critique to come. The hosts and DEA spokesman then describe the posses. The community activist quickly points out that the word “posse” is from the U.S. She argues that even if there are Jamaican criminals in the area, it is the violent American lifestyle they have imitated. [Shifting blame away from Jamaicans.] When one of the hosts suggests that the activist is admitting the posses do exist, the activist states that she only knows of the posses from what she reads in the newspapers [Personal distancing from criminals]. ... The JPL leader states that for the last 10 years, illegal aircraft and boats have gone from the U.S. to Jamaica and picked up drugs there. The operators of those planes and boats have recruited Jamaican ghetto members [Shifting blame away from Jamaicans], who he says are

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vulnerable to these overtures because they are “uneducated, impressionable, and poor” [Humanizing the drug dealers]. The Jamaica-loving African-American lawyer then argues that both media sensationalism and law enforcement priorities are anti-“black.” [Invoking racism.] Here and later in the program he contends that law enforcers ignore “white” criminals at the top of drug hierarchies (the audience claps) [Shifting blame away from Jamaicans]. He states that he does not believe media statistics about Jamaican crime [Discrediting media competence or honesty]. Next the head of COCO states that the drug problem is international, not limited to any particular nationality [Shifting blame.] He voices strong opposition to drug dealers [Distancing.] He later quarrels with journalists’ reports that Jamaicans control a major sector of the drug trade, declaring that it is physically and financially impossible that Jamaicans could be so influential. [Discrediting media competence]. He asserts that this overgeneralization can quickly lead to the idea that all poor “black” people lack respect for life [Invoking racism], while the drug problem in the “white” suburbs is ignored [Shifting blame; questioning media and law enforcement priorities].187 ... The community activist argues that for the first time in her 28 years in Baltimore, she is beginning to feel inferior because she is Jamaican. This is a result of media sensationalism. Feelings of inferiority lead to anxiety and hostility, she says [Critique of media reports because of their effects]. ... One of the hosts asks whether the panelists admit that there are Jamaican criminals in the area. The head of COCO says that based on reports from the police [Personal distancing], his organization is not prepared to dispute that statement. ... The host suggests it was because the media “so-called sensationalized” the issue that the Jamaican community finally spoke out against drug dealing. The head of COCO says no, they have always spoken out against drug dealing [Distancing]. Now what they have “come forth to speak against” is the “generalizations which have been put forward to


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make it appear that all Jamaicans and Caribbean people are involved” [Discrediting media competence and motives]. The host asks the lawyer what percentage of Jamaicans in the area is involved in drug trafficking. He answers “probably less than 5%.” She contests his figure, saying that DEA and ATF information indicate close to 30%. In the background several panelists immediately murmur that this is inaccurate [Discrediting media competence]. The lawyer expresses skepticism of law enforcement statistics, noting that enforcers are motivated to make problems seem worse than they are in order to justify their budgets [Discrediting law enforcement data and motives]. He adds that the quality of life in Jamaica is far superior to what the media portrays. “They don’t have a crime problem down there,” he asserts to audience applause [Media critique; distancing from criminals]. There is a commercial break. Afterwards, the second host clears up the erroneous statistic, stating that the numerator was a national figure, whereas the denominator was local (3000 Jamaican arrests nationwide in 1987 divided by some 10,000 local Jamaican residents). He notes that the DEA supports the correction. The DEA spokesman points out that posse members are nomadic, not local residents [On behalf of local Jamaicans, geographic dissociation]. He states that D.C. is a terrific market to sell anything since it is less affected by recessions than other parts of the country. For this reason, roving Jamaican criminals have targeted the D.C. crack market. An audience member is given a microphone. He protests the recent journalism as unfairly singling out Jamaicans [Critique of media emphasis] and as leading to damaging stereotypes [Critique of media reports because of their effects]. He especially decries the Channel 13 piece (aired in February of 1988) that showed footage of Kingston ghettos. He asks what image Russians would have of Americans if he produced a report on Appalachia, East Baltimore, or BedfordStuyvesant and broadcast it there [Critique of media imbalance; effort to evoke empathetic distress].

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The embassy representative notes that Jamaica is multi-faceted [Distancing] and that the government is working to improve the lives of the poor [Assertion that Jamaicans are taking action to remedy the situation]. One of the hosts asks why Jamaicans have been singled out. The community activist instantly responds, “Because they single out black folks from anything” [Invoking racism]. ... She adds, “We are nurses, doctors, lawyers, domestics ...” [Distancing]. The lawyer says that “black” Americans have much to learn from Jamaicans, who are highly accomplished [Distancing from criminals]. “But we will never learn that in the media” (audience applauds) [Media critique]. Trembling with outrage, a Jamaican woman in the audience asks why, if Jamaican drug dealers are such a problem, didn’t Operation Caribbean Cruise find any drugs? She clearly implies that the correct answer is that Jamaicans are not dealing drugs in the area [Discrediting media and law enforcement reports]. She mentions that during OCC doors were kicked in [Evoking sympathy], eliciting a supportive reply from the DEA spokesman. Citing statistics to bolster his argument, the embassy representative then asserts that the Jamaican government is fighting hard against drug dealers, a contention the DEA representative agrees with [Assertion that Jamaicans are taking action to remedy the situation]. The lawyer contends that because Jamaicans are higher achievers and more educated and organized than African-Americans, their criminals are more purposeful in their violence—more intelligent and less emotional about it. This is something one must admit, he says. But, he adds, Jamaican violence in the U.S. must be put in perspective. It is only as large a problem as “a pimple on a gnat’s behind” [Discrediting media and law enforcement emphases].188 The JPL leader argues that Jamaicans are also victims—victims of American drug dealers’ illegal air flights into Jamaica, which have


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brought tremendous numbers of weapons there [Evoking sympathy; shifting blame]. On their return flights they have carried posse members into the U.S. [Shifting blame]. ... A brief exchange among a Jamaican audience member, the JPL leader, and the lawyer discusses the temptations to drug dealing that illegal aliens face because of their precarious economic position in the U.S. [Humanizing the dealers]. The rest of the panelists do not seem eager to follow this train of thought. In closing, the community activist states that the media need to “take their emphasis and put it” on the “Caucasians” who own the planes and boats used in drug dealing [Critique of media focus; shifting blame]. The head of COCO states that “it is not a Jamaican problem, but a drug problem” [Shifting blame]. The DEA representative says he blames neither the media nor law enforcement, but rather the “delinquents” who hurt the reputations of the law-abiding [Personalized distancing on behalf of law-abiding Jamaicans]. This recounting indicates a wide variety of arguments Jamaicans and their sympathizers use in the face of negative media representations. As both quantitative and qualitative evidence in this work has shown, their contentions contain much merit; my in-depth study supports many of their conclusions. I have tried to respect their concerns as a topic worthy of investigation—a path some of my informants succeeded in steering me onto. ACTIVIST WEST INDIAN APPROACHES TO NEGATIVE MEDIA West Indians have also found ways to make their viewpoints known other than speaking in public forums and later with an anthropologist. COCO has been especially active. After Operation Caribbean Cruise, COCO questioned the D.C. police department about the wording of their training booklet, emphasizing that department’s public accountability. In 1988, after further negative media coverage, once again COCO objected to overgeneralizing police statements. They requested supporting data on local Jamaican crime from the police.

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Quietly working behind the scenes, COCO also successfully encouraged the police to drop references to nationalities and regions in the names of their future operations and task forces. Furthermore, the Council organized a letter-writing campaign protesting the negative media coverage. In addition, COCO worked to promote positive images of West Indians among Washington’s African-Americans by assisting the Anacostia Museum with the Jamaican portion of its “Black Mosaic” exhibit. Finally, COCO has pressed for Caribbean representation in Chesapeake-area governmental bodies, as a way of increasing West Indian influence on the larger community’s policies, politics, and perceptions. By 1991, West Indians were or had been members of three Prince Georges County commissions (on mental health, cultural affairs, and substance abuse), one Montgomery County committee (ethnic affairs), one Baltimore commission (social services), and five D.C. commissions (professional engineers, recreation, private industry, and two police advisory boards) (COCO News October/November 1991). In addition, in 1994 Jamaican-American Shirley Nathan Pulliam won a seat in the Maryland State House of Representatives. Although her campaign (which I worked on) did not stress her West Indian origins, those origins were certainly not concealed (for one, she has a significant Jamaican accent). Ms. Pulliam’s political goals range broadly beyond the special needs of the West Indian community; still, that community and its reputation remain among her concerns. West Indians have responded, too, with their own media.189 Newsletters put out by Caribbean organizations, Caribbean radio programs in Washington and Baltimore, a Prince Georges County local-access cable TV show, and small and transitory newspapers have all presented West Indian perspectives. In addition, during the period of my fieldwork several media personalities in the Chesapeake region had West Indian backgrounds. These were a talk show host on Howard University’s TV station (Kojo Nnamdi/Guyanese), an anchor for Channel 9’s nightly news in D.C. (Maureen Bunyan/ArubanGuyanese), a “black”-activist radio host in Baltimore (St. George Crosse/Grenadian), and the publisher of the “black”-oriented Baltimore Times (Joy Bramble/Montserratian). Although these media personalities seldom focused on West Indians in their reporting (with


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the exception at times of Kojo Nnamdi), their personal experiences and loyalties discouraged their media outlets from disseminating inflammatory images of Caribbean peoples. Yet no matter how vocal they have or have not been in criticizing mass media, most West Indians in the Chesapeake region have actually shared basic assumptions with local journalists. UNDERLYING PREMISES IN WEST INDIAN CRITIQUES OF MASS MEDIA West Indian immigrants are true believers in the pull-yourself-up-byyour-bootstraps American Dream. My informants saw themselves as high achievers because of their good values and self-discipline; hence they did not question the common, underlying individualism of the media’s morality tales (see Gray 1995a). They rarely sought to have journalists explain socioeconomic or historical factors shaping posse members’ behaviors.190 On the contrary, like many of the participants in the “City Line” show, they preferred that media focus neither on poverty in their home countries, nor on the struggles of illegal aliens in the U.S. Their outrage was rarely over the portrayal of posse members as inhuman monsters per se; rather, they were incensed that by association they themselves or people like them were sometimes seen as monsters too. They also rarely complained that journalists underreport on structural factors hampering non-criminal immigrants’ access to the American Dream.191 West Indians’ critique of journalism could take the form of, “Why are you focusing on sensational crimes, rather than on social priorities and policies that affect a lot more people—the low minimum wage, the shoddiness of urban schools, and the lack of affordable health care for low-wage workers?”192 Instead, West Indians’ primary frustration with the media is that in a “good guy/bad guy” individualistic model of how to achieve the American Dream, people like them are too often cast as the bad guys. Sometimes they ask, as in the “City Line” TV show, why the really bad guys have not received more attention. Sometimes, when they look at the portrayal of “black” West Indians as the quintessential drug dealers, they perceive racist typecasting. But they tend to avoid arguments that racism in

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general is holding them back from success or pushing them or their compatriots into negative behaviors. In the Chesapeake region, these immigrants rarely criticize governments’ tendencies to ignore the plight of the working poor (with the notable exception of Shirley Pulliam, who made greater access to health care a major part of her political platform). Nor do they criticize the too-scarce media coverage of these issues as they pertain to West Indians.193 The typical solution of first-generation West Indian immigrants to the minimality of the minimum wage is neither to engage in activism to change government policies nor to seek wide media coverage of the problem. Their solution is to take a second job. They do not always have confidence in their abilities, as newcomers, to change U.S. society—but they do have confidence in their abilities to work hard and “make it” at an individual or family level. The biggest media threat to them, therefore, is negative coverage that might make it harder for them to obtain jobs or promotions, not media that “merely” ignore the social policies and laws diminishing the quality of their lives. CHAPTER CONCLUSION Mass media are sites of power and struggle in modern American society—nodes of conflict. Power is distributed unevenly among the contenders. Concluding his study of the rise of commercial journalism, Schiller aptly states that ... social conflicts have been disguised, contained, and displaced through the imposition of [putative] objectivity, a framework for legitimating the exercise of social power over the interpretation of reality. Those without institutionalized resources have, time and again, found themselves pilloried and marginalized in the press, while crucial issues have been amplified in such a way as to lead the general public to [support] institutional control (D. Schiller 1981:196). These effects of media power have worried West Indian immigrants— especially Jamaicans. Their drive to succeed financially, and their keen


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desires for social esteem both in the U.S. and “back home,” have led many to take the issue of media representations very seriously. Intellectual Umberto Eco once asserted that ''a nation belongs to the persons who control its communications” (cited in Landay 1995). He thus pithily summed up a preoccupation of West Indian immigrants in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Seeking greater financial and educational power over their destinies, they came to the U.S. to stake a claim to the American Dream. Deeply wanting the nation to belong to them, too, they have made tremendous sacrifices to secure their places in American society. Wise to the ways of the world, many have understood the dangers that negative media imagery about them poses. As much as possible, mass communications too must be “claimed”—or at least challenged whenever they go astray (Heyman 1998:61).


CHAPTER SEVEN

Conclusion The Dilemmas of Reputation

American social patterns have forced West Indians in the Chesapeake region—and in all areas where they have settled—to struggle with the politics of reputation. One aspect of the struggle has been their strategic194 effort to distinguish themselves on the basis of their foreign “culture” from their putative “race”-mates, the country’s AfricanAmericans. This affirmation of the “culture” concept serves to dispute notions of homogeneous and inferior “race” and to distance West Indians from the most socially demeaned minority in America.195 West Indians at times engage in such distancing from AfricanAmericans even as, at other times, the common concern with racism has become a source of unity between them and “black” Americans.196 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, most West Indian immigrants shared a related concern about negative media representations of them. They cared about the media because, not unreasonably, they feared that unflattering images of their “culture” could constrain the rise in social status that means so much to them, both transnationally and locally. When public imagery about them is harsh and unbalanced, many react with indignation and alarm. Despite the tremendous demands on their time and energy that the immigrant experience requires of them, when their ethnic reputation is sullied, many make an extra effort to defend it. They wish to have their foreignness remain an asset, not a liability. Previous scholars of West Indian immigration have tended to examine one of two aspects of these immigrants’ ethnic reputations. First, they have explored the way “race” constrains West Indians’ social status and experiences in America. The negative impact of 145

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“race” is a phenomenon virtually all scholars of the West Indian experience have observed at least to some extent (see especially Vickerman 1999 and Waters 1999). Second, some social scientists have studied the ways that West Indians’ foreign ethnicity has benefited them. The latter question has provoked controversy. SCHOLARSHIP ON THE BENEFITS OF IMMIGRANT STATUS Scholars agree that West Indian immigrants often perceive that “whites” favor them over American “blacks,” but they are divided over whether the perception is accurate. One group of scholars suggests that, overall (and with some qualifications), the perception is correct— “white” Americans do at times treat West Indians better than they treat native “black” Americans. The other group argues that West Indian immigrants are sadly mistaken to think that “whites” prefer them in any way.197 On this topic the most important work has been by Waters: she has extensively interviewed fellow “whites” about their views of West Indians and has actually documented pro-immigrant selectivity in hiring. In her study of a food-services business in New York City, she found a “marked preference [among] white managers ... for West Indians over native blacks” (1999:95). Her book quotes “white” managers who clearly and directly described their preference, while the composition of the company’s work force (90% immigrant) demonstrates that the managers’ attitude has definitely had an impact on reality. The reasons for the preference were that 1) beginning in the early 1980s, the company found virtually all new employees through the social networks of existing employees. If an employee recommended a new worker who subsequently did not work out for the company, that employee could no longer recommend new people for employment. 2) According to managers, the individuals whom immigrants recommended had pleased the company much more often than had the individuals recommended by “black” Americans. West Indian immigrants came to fill positions where the ability to speak

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English was important in dealing with the public, while nonAnglophone immigrants worked in the kitchen. 3) Specifically, managers stated that they were pleased with immigrants because their turnover rate was much lower than that of American “blacks.” They believed that “black” Americans “lacked a work ethic and the discipline to keep the jobs” (1999:118). 4) Managers felt that West Indians were more willing than American “blacks” to perform tasks that were not in their job descriptions, simply because a boss had asked them to. West Indians exhibited this prized “flexibility” despite the low pay and limited opportunities for advancement that the company afforded to entry-level workers. 5) Managers perceived that “black” Americans would not be willing to accept such low pay in the first place. By contrast, West Indian immigrants do accept the jobs and, once on the job, do not constantly complain about the pay. 6) Managers saw American “blacks” as angrier and as having more of “a sense of entitlement”—a sense of being “owed” something— than was the case generally with West Indians. As a result, the managers felt that West Indians made more cooperative workers, overall. The managers spoke of the West Indians’ having different “cultures” and “values” from those of “black” Americans. They indicated that one of their primary sources for learning about such differences was conversation with the West Indians themselves; before getting to know the West Indians, they had not realized that “blacks” could differ so much from one another (Waters 1999:120-1). Thus, the West Indians succeeded in distinguishing themselves from native “blacks” not only through their behavior, but also through their talk. They used the language of “culture” and morality, which made sense to the “white” managers. As a result, “the master status of the West Indians in the eyes of these managers for the most part was

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‘immigrant,’ and the fact of their black skin was mostly not consequential” (Waters 1999:122. Her 1996:76-7 also notes the desire of the ethnic-identified second generation to be perceived as West Indian and therefore reap the benefits of the favoritism). Waters’ findings cast doubt on the assertions of earlier scholars who either 1) directly argued that “white” Americans do not prefer West Indians to “black” Americans, or 2) simply downplayed the possibility and/or relevance of “white” favoritism.198 Some authors who make the second argument suggest that “white” racism is so strong that even if some “whites” view West Indians a tiny bit more favorably than they view American “blacks,” certainly no real socio-economic advantages ensue. By contrast, Waters’s work demonstrates that the favoritism is real and that it does affect life chances. There seems to be a partial pattern among the scholars with respect to the issue of “white” favoritism. Those arguing that West Indian perceptions of favoritism are mistaken tend to be “black” academics (M. Gordon 1983:17fn2; Sowell 1978:44; Vickerman 1991:32; Green and Wilson 1989:119; Bryce-Laporte 1973:56-9)—moreover, all except Sowell are themselves at least partly West Indian. But this stance is not universal, in that a few West Indian academics have agreed with their non-academic co-ethnics that some preferential treatment really exists (e.g. Forsythe 1976:65-6; Justus 1978:124; see also the work of African immigrant Woldemikael 1989:154,157). At same time, most of the social scientists who have argued or implied that, to some extent, “white” favoritism does exist have themselves been “white.”199 Moreover, to my knowledge no “white” researcher has argued strongly that the favoritism is a fiction, though Foner has expressed skepticism about the impact on the actual life-chances of West Indian immigrants of what she agrees are clearly favorable views among “whites” (1987c). This rough divergence between “black” West Indian academics and “white” academics might be explained as follows. Several authors argue that it is when West Indians are most upwardly mobile that they are most likely to perceive racism as being applied not only to AfricanAmericans, but also to themselves.200 This perception occurs because their upward mobility puts them in direct competition with “whites” for jobs, loans, educational opportunities, and promotions. Two of my upwardly mobile informants expressed this viewpoint.


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Moreover, among West Indians, those with advanced educations, and especially the intellectuals are among the leading advocates of black empowerment and black unity. (Often they express embarrassment at the less “progressive” attitudes displayed by many of their countrymen.) This association is reinforced by institutional ties: many Caribbean intellectuals teach in departments of African-American studies or write for African-Americanoriented publications (Kasinitz 1992:204). The idea, then, that “whites” favor West Indians over American “blacks” can seem both false to a West Indian intellectual—because of his or her experience with the job market—and offensive to a black unity political stance. This is perhaps why some West Indian academics in the U.S. have more or less dismissed their compatriots’ belief in “white” favoritism (e.g. Green and Wilson 1989:119). The position of the observer thus may have a great deal to do with what has been observed (Bourdieu 1977; R. Rosaldo 1989). The importance of the researcher’s social position is, of course, equally relevant for “white” academics. “White” scholars may be more likely to perceive some truth in the belief in “white” favoritism because of their greater knowledge of and access to “white” people’s attitudes. This certainly seems to have been the case with Waters’s research. She found that the “white” managers were much more frank with her about how they felt about both foreign and native “blacks” than they were with her “black” American research assistant (1999). The “white” academics’ viewpoint may also arise because the idea that “whites” are consistently and uniformly virulent in their racism, and unable or unwilling to distinguish among “blacks,” flies against their understanding of the current “racial” climate in the U.S.—and their understanding of themselves (see P. Cohen 1992:68-9). The “white” academics suggest that “white” attitudes are more complex than an across-the-board, predictable racism; the more varied the contact “whites” have with “blacks,” the more complex their “racial” attitudes become (see Waters 1994:817-8 and 1999).

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THE PARADOX OF IMMIGRANT STATUS Waters’s findings are compelling and complementary to mine. While she documents the positive effects on West Indians (vis-à-vis “whites”) of their foreign identity and cultural profile, I have endeavored to show that in the complex and often contradictory social field of U.S. “race” relations, foreignness can sometimes turn sour. A paradox in West Indians’ social position is that their foreignness can serve either as a partial protection against racism or as an involuntary invitation to xenophobia. Chapters Three and Five showed a clear tendency in mass media of the late 1980s and early 1990s to depict West Indian felons at a rate far out of proportion with their rate in the West Indian immigrant population. As the chapters explored, processes of sensationalism (driven by the need for profits); of anti-“black” prejudice simmering below the surface in a climate in which overtly racist portrayals of African-Americans are taboo; of “pack” journalism; of law enforcement ties with journalists; of West Indian criminals’ strategic uses of ethnicity; of “white” control over media production; of the uses of stereotypes in order to reduce financial risk in media entertainment; and of the time pressures on media producers have all contributed to this imbalance. Throughout, West Indians’ “otherness” as foreigners has been seen to be a factor in why media producers could “afford” to treat these immigrants with such frequent disrespect. The chapters have thus aimed to add a further dimension of intra-“black” difference to media studies on how “blacks” have been portrayed in America. Chapter Two explored reasons why negative media portrayals matter. American history shows us that whenever the U.S. declares war, media portrayals of minorities perceived to belong to the enemy side can take a sharply disapproving turn. The innocent can end up being demonized and hurt—as the experience of Japanese-Americans during World War II poignantly demonstrates. Whether our wars are against fascism, or drug dealers, or terrorism, Americans must find ways to protect the innocent on both sides of the conflict. One aspect of that protection are vigilantly responsible and fair-minded mass media. Media producers must resist a facile and all-too-human disposition during times of war or stress to see villains everywhere within any particular ethnic group.


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During the late 1980s and early 1990s crack epidemic, Americans’ “need” for villains became, ironically, a significant problem for West Indians; suddenly those who had been blaming another group for bad behaviors found themselves a target of blame. When publicity about the activities of Jamaican criminals threatened to tarnish the relatively good name of the entire West Indian immigrant population, West Indians became acutely aware that villain roles oversimplify and overgeneralize human behavior and can reinforce social hierarchies. Being cast in low-status roles damages people’s health and life chances. Unfortunately, simplistically blaming others in order to manage anxiety or improve one’s own social standing or self-esteem is a very common human tendency. But is it a necessary tendency? Must people play zero-sum games with social status? Why not instead make a practice of noticing human decency, dignity, and worth? ANTHROPOLOGY, MASS MEDIA, AND THE MORAL ORDER We could take our cue from Heyman’s recent vision of anthropology as “advocating societal arrangements that stimulate the human moral sense and increase the recognition of mutual personhood across social boundaries” (1998:7). In calling for more balance in law enforcement training and in journalism, I have touched on improvements in current U.S. social arrangements that would help Americans recognize the personhood they share with West Indian immigrants. Mass media could do much to help Americans walk a mile in those immigrants’ shoes; in the contemporary world, many of people’s understandings of others come through the mass-mediated imagination, rather than through direct experience (Appadurai 1990). While coming to an empathetic understanding of people through images offered by the media is rarely as transforming an experience as coming to a similar understanding through sustained personal contact, in a fragmented, mass society the media still have a valuable role to play in increasing mutual tolerance. But charity should begin at home—so I want explicitly to recognize the contributions to American society of some of the many actors who have appeared in this book. Certainly, there should be no two-dimensional villains in this study.

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While I have noted multiple constraints on their work that journalists face (capitalist competition, tight deadlines, low budgets), I have been more critical of them than of other people I have discussed. I begin, then, by pointing out the value of their efforts for U.S. society. While I believe that my criticisms have been warranted, I wish to balance my own analysis. Flawed though it certainly is, the press in the U.S. is nevertheless far more responsible, free, and genuinely informative than in many countries. I am grateful not to be subjected to totalitarian mass media, as in 1990s Serbia and North Korea, to name just two recent examples. American reporters work long hours, often for low pay, in part out of an admirable idealism. Some even risk their lives to provide the most accurate news they can to their audiences. Their efforts are not unappreciated. Reading the morning paper is one of the most important rituals of my day, and the days of many other people like me. The U.S. press has been one of my teachers in life, and not infrequently a good one. As for journalists’ relationships with law enforcement officials, it should be noted that reporters do not always write from a law enforcement point of view. Indeed, fine investigative journalism sometimes uncovers police abuses. Moreover, even when crime reporting does simply repeat a police viewpoint, that reporting can have valuable social functions. If there is a serial rapist-murderer in my neighborhood who manages to slip through seven-inch gaps in security window bars (as was actually the case nearby), I want to know. The press tells me.201 My criticisms of the press are therefore meant in a spirit of respectful engagement. Precisely because the American press does produce good reporting—and because it has so much potential to do consistently better—I have documented and reproached a sensationalist slant that hurts real people. I suppose that even sensationalism may have positive social functions: some public figures may be checked in their misbehaviors by fear of media exposure. But at least as often, I suspect, the fear of sensationalism merely makes people excessively timid, unwilling to speak freely, much less willing to show sympathy for the villain of the day—and much more secretive about their own misdeeds. More balanced journalism would help correct these problems and would protect innocent people from being prematurely


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“tried by the media.” In the interests of balance, I applaud the trend towards more nuanced and wholesome “community news” (see Chapter Three). In Chapter Three I also noted my gratitude to the law enforcement officers who endure much stress and regularly risk their lives in an effort to keep law-abiding people safe. It is not easy to be entrusted with the legitimate use of force. Law enforcers are often resented, misunderstood, threatened, and socially isolated. While it is crucial for an alert citizenry to hold law enforcers accountable for all their actions, I see no value in facilely assuming that law enforcers are powergrubbing fascists. My criticisms of law enforcement training and their “handling” of reporters are thus meant constructively. Third, I wish to highlight the social value of a group that has been indirectly disparaged in this book. Unfortunately, detailing all of African-Americans’ contributions to American society is well beyond the scope of this work. Yet I do not want to fall into the error of repeating unflattering “attributed opinions” without at least providing an explicit balancing statement of my own. After all, I have taken Washington reporters of the early 1980s to task for unreflectively repeating just such “attributed opinions.” The reader may recall that some print news reports included police slurs about the violent activities of alleged “Rastafarians”; the articles failed to place those comments in a broader context fairer to the Rastafarian community. It is important, then, to point out the value of African-American labor in making the U.S. a society whose lifestyle is the envy of the world. The capacity of “white” Americans to under-remunerate African-Americans for their labor is part of what made the “whites” among the richest populations in human history.202 As 1990 Census Bureau findings indicate, there is a significant difference in median overall wealth203 between “black” and “white” households.204 This disparity exists in part because overall wealth “reflects decades of differences in earnings, investment and the inheritance of property” (Pear 1991). “Whites” could enslave or underpay “blacks” and then take their extra profits and buy houses, shares in mutual funds, college educations, and other patrimony and socioeconomic advantages to hand down to their children. The “blacks” were left struggling to pay the rent. Even “whites” who never hired “blacks” generally benefited from

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the system.205 The best jobs, salaries, promotions, and schools were reserved for them. Yet in the midst of this injustice, African-Americans still managed to have a profound, enriching impact on American culture (Mintz 1970b:7-9; Mintz and Price 1976:14,16-7,43). Imagine the following scenes from my day: In the morning, I turn on a song with a bouncy drum beat on it for my daughter’s amusement, all the while making a peanut butter sandwich for her lunchbox. Enjoying the music, I remark to my husband, “Man, I love the way this drum and banjo play together ... Say, honey, can you drop a shirt off at the dry cleaner for me after work? It’s in my tote bag.” He answers, “Sorry—no can do. I’m giving blood today at five.” Later that morning a friend drops by. “Hey, long time no see!” I exclaim with pleasure. She complains about her boss. “Is he bad mouthing you to the secretaries again?” I ask. Still later I pick up my daughter from day care. Greeting her, I playfully demand, “Gimme five!” and with a grin she slaps her palm against mine. Finally, towards the end of the day, my husband and I watch a little TV. We are especially amused by the antics of a male AfricanAmerican comedian who pretends to be a rich, “white” elderly woman serving tea to her guests. He portrays her as so stiff in the center of her body that she must have swallowed a broom handle, and so fussy with her hands that she undermines all the genteel bodily etiquette she verbally insists on. In every one of these activities (and many more besides), I am indebted to the contributions of African-Americans to my cultural and social environment. In many of these activities, in fact, my family and I reveal our “white” American selves to be partly “black” American in culture. African-Americans have influenced “white” Americans’ cuisine (most notably by inventing peanut butter);206 our musical tastes (by inspiring the drumming that has become nearly ubiquitous in American music, as well as by creating jazz and the blues); our speech (by popularizing the vocative use of “Man,” and the vocabulary items “banjo,” “tote,” and “bad mouth”—and likely also “no can do” and “long time no see”);207 our medical procedures (the work of an AfricanAmerican doctor, Charles Drew, made common the lifesaving procedure of giving blood, which is essential to modern medical practice); our gestures (the “high five”); our sense of humor (the pleasure of parodying “whites’” stiffness and formality); our sports; our


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literature; our religion (e.g. Gospel music and call-and-response worship styles in Pentecostalism); and our dance and clothing styles.208 Because we have been so influenced by African-Americans, we demonstrate Woodward’s assertion that “so far as their culture is concerned, all Americans are part Negro” (1969:17). Accordingly, I salute my own African-American heritage and the people who gave it to me. Two more categories of people deserve praise. First, I have great respect for my fellow academics—including those with whom I have disagreements. Second, the West Indians I studied command even more of my admiration. Whenever I became weary of research and writing, I remembered their perseverance in pursuing their own goals. What inspiring people they are! In the area I find their attitudes troubling—their too often overgeneralizing statements about “black” Americans—I have tried to bear in mind that it is the racism of the social group to which I belong that has cornered them into this approach. With all this praise and empathy, how then am I advocating that we analyze social life? I am not arguing for a Pollyanna social science; we certainly ought not, like Candide’s mentor, proclaim this the best of all possible worlds. Our willingness to criticize is the first step in improving the justice and quality of life for the people around us. Thus I agree wholeheartedly with Heyman in urging that we “diagnose contexts and ideologies that weaken, restrict, or distort [the recognition of] mutual personhood” (1998:7). A focus on recognizing the value and addressing the needs of each human life must decry unjust and anti-human practices. But we must make criticisms very thoughtfully—that is, in a manner full of careful, broad, fair, and courteous thinking. On the one hand, we must insist on understanding the complexities of people and social processes as much as we possibly can; on the other, we should acknowledge that all research is limited and that we never possess the final answers—or the incontrovertible assessment of someone else’s morality. We must bear in mind that in some way or other, virtually all of us are both villains and saints, albeit in varying (and shifting) proportions. Ethnography is well suited to this task of providing balance because participant-observation enhances a deep and multifaceted grasp of people’s lives and motives.

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Both human misdeeds (e.g. the crimes of posse members) and human decency (e.g. the hard, honest work of the vast majority of West Indian immigrants) must be acknowledged—in journalism, in the arts and entertainment, in social science, in politics, and in daily life. If we focus only or disproportionately on crimes, sins, and victimhood, neglecting to celebrate people’s positive contributions to the life of our communities, we actually diminish their motivation to act decently. True, there are numerous reasons for behaving decently other than community praise—for example, the callings of religion, the desire not to pollute one’s social environment, the fear of punishment, and genuine concern for others. But explicit community approval can make a difference; indeed, any kind of attention to a phenomenon can increase its occurrence.209 Psychological and social scientific research suggest that in many areas of life, what we as a society notice shapes what we get. Our social world is far from the best of all possible ones—but it is not an unremittingly cruel world, either, and we had best pay attention to those behaviors we value as beneficial to humanity.

APPENDIX

Methods for Searching and Categorizing Print Media

DATABASES AND SOURCES CONSULTED 1.

NEXIS Levels Searched: Academic Universe (limited text searches): General News Topics/Major Newspapers General News Topics/All Magazines General News Topics/Sports News Full-text searching—General News Topics—Selected Sources: Washington Post Washington Monthly Washington Times Playboy Time Christian Science Monitor Newsweek USA Today Full-text searching—“AllNews”—for Colin Powell and Colin Ferguson searches only Key Words Searched: Barbad! AND immigra!—Academic Universe searches only West Indian AND immigra!—Academic Universe searches only Ewing (with “Jamaica OR Jamaican” in “Additional terms” field)— Academic Universe only

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Appendix Rastafarian—Washington Post full-text searching and Academic Universe searches Jamaic! AND immigra!—Selected Sources full-text searching Trinidad! AND immigra!—Selected Sources full-text searching Guyan! AND immigra!—Selected Sources full-text searching Operation Rum Punch—Selected Sources full-text searching Fredericksburg AND Jamaica!—Selected Sources full-text searching Jamaica! AND violen!—Selected Sources full-text searching Smithsonian! AND Caribbean AND festival—Selected Sources full-text searching Paradise Manor AND Jamaica!—Selected Sources full-text searching Colin Powell AND Jamaica!—“AllNews” full-text searching Colin Ferguson AND Jamaica!—“AllNews” full-text searching nanny and Baltimore—Washington Post full-text search nanny and Trinidad—Washington Post full-text search nanny and Pikesville—Washington Post full-text search reggae AND Jamaica!—most of the 281 stories found in this effort, which was a full-text search of the Washington Post only, were music reviews and were eliminated from the tallies—see below for explanation.

2.

Ethnic News Watch (online) I searched for articles containing the word “Jamaican,” specifying 1994 and earlier, with “Geographical location” as Baltimore, MD, Baltimore County, MD, Washington, DC and Annapolis, MD. I requested Englishlanguage only, and for “Ethnic Group of Pub” I selected the “African American/Caribbean/African” category. I then did the same search again, but with key words “CaribbeanAmerican,” “Caribbean-Americans,” “Caribbean-born,” and “WestIndian.” Ethnic News Watch does not track the Baltimore Times.

3.

Baltimore Sun database at Johns Hopkins University library (using key word “Jamaica”—searches for other West Indian isles yielded little about immigrants). Note: I was only able to search this database for 1992-1994. My informants gave me many clippings about West Indians from this paper for the earlier years, however. What omissions I have from the Baltimore

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Sun and Evening Sun likely skew my data towards making the press seem more kindly towards West Indians than they probably were, since I was not able to do a thorough search of these two co-owned papers for 198788. As Chapter Seven explains, 1987-88 were the years when the most negative and some of the most copious reporting on West Indians appeared in other print sources in my market. I did find some articles from the Sun for those years, but I may be missing some. The pre-1987 years are less important because reporting on West Indians was sparser then (and I do have some Sun articles from those earliest years as well). 4.

clippings informants gave me

5.

extensive personal reading of the Baltimore Sun during the time of fieldwork

6.

clippings given to me by Elissa Krauss of the National Jury Project. She searched the UMI Newspaper Abstract on disc, which covers major papers, for 1985-1992 using the keyword “Jamaica(n).” The only relevant articles her search yielded that mine did not were two from the Wall Street Journal. I included them in my tally.

DATES SEARCHED (EXCEPT WHERE OTHERWISE SPECIFIED) 01/01/80 - 12/31/94 TYPES OF ARTICLES ELIMINATED FROM TALLY (FROM ALL NUMERATORS AND DENOMINATORS) 1.

any not dealing with West Indian immigrants in the U.S. or their children (where identified as such). Thus I eliminated most international news, reports on U.S. policy towards the Caribbean, news about West Indians in Britain or Canada, and features in the “Travel” sections of newspapers.

2.

reviews of novels or film, even if these works of fiction had West IndianAmerican characters.

3.

neutral references to West Indian immigrants—e.g. in a long article about African-American poets, a comment at the end that a Jamaican immigrant asked one of the poets for his autograph.

4.

articles in which the positive and negative portrayals of West Indians were highly mixed, in about even proportions. Such articles were rare.

5.

articles mentioning non-West Indian immigrants residing in Jamaica, New York.

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Appendix

6.

reviews of albums featuring West Indian musical styles. Most of these reviews do not deal with West Indian immigrants. Many reviews of reggae albums, for example, discuss the works of artists still resident in the West Indies, or else the works of non-West Indians playing reggae music. In addition, musical reviews are somewhat technical, probably capture fewer readers’ attention than do news stories, and are much less focused on moral issues than are articles about crime. A music review does a poor job of “balancing out” a crime story. I did, however, include in my tallies (as positive) in-depth articles about West Indian musicians residing in the U.S.

7.

articles about athlete Ben Johnson, since he is a Jamaican immigrant to Canada, not the U.S. In the timeline in Chapter Seven I note some statistics about coverage of Johnson, however (see especially footnote 20). These figures were obtained through two searches of NEXIS Academic Universe. The first used the search term “Ben Johnson” and scanned the period from 1980-09/26/88, the day before the Olympic Committee announced Johnson’s positive test for steroid use. The second search used the terms “Ben Johnson AND steroid!” and scanned the period from 09/27/88 to the end of 1994.

8.

articles about famous West Indians—e.g. Patrick Ewing, Colin Powell, and Colin Ferguson—that did not mention their Caribbean origins.

METHOD FOR CATEGORIZATION I read most of the relevant articles in full. I categorized some, however, based on their headlines, on my familiarity with the events they described, and on their genre of reporting. For example, knowing that the article “Festival Lets Montgomery Enjoy Its Cultural Diversity” (Washington Post 6/15/92) included the words “Jamaica” and “immigrant” (or derivatives), I counted it as a positive portrayal without reading it. The headline is upbeat, and articles about multicultural festivals virtually always laud the groups represented. VALUE JUDGMENT IN CATEGORIZATION I counted as “negative” articles discussing crime, violence, drug dealing, or illegal drug use. I based this value judgment on my informants’ views—these were the kinds of articles they considered to represent them negatively—and on the typical U.S. morality to which my informants were responding. I deemed most of the relatively few references to dealing in marijuana to be negative. The exceptions were respectful articles which discussed marijuana as a Rastafarian sacrament—unless those articles also significantly detailed West

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Indians’ trafficking in marijuana. When articles were highly mixed in tone, I eliminated them from my tallies. I counted as “positive” articles noting accomplishments of West Indian immigrants in a wide variety of fields (including boxing, despite its violence and my personal disapproval of it). A LIMITATION OF THE DATA LEXIS/NEXIS Academic Universe lists articles provided by wire services under the names of those services (e.g. AP, UPI, Reuters). I have only sometimes been able to verify that particular news wire articles were picked up by print media in the Chesapeake region; in such cases, the articles have been included in the tallies. It is virtually certain, however, that I have inadvertently neglected some articles that were indeed picked up, because I lack clear evidence that they were published locally. For example, it is extremely likely that in 1984-5 The Washington Post published some of the many short AP and UPI articles available about boxer Livingstone Bramble; however, I cannot know how many, nor which ones—so these AP and UPI articles were not included in my tallies. The same is true of wire service articles about basketball player Patrick Ewing. Few of these reports mention his Jamaican origins, however.


Notes

1. The term “American” is used here to refer to people of the New World. The term “North American” refers to people of the United States (with apologies to the people of Canada). The term “black” (used by the author in quotation marks, and without them in this Foreword) refers to people of African origin and their descendants. The term “African American” refers to North Americans of African origin. There is no need to stress here that race is socially constructed. But it is a social construction that takes into account discernible physical variation. 2. Details of Balbir Singh’s life can be found in Whitford 2002. 3. Posting on June 11, 2002 at http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/legalinfo/ discrimupdate.htm. 4. Per the Arab American Institute website: http://www.aaiusa.org/ demographics.htm. 5. Names have been changed. 6. According to a lawyer involved in the operation’s aftermath, the police had obtained phone records of suspected drug dealers and then targeted houses the suspects had called. Of course, the police had no way of knowing whether the calls were about drugs, car pooling to festivals, or getting together to play dominoes. 7. I use the term “West Indian” as these immigrants do, to refer to people from Anglophone Caribbean countries. 8. By “Chesapeake area,” I mean Maryland, Washington D.C., and the Washington suburbs in Northern Virginia. 9. For ethnography on “reputation” in other parts of the world, see Bailey 1971 on European villages; Abu-Lughod 1986 on Bedouins in Egypt; Ortner 1989 on Sherpas; Wikan 1990 on the Balinese; and Wade 1993b on “black” Colombians. 10. Data from U.S. Department of Commerce 1990a. 11. See C. Du Bois 2000:316-323. 12. The partial exception may be Jamaican drug kingpin Vivian Blake. Kingston legend has it that he came “from good table” and went to Columbia

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Notes

University to study and play soccer, soon dropping out to sell drugs (Gunst 1995:144). Blake apparently never finished a degree. 13. Her irritation with this geographical confusion was also typical of local West Indian immigrants. Note that one of Gmelch’s Barbadian informants reported the same question (1992:197). 14. Of course, what counts as “negative” or “positive” for a reputation depends on one’s perspective. I have accorded news items the valences that my working and middle class informants invariably spoke in terms of—that violence is negative, and thus being depicted as violent is negative; that dealing drugs is likewise negative. See Appendix for further detail on my methods. 15. Actually, the number was even higher, but my lack of access to online information about articles in the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun prior to 1992 put some limits on the completeness of the data. See Appendix on my search and tallying methods. 16. On the cognitive importance of headlines, see van Dijk 1988. See also Heyman 1998:36. 17. Although the Bahamas are not technically in the Caribbean Sea, I include stories about them in this figure, since they, along with Guyana, have a British-African heritage like that of the Anglophone Caribbean islands. 18. Colin Powell’s 1995 book tour prompted much positive coverage of him, however, with his background as the son of Jamaican immigrants frequently mentioned. 19. Media reports about Patrick Ewing, Colin Powell, Colin Ferguson, and other famous and infamous individuals are only included in my tallies if the reports mentioned their Caribbean origins. 20. One could also count as positive the features on tourism in the West Indies in newspapers’ “Travel” sections; however, these features usually wax eloquent about scenery and American- or European-owned resorts, skimping on descriptions of West Indian peoples and their accomplishments. 21. Data by request from Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. For 5% of inmates no data on birthplace was available. A limitation of the data is that birthplace was determined by the inmates’ reports; hoping to avoid deportation, some foreigners falsely claim a U.S. birthplace. The total figure for foreigners may therefore be low. According to law enforcers, however, when West Indian criminals lie about their origins, they usually claim to be U.S. Virgin Islanders. My overall statistic for West Indians in Maryland prisons already includes self-proclaimed Virgin Islanders. This inclusion in fact prejudices my statistic against the West Indians somewhat, since not all the “Virgin Islanders” are actually West Indian. According to my law enforcement sources, Africans—especially Nigerians— also claim to be Virgin Islanders. Law enforcement officers in Maryland even argue that a Nigerian is more likely than a Jamaican to persist, once incarcerated, in his claim to be a Virgin Islander. Thus my inclusion of all self-

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proclaimed Virgin Islanders somewhat overestimates the percentage of incarcerated West Indians. 22. The calculation is problematic in that the numerator is 1993 data, whereas the denominator is from three years earlier. Still, the statistic serves well as a rough guide. If anything, using 1990 data for the denominator prejudices the statistic against my argument. Because of continuing Jamaican immigration to the U.S., by 1993 the Jamaican population in the Chesapeake region was almost surely larger than the 1990 data showed. A corrected, larger denominator would show the rate of Jamaican incarceration in Maryland to be even smaller than 1%. Moreover, in the interests of statistical caution, I have prejudiced the statistic against my argument in another way: I have counted all inmates claiming to be Virgin Islanders as Jamaicans. See the footnote immediately preceding this one for further explanation. 23. Unless they are naturalized citizens—which according to my law enforcement sources is rare among Jamaican criminals—Jamaican felons are generally deported upon completion of their sentences. Thus, among those not incarcerated, few are ex-offenders in a pause between crime sprees. Most Jamaicans who were not in prison during my fieldwork can reasonably be counted as law-abiding. 24. The rationale for excluding music reviews here and in the broader discussion in Chapter Three is that such reviews rarely deal with the accomplishments of West Indian immigrants. Many reviews of reggae albums, for example, discuss the works of artists still resident in the West Indies, or else the works of non-West Indians playing reggae music. In addition, music reviews are somewhat technical, probably capture the attention of fewer readers than do news stories, and are less focused on moral issues than are articles about crime. Thus a music review does not do a good job of “balancing out” a crime story. 25. The figure for the year 1993 alone is 62%. Thus, in the year for which I have demographic data about prisoners, the statistical imbalance in media reports was virtually the same as the media imbalance during the entire 19801994 period. Note that the figure excludes travel articles, for the reason mentioned in note 16. I have also excluded articles that were either neutral or mixed (showing West Indians in both positive and negative lights in about equal proportion) from all calculations. Such articles were rare. See details on my method in the Appendix. 26. At the time of my research, most of my informants had been in this country for more than five years; many had been here for decades. They were not neophytes in the American social context. Possibly West Indians minimized the effects of racism on their lives because they wished to please a “white” researcher. I often expressed surprise when they minimized racism, however, partly in an effort to see if further probing could elicit a changed response (and partly because I was actually

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surprised). My reactions did not change the way they spoke. Some scholars in fact argue that West Indians are blunt and less prone than others to modify their speech according to whom they are conversing with (see Gmelch and Gmelch 1997:216-7 fn 2; Waters 1999). Indeed, several of my informants had been criticized in the U.S. for being too outspoken about “race” relations. They felt frustrated by what they considered an American style of communication requiring them to “walk on eggshells,” as one informant put it, when dealing with controversial topics. They wanted to be able to converse frankly about their concern that racism could affect them, yet they usually did not complain that they had been seriously victimized by it, and they often expressed disdain for African-Americans who, they felt, complained too much about racism. See Vickerman 1999:91-135 for an analysis of how West Indian men in the U.S. both downplay racism and yet struggle with its realities. See C. Du Bois 2000:167-189 for a review of the literature on West Indian immigrants’ relationships with “white” Americans. 27. Waters’s recent research among second-generation West Indians in New York City suggests there are class differences in how such children form their identities (Waters 1999). It is thus important to note that the teens I interviewed were all middle class. The working class parents I spent time with happened to have children who were either adults or under 10 years of age. 28. See Stafford 1987a:150; Waters 1992:7. Waters 1999 examines African-American perspectives on the relationship between the two groups. 29. Although many West Indians resist assimilation into the AfricanAmerican community, some take an opposite approach. These immigrants and their children reject any effort to find opportunities in the “white” world, choosing instead to try to build strong “black” economic enclaves. This position insists on unity among all “blacks” in the U.S., no matter what their national origins. The position been advocated by some prominent “black” leaders of Caribbean background—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and now Louis Farrakhan. It is unclear what proportion of their followers have been West Indian immigrants. Among the West Indians I spoke with, only one advocated this position. 30. See C. Du Bois 2000:45-161. 31. For a review of the literature on this topic, see C. Du Bois 2000:189214. 32. West Indians do often cling to their accents as markers of laudable ethnic backgrounds, however. 33. West Indians may also emphasize the uniqueness of their culture when interacting with African-Americans in order to distinguish themselves, ironically, from “white” Americans. West Indians may need to distinguish themselves from “whites” because they are sometimes accused by AfricanAmericans of “acting white” (see Wade 1993b:323; Waters 1992). Emphasizing their differences from “whites” may help them to be more accepted in the African-American neighborhoods in which they often live.

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Thus by trying to be “other” than either “black” American or “white” American, West Indians may be trying get along with everyone, and to opt out of the U.S. “racial” system altogether. Indeed, several of my informants suggested that they would prefer not, given the state of “black”-“white” relations here, to get involved in Americans’ “racial” quarrels. For example, a Jamaican professional told me that whenever at his job there are discussions about “racial” problems, he says to the arguers, “It’s a domestic problem you have, and I don’t understand it. Maybe someday when I understand it, I’ll participate in these discussions.” 34. Boas 1940:191-195, 247-50; see Harris 1968:292. 35. As Baker has pointed out (1994), Boas shared this project with the more activist W.E.B. Du Bois. 36. Which physical characteristics are deemed evidence of “race” is, of course, a matter of cultural construction as well. Wade cogently argues that it is no more “natural” for a society to select skin color or hair texture as markers of “race” than it is for them to select “height, eye colour or double-jointedness of thumbs” as evidence of “race” (1993a). 37. The Civil Rights movement did have some West Indian and West Indian-American leaders, however. 38. I do not wish to suggest that the United States is on an inevitable march to a color-blind society. If there is now a crack in racist ideologies, there are also people who intensely wish to fill in that crack. There is no guarantee that “white” supremacists—or “black” separatists—will not roll back the progress toward “racial” integration that has already been made. 39. See Loewen 1988:131-4 for a theoretical discussion of how emotion and instrumentalism operate together as motivators in “race” relations (in his case in “whites’” behaviors towards “blacks”). On the intertwining of affect, instrumentalism, and ethnic identification among West Indian immigrants, see Basch 1987b:161; and Kasinitz 1992:251. On affect and instrumentalism among West Indian immigrants more generally, see Bryce-Laporte 1987:523,61. On the high instrumentalism towards the U.S. among West Indian immigrants, see Vickerman 1999:74 and Justus 1976:139. 40. See C. Du Bois 2000 for a detailed account of my research methods and informants’ characteristics. 41. A few preferred to think of themselves as “brown.” Two other informants, of highly mixed background (East Indian/Chinese/African in one case, and East Indian/Chinese/African/Portuguese/Amer-Indian in another), preferred simply to think of themselves as “mixed.” Some “brown” and “mixed” individuals identified themselves as “black” in contexts in which that might be advantageous, however—for instance, in seeking financial assistance for schooling, or in speaking with an African-American researcher from the Anacostia Museum.

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42. My casual dress and residence in an apartment in a poor neighborhood may have suggested to some of my informants that I have more of a “middle” middle class background. 43. In the interest of avoiding cumbersome prose, when I write “island” the reader should mentally include Guyana as well. 44. See Waters 1994 on how this observation may not entirely hold for the working class and “underclass.” 45. West Indians often use the word “Caribbean” to mean “Englishspeaking Caribbean.” Thus, although many of the West Indians’ organizations and events are labeled “Caribbean,” they do not usually include individuals or artistic forms from non-Anglophone countries. 46. See Foner 1983 on West Indian Seventh Day Adventists in New York City. 47. For details about this nanny agency and its impact on the region, see C. Du Bois 2000:324-343. 48. Wilson found, however, that older men often focused more on “respectability” and less on “reputation” than in their youth. 49. I heard such concerns from male informants of various social classes and ages (including teens); not all were religious people. They were, of course, partly responding to negative images of “black” males—particularly foreign “black” males—in the U.S. 50. Yet, at other times during my research, West Indian men used the word “reputation” to signify positive, Christian qualities that they claimed for themselves and valued. Note that this latter use of the word “reputation” conflicts with the word’s meaning as Wilson understood it. As I have already pointed out, my informants used the word “reputation” to discuss multiple types of status issues. 51. Of course, Wilson may never have intended for these concepts to be generalized to West Indians overseas. 52. Although Wilson describes “reputation” as a reaction to “respectability” and therefore historically dependent on the presence of respectability for its development, he also envisions a future West Indies in which people embrace “reputation” without respectability. Such a scenario implies that “reputation” is now an independent, self-sustaining value system. 53. One of my Rastafarian informants contends that for this reason, it is nonsense to assert that Rastafarians aim to overthrow the government of Jamaica. “No Rastafarian wants Jamaica,” he said. “Africa is our home.” Another Rastafarian similarly described the OCC training manual’s accusation to me as “completely ludicrous.” 54. One of my informants, and another for the Anacostia Museum, stated that a Rastafarian in dreadlocks unfortunately resembles the mythical “black heart man,” a bogeyman whom Jamaican parents invoke to frighten their children into obedience. The appearance of a Rastaman thus can arouse a

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visceral fear in Jamaicans, bringing back troubled memories from childhood (see Gmelch and Gmelch 1997:114 on this myth in Barbados). 55. Since I have only praise for this girl and since she gave her address in a public forum, I have used her real name. 56. In Chapter One I recounted one woman’s justifiable belief that OCC itself was discriminatory (although in-depth study suggests that police incompetence and naiveté also played major roles). Later in that chapter I noted the frustration of some West Indians with apparent “profiling” practices among highway law enforcement and airport Customs agents. 57. Signorelli and Gerbner (1988) note several studies supporting the hypothesis that people do not distinguish between media and reality, as well as several supporting the opposite claim—that is, that people’s views of reality are not dictated by mass media. 58. Van Dijk found that people recall negative media representations of minority groups somewhat better than positive representations of those same groups (1987:329-331,336). For a review of the psychological literature suggesting that people find images with upsetting emotional content easier to remember than upbeat images, see B. Reeves et al. 1991. 59. For a powerful history of stereotyping—including media representations—and its detrimental impact on an African people, see R. Gordon 1992. 60. A desire to send money back home to loved ones in the Caribbean was also a powerful motivation. 61. A middle-class Jamaican woman told an interviewer for the Anacostia Museum a very similar story to that of Grace Henry’s grandmother. In the case of the Jamaican, the person who ruined the family’s finances was the woman’s wayward (and now ex-) husband. 62. Gmelch writes, “I have ... heard of students who went abroad [from Barbados] to earn a college degree but dropped out or were dismissed for poor grades and then remained overseas to avoid the shame of returning home a failure” (1992:309fn.6). This was not the case, however, with Dr. Bogle, who excelled and became a professor at Howard University (she requested use of her real name in this book). 63. A stark example of stereotypes’ power to change neighborhood life is “blockbusting.” Baxandall and Ewen document the blockbusting and “racial steering” of real estate agents in a Long Island community in the 1960s. The agents used scare tactics to induce “white flight.” They would, for example, inform “white” families that because “blacks” were moving in nearby, “The value of your house is dropping $1000 a month.” Or they would comment, “You have a twelve-year-old daughter. What if she were raped? You’d have a mulatto grandchild” (Baxandall and Ewen 1996:104-107). Within 15 years, a town that had been 80% “white” had become 80% “black,” and the real estate agents had made many handsome commissions.

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64. Wade argues that internalization of negative stereotypes motivates some Colombian “blacks” to have children with lighter-skinned people (1993b:239252,295-313). These individuals wish to “whiten” censured traits out of the next generation through selective mating. 65. By contrast, Carter’s Senegalese informants in Italy did (1997:165). 66. Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and 17 francophone countries in Africa were all experiencing pushes toward democracy at the time of my conversation with this informant. On African democratization in the early 1990s, see Dyer 1991. On media coverage of Africa during this period, see Issue 1994. 67. See Thune 1977 on how the telling and re-telling of one’s own life history shapes behavior. See Chamberlain 1998 on how membership in a family with a recurring migration history can affect the sense of self. 68. A well-to-do Jamaican woman aptly remarked to me about Jamaican drug dealers in the U.S., “They too have a dream.” 69. “Black” and “white” students were compared after adjustments were made for differences in their prior SAT scores. 70. Similarly, a 1999 study examined effects of the popular notion in the U.S. that women are not skilled in math. The researchers found that women who were subtly reminded of the stereotype prior to taking a math test did significantly worse than women who were not. This was the case even for women who did not consciously believe the stereotype (Brown and Josephs 1999; Vedantam 1999). Parallel research indicates that positive imagery can enhance performance. A child who sees himself on videotape succeeding at a specific task—even when the images are false constructs—can feel so encouraged and instructed that actual skills in the task significantly improve. See Collins 1997 and Dowrick 1999. 71. Cortés 1993:61,67-8; di Leonardo 1984:29,185-189; Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:235. 72. Studies of the health and social rank of other primates suggest that the association between low social status and unhealthy levels of stress hormones in the blood is part of primates’ biological make up. In one study, individual monkeys of high social rank were transferred to different communities of monkeys where they lost status; their pulses and the fat in their arteries increased significantly. See Lardner 1998:26A. 73. That the experience of being bossed causes the stress is one interpretation. A second interpretation is that envy is the main stressor—that more unequal societies excite “a preoccupation with material pleasures, money and status, and aggravat[e] feelings of anxiety and inferiority that eat away at people” (Lardner 1998:26A). 74. Conversely, anthropologists now sometimes use quantitative methods or literary analysis (see, e.g. Ortner 1991; Field 1999); they write theory and history; and they no longer shun study of their own societies. 75. Appadurai 1990, 1991; Hannerz 1992.

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76. Commercial audience research via surveys and focus groups is also a cumbersome feedback mechanism. Anyway, media producers sometimes disbelieve or ignore the findings of audience research (Gans 1979:231-4; Turow 1984:55). 77. Under certain conditions, however, small societies with face-to-face gossip can also succumb to pernicious and too-long unchallenged exaggerations. In U.S. history, the Salem witch trials are a prime example of the dangers of gossip run wild. 78. Qualitative audience research is a relatively young subfield within academic media studies. See Lull 1990:7-10,13-17,146-7; F. Ginsburg 1994:56. 79. The Guide to Research on Race and News (2000) by the Missouri School of Journalism provides annotated bibliographies of scholarship on this topic, both from journals and books. 80. Note that West Indians were very rarely covered in most news media prior to 1980. 81. See van Dijk 1987:44 and C. Campbell 1995:7,21 on the invisibility of minorities in mass media, and Bryce-Laporte 1972 on the special invisibility of “black” immigrants. 82. Gans 1979 discusses journalists’ dependence on government sources. 83. The Census is widely considered to have undercounted “blacks” and undocumented immigrants. See Anderson and Fienberg 2000. 84. Decades earlier, print media in major U.S. cities dropped written references to suspects’ “race” (Higham 1997a:10). Only during social disturbances, such as the 1960s riots (Higham 1997a:16), or whenever police sought a known, fugitive criminal, was mention of a suspect’s “race” deemed pertinent. The 1987 Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual declared “race” germane to a story (and therefore acceptable to include) if the article was about “a person sought in a manhunt.” By 1992, however, the stylebook had dropped even the statement about manhunts from the entry under “race.” 85. Elissa Krauss of the National Jury Project performed similar searches for an affidavit on behalf of a Jamaican accused of drug and violent offenses in the U.S. The affidavit argued that the man should not be tried in the Philadelphia region due to prejudicial media coverage of Jamaicans there. Krauss found that with the exception of Colombians, no foreign group had been as maligned by the Philadelphia press between the years 1985 and 1992 as Jamaicans. Although Krauss’s search methods and criteria for inclusion or exclusion of articles differed somewhat from mine, our overall statistical findings are compatible. See Krauss 1993. 86. For more on the reasoning behind this estimate, see note 42, which counts criminals who have not yet been convicted. 87. Schiller has argued that, ironically, the American journalistic ethic of “objectivity” arose among crime reporters in the penny press of the 1830s (D. Schiller 1981).

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88. Surely many more than 1,300,000 people were reached, since many newspapers were delivered to multi-person households. The number of extra readers probably more than offset any overlap in readership among papers (i.e., the extra readers easily offset any inadvertent “double counting” of readers in the original figure). 89. Gunst, who is pro-PNP, suggests that it was JLP henchmen who controlled Jamaica’s cocaine trade in 1980 (1995:41-2,117). She deemphasizes the early arrival in the U.S. of PNP criminals. Her descriptions of particular “posses” suggest, however, that PNP-allied groups did arrive in the U.S. first (see pp. 10,42,185). 90. Media reports about Patrick Ewing, Colin Powell, Colin Ferguson, and other famous and infamous individuals are only included in my tallies if the reports mentioned their Caribbean origins. 91. See Appendix for information on how articles about Bramble were tallied. 92. In 1987 there are also many positive articles about Canadian track star Ben Johnson which mention his Jamaican origins. Indeed, from January 1984 to September 26, 1988, The Washington Post printed 52 articles that were favorable to Johnson. From September 27, 1988 to the end of 1994, however, there would be 127 negative articles about this same man because of his use of steroids. Neither the positive nor the negative articles have been included in the overall tallies, since they deal with an immigrant to Canada, rather than the U.S. (see Appendix for my tallying methods). The Ben Johnson scandal was also extensively reported on TV. 93. Based on the U.S. population of Jamaicans from the 1990 Census. 94. Limited database searches of transcripts for NPR (radio) and CNN (cable TV) suggest coverage of West Indians similar to that of other media. 95. Arguably, I too engaged in sensationalism—or at least, dramatic narrative—in opening this book with an account of Operation Caribbean Cruise. In so doing I gave my academic readers what they generally expect to hear from an anthropologist—a tale about a mistreated minority. I did this not falsely—and indeed, in accordance with my informants’ priorities—but nevertheless with a writer’s craft and intent to capture the reader’s interest. Thus I am partly sympathetic to journalists’ efforts to engage their readers by telling good stories. Anthropologists would do well to learn from journalists about how to reach broad audiences (our writing has been described as “surprisingly boring”—Pratt 1986:33). At the same time, however, I have endeavored to provide far more historical background, actors’ viewpoints, and in-depth analysis than journalists generally do. Of course, I have had far more time and space in which to do so! Yet news organizations could to some extent address such issues if their editors, and especially the CEOs who control their budgets, would allow reporters to take more journalistic risks, spend more time on their stories, seek out more unusual sources, and specialize in specific topics (see Downie and Kaiser 2002). Feature reporters sometimes present more

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balanced analyses than crime reporters; surely lessons can be learned from this disparity. 96. Ironically, Flynn argues that governments are too silent about dangerous, qualitative changes in the worldwide drug trade since the late 1980s. Such changes include drug cartels’ development of sophisticated market research, transportation, distribution, finance, intelligence gathering, and security systems (Flynn 1996), along with the spread of their influence into many developing and ex-Soviet countries. Since journalists rely heavily on government sources (Gans 1979), mass media too have failed to examine these issues in depth. Instead the focus remains on sudden bursts of violence—the tip of the iceberg. Similarly, Glassner contends that disproportionate media focus on statistically uncommon but frightening phenomena distracts Americans from truly important concerns facing the country (1999). He argues that officials from a wide variety of U.S. institutions contribute to this media distraction. 97. On how audience research has shaped the format of local TV newscasts (thus apparently giving the people what they want), see Turow 1984:160. 98. D. Schiller 1981:1; Bird and Dardenne 1988; Appadurai 1990:9; Lull and Hinerman 1997. 99. Twice during my fieldwork I attended presentations, free and open to the public, given by Chesapeake-area media personalities. At both during the question and answer period, female audience members over 50 years old made vigorous protests against the prevalence of crime reporting on local TV. At one of the two forums, the media representative even asked, “Who likes the current amount of crime reporting?” Most younger people raised their hands. She added, “Who doesn’t?” Most older people in turn raised their hands. 100. The most notable exception occurs when an adult (of any background) kills a child. Then journalists produce highly sympathetic and often in-depth reports about the victim. Journalists also discuss victims of high-profile crimes, although stories about victims or their families are usually eclipsed by the sheer quantity of stories about the crime, police work, and trial. Sometimes, of course, the relative obscurity of victims is at their request. 101. We might add that “black” males are especially dreaded (Glassner 1999); hence West Indian men may be even more sensitive than their womenfolk to negative media stereotypes. Certainly Hollywood films portray West Indian males far more negatively than the females. Yet I did not detect significant gender differences in West Indians’ complaints about mass media. West Indian immigrant women rise up in defense of their men. 102. See Ross 1996:xxi on “whites’” projection of their concerns onto “blacks.” 103. There is actually a strong trend in mass media entertainment towards affirmative action in the representation of American “blacks.” AfricanAmericans are among the least likely “racial” or ethnic groups in TV entertainment to commit a murder; between 1960 and 1990, “blacks on

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television [were] about eighteen times less likely to commit homicide than in real life” (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991:198). Gray (1995b) helps to explain the flowering of positive portrayals of “blacks” in TV entertainment by noting that in the competitive TV climate of the 1980s, producers began paying more attention to the viewing preferences of “black” Americans. Research had indicated that American “blacks” watch considerably more TV, on average, than “whites” (Gray 1995b:67). 104. See Turow 1984:149-186 on media producers’ strategies for coping with risk. Ironically, using stereotypes can reduce risk (see below)—but only if advocacy groups are not poised to attack those stereotypes. 105. On the inclusion of African-Americans in Euro-Americans’ “moral community”— as people who in very real ways are now considered “our own”—see Patterson 1997:17-18. 106. See Heyman 1998:39 on contemporary Americans’ perception of a link between crime and immigration. 107. On the impact of Hollywood on Jamaican drug dealers, see Gunst 1995: xv-xvi, xxi-xxii,112,210-11; Ellis 1991:237-240; and the 1972 film, “The Harder They Come.” 108. An ATF officer told me that the CIA used to supply guns to notorious Jamaican hit man (and later drug dealer) Lester Coke. He said they gave Coke guns to facilitate violent agitation against the PNP Manley government. See Gunst 1995:xvii-xviii,18,42-3. 109. Defined as serious property and violent crimes; the figure excludes drug offenses. Unfortunately, Headley does not compare rates for drug offenses between Jamaica and the U.S. 110. The Weekly Journal 1994 describes research at American University in Washington that came to similar conclusions. 111. A home video the INS allowed me to see suggests the attitudes of these criminals. The tape, seized during a drug raid in 1992, shows young Jamaican males posing in action shots with huge weapons, suitable for war. One man points his enormous, knife-tipped gun at the camera and menaces, “Pop, pop, pop!” He dances with the gun. Another man appears to load his weapon. The cameraman exclaims, “No, no, no!” but later adds, “Yes, warrior!” The videotape is rather playful in tone, which almost makes it more disturbing for the non-criminal viewer. 112. Some were members of the “Shower posse,” which was not Rastafarian (Gunst 1995:134-5,143; see also Kasinitz 1992:81,84). 113. See Signorelli and Gerbner 1988 for an annotated list of studies supporting this assertion. On the history of press-police relations, see D. Schiller 1981. 114. On the creation of public fears about “crack” cocaine by reporters, law enforcement officials, and especially politicians, see Reinarman and Levine 1995.

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115. He asserted that this was even more true of the ATF in the years after the bungled raid in Waco, Texas in 1993. 116. Since the Waco disaster of 1993 they have stopped doing so. 117. In 1992, Brown died in a mysterious fire in his maximum-security cell in Kingston, one day before his last possible appeal against extradition was to have been heard in the Jamaican Supreme Court (Adams 1992). 118. A knowledgeable informant asserted that Operation Caribbean Cruise was compromised in part by the D.C. police department’s order for 500 doughnuts on the morning of the operation! 119. A well-informed federal agent in Baltimore told me, however, that in 1986-7 there were some genuinely religious Rastafarians dealing cocaine in northwest Baltimore. She added that religious Rastafarians are no longer dealing drugs in the area. 120. The 1990 U.S. Census recorded 12,054 Marylanders of Jamaican birth. This number excludes most of the state’s undocumented Jamaicans; undocumented immigrants rarely fill out census forms. Many informants told me that the Census figures for West Indians were too low; I was generally told to double them. Still, if we take the low Census figure at face value, and if we posit the number of Jamaican drug dealers in Maryland to be in the high hundreds—say, 800—the proportion of the state’s Jamaicans who were not drug dealers in the early 1990s was still 93%. If we use the more likely figure of 20,000 Jamaican-born residents of Maryland as the denominator, then 96% of them were not involved in dealing drugs. 121. The officer’s father had worked with an American lawyer to bring the women up from Jamaica. The officer stated that the women had pre-existing ties to Baltimore. They were never involved with Baltimore’s illegal nannyimporting business. 122. See also Lyman 1989. At the time of publication, Lyman was a faculty member at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Law Enforcement Training Institute. His chapter on Jamaican crime is shorter and less emotionally charged than the ATF booklet but still fails to put that crime in the overall context of West Indian immigration to the U.S. 123. An ATF official told me that his agency gleans information disseminated at the conference partly from the NEXIS database of U.S. journalism. (This is the same database I used to analyze Chesapeake-area coverage of West Indians—see Appendix.) Thus law enforcement officers influence journalists, whose reports in turn become a repository of information for law enforcers. 124. Devotion borne of material largesse is also why an estimated 40,000 poor people in Kingston attended the funeral of Mark Coke, son of Florida’s Jamaican drug dealer Lester Coke (Adams 1992; Gunst 1995:237-8). 125. Information from the Drug Enforcement Agency (personal interview). 126. The leader of the JBM, “Jamaican Jay,” has a Jamaican mother and Nigerian father. He had birth certificates from both countries and a British

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passport under a different name, although apparently he never lived in Britain. His criminal associates were all Nigerians or all Jamaicans, depending on which law enforcement source one talks to. Thus the INS told me that all the records they pulled on this organization dealt with Nigerians, whereas a Baltimore Housing Authority Police detective on the case told me that the top echelon was all Jamaican, and the street-level workers African-American. All agree that the organization sold drugs from Nigeria, marketed them in a modified Jamaican style, and used the Jamaican underworld’s modes of violence. There are many aspects of the operation that remain unclear to law enforcement—for example, the shipment route(s) for the heroin. Jamaican Jay sent and received numerous Federal Express packages to and from Jamaica. In 1992 Jamaican Jay was paralyzed in a shoot-out with police. In 1993 he and three associates were convicted on RICO charges for murder and drug dealing. Jamaican Jay was sentenced to multiple life sentences with no chance of parole (Myers 1993,1994). 127. There is a difficulty here with terminology. Is a person who committed a crime necessarily a “criminal”? What about someone who committed many crimes but has turned his life around? I use the term to refer to career felons. I cannot know whether, by this criterion, any of the men at the Wicomico facility were “criminals”—but likely many were. In any case, I had not intended for the prisoners to see my letter requesting an interview with a “criminal.” I had used that word to emphasize to my law enforcement contacts that I was not interested in interviewing someone who was merely an illegal alien. 128. A 1988 Washington Post article quoted a Jamaican whom law enforcement officials said was a hit man for local posses (02/23/88). This man complained to the Post that Jamaicans are unfairly stereotyped because of the actions of a few violent people. 129. My law enforcement sources tell me, however, that in recent years Jamaican criminals have tried to blend into the African-American population to evade police detection. 130. High-profile people, such as top government officials, also have their views disseminated—but they are sometimes subject to severe media criticisms, too. 131. These unclear, sensationalist headlines were likely written by editors less familiar with the story matter than the reporters. The headline writer at the Baltimore Sun might protest that “U.S.” in the phrase “U.S. prison system” refers only to federal prisons, but it is doubtful that a reader without a law enforcement background would grasp the subtlety. My doctor friend (and his lawyer friend) missed it. 132. 90% of state inmates in 1991 were felons. 46.6% of state inmates had committed violent crimes; 21.3% were convicted of drug offenses (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics 1993:4,7). Similar data from 1993 for federal prisons (1991 data was not available) reveals, by contrast, 97.5% of sentenced federal inmates were felons, but only 30.9% had a history of violence. Over 50% of the federal

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prisoners were convicted of drug offenses (Federal Bureau of Prisons, personal communication). Thus it appears that federal prisons house more felons (and more drug-related offenders) than state prisons but fewer violent offenders. 133. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics 1993:1; Federal Bureau of Prisons 1993. The federal figure includes only sentenced prisoners. Note that by definition, all state prisoners have already been sentenced (those still awaiting trial or sentencing are held in jails, pending transfer to a state prison). 134. See Federal Bureau of Prisons 1993. Careful examination of a 1992 report by the INS yields a similar statistic of 7%. See Immigration and Naturalization Service 1992:15. 135. Per the Federal Bureau of Prisons, phone conversation 12/3/93. Per the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (1993:2), state prisoners “account for about 17% of the total adult correctional population. These inmates have usually committed the most serious offenses or have the most extensive criminal records.” In other words, a thorough statistical analysis of alien crime in the U.S. would include data on adults in local jails, on probation, or paroled, as well as on juvenile offenders. This data is elusive, however. 136. U.S. Department of Commerce 1993:2,9. According to census data, in 1990 foreign-born Americans, including naturalized citizens, made up 7.9% of the total U.S. population. 137. It is also unlikely that naturalized citizens are more responsible for crime than native-born Americans. On the contrary, individuals seeking naturalization must show “good moral character” (Boswell and Carrasco 1992:643). For three to five years prior to naturalization (the timing depends on whether or not the person is married to an American), the applicant must be clear of criminal records for drug offenses, fraud, theft, deliberate violence, money laundering, habitual drunkenness, professional gambling, and polygamy (Merritt 1993:83). 138. In federal prisons, 31% of non-citizen inmates in late 1993 came from Mexico; Colombians and Cubans were the next largest groups (Cubans in part due to the Mariel boat lift). Five percent of the non-citizens were Jamaicans; adding in other West Indian criminals, the percentage of alien inmates who were from the English-speaking Caribbean was just under 8% (data by request from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, December 1993.) 139. Data by request from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, December 1993. 140. In 1991 Jamaicans were the 6th largest national group whose citizens the Drug Enforcement Administration reports arresting for cocaine violations (by far the largest national group was U.S. citizens). Yet Jamaicans made up a mere 1% of the cocaine arrests. Adding in the Trinidadians and Bahamians arrested by the DEA, the figure rises to 2% for the West Indies. Two percent is also the statistic for the DEA's West Indian marijuana arrests (Drug Enforcement Administration 1992). The ATF reports in a fact sheet that from 1988 through 1991, their work led to court cases against 770 Jamaican defendants. Although these 770

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individuals and their accomplices do appear to have had a significant impact on certain drug markets, it must be borne in mind that they, along with the DEA arrests, represent less than 0.3% of the individuals of Jamaican origin counted in the 1990 U.S. Census (U.S. Department of Commerce 1990a). 141. On the organization of the advertising industry, see Turow 1984. 142. Although we were discussing heterosexual ads, he hinted that he was most disgusted by gay sex on the beach. 143. See Patterson 1998 on this imagery for “blacks” in general. 144. June 7, 1995, p. 54. 145. Reggae has been a Grammy category since 1984. 146. Roylance 1993 addresses the way this nostalgia affects the work of Customs officers dealing with West Indians at points of entry into the U.S. A “black” passenger from an Air Jamaica flight landing at Baltimore-Washington International Airport is quoted as protesting that “I think they search blacks more than whites.” The article continues: “‘Actually, she was right,’ admitted Chief Inspector Will Somers ... Although the three passengers searched before Ms. Taylor were white, blacks on Air Jamaica flights do get close attention, he said. But inspectors say it’s chiefly because of their eating habits, not their race. More frequently than any other group, the inspectors say, Jamaicans and their family members [including American-born children] carry their island cuisine with them—especially mangoes, yams, sugar cane, thyme and fresh meats. They’re prohibited items because they often carry a variety of agricultural pests.” 147. In-depth works examining the depiction of African-Americans include Bogle 1988; MacDonald 1992; Dates and Barlow 1993; Turner 1994; Gray 1995b; Ross 1996; Kennedy 2000; and Bogle 2001. These are complemented by works examining representations of other ethnic and religious minorities (and sometimes also African-Americans): Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991; Noriega 1992; Toplin 1993; Rodríguez 1997; Kamalipour and Carilli 1998; and Torres 1998. There is also a considerable body of research on media portrayals of minorities in Britain. See the discussions in Ross 1996, Cottle 1997, and Law 2002. 148. Notable exceptions to this pandering to viewers’ stereotypes are the disproportionately positive depiction of African-Americans in TV fiction (Lichter, Lichter, and Rothman 1991; DeMott 1995) and the eschewing of negative portrayals of homosexuals (Turow 1984:92-4,170). 149. Dates and Barlow 1993a; Bogle 1994; L. Anderson 1997; Rodríguez 1997. 150. Actually Poitier’s education stopped short of college. While he was more educated than most “blacks” and many “whites” in mid-20th century America, he was by no means a well-educated man when he began his acting career. He explains in his autobiography that a Jewish fellow restaurant worker in New York first taught him elegant vocabulary and an appreciation for diction (Poitier 1980).

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151. Examples of this elite African-American accent are those of Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) and more recently, Belafonte in “White Man’s Burden” (1995). See Poitier 1980:338. 152. One should bear in mind that, for all their limitations, these were positive, trailblazing roles for “blacks” in U.S. cinema. See Poitier 1980 on criticisms of his career and his response. Later in their careers, both Poitier and Belafonte have worked on films for African-American audiences. Poitier has acted in, directed, and produced “black”-oriented films, and Belafonte has played in two directed by Poitier (Poitier 1980; VideoHound’s 1997). 153. For productions with Sullivan Walker, see Boothe 1993 and www.tvtome.com. For productions in which Geoffrey Holder, Delroy Lindo, Carl Lumbly, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Lorraine Toussaint have played AfricanAmericans, see VideoHound’s 1997. 154. For example, he perceives the heroine of “Wide Sargasso Sea” to be, perhaps, mulatta, whereas I see no evidence in the film that she is anything but “white.” Vickerman also appears to agree with the narrator that his story shows the island of Jamaica itself as a corrupting force, whereas I interpret this perception to be one of the shortcomings and rationalizations of that character. I see the film as subtly indicting social systems that buy and sell human beings —whether slaves, indentured laborers, or brides. It is such social systems—to which the character who blames the island milieu is a significant contributor— that ultimately lead to so many misfortunes. On most other points about this film, however, Vickerman and I are in agreement. 155. His list is fuller than mine in that I omit films dealing with Haiti, since it is not an Anglophone country, and I focus only on films with West Indian characters, whereas Vickerman lists ones with West Indian scenery alone (e.g. “Eve and the Merman”). In addition, in a few cases I was unable to obtain films on Vickerman’s list because they were too old and insufficiently popular to be available on tape, even at video rental outlets that specialize in hard-to-get movies (e.g. “A High Wind in Jamaica,” “The Little Ones,” “The Truth about Spring”); I was reluctant to include them without having seen their contents. In other ways, however, my compilation is more complete than his. 156. Many of the films appearing on this list without annotations are annotated in C. Du Bois 2000:573-581. 157. All listed productions began as cinema films unless TV is specified. 158. “The Cosby Show” is discussed in MacDonald 1992; Dates and Barlow 1993a; Turner 1994; Gray 1995b; and Bogle 2001. 159. This is the ceremony that my informant, Ras Basil, spelled “niahbinghy.” See below. 160. For a broader analysis of this show, see Gray 1995b, Schulman 1995, and Bogle 2001:276-380. 161. For these business figures, see Exhibitor Relations 1990 and the Internet Movie Database 1999.

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162. Per Ferguson 1998:235, this film grossed $47.62 million. 163. See the review of this film in Ferguson 1998:114-118. 164. See the analysis of this film in Ferguson 1998:224-230,234-6. Per Ferguson, the film grossed $16.64 million (1998:235). 165. Brodber’s novel Myal, set in Jamaica and Baltimore, explores how representation of Caribbean people as laughable, exotic buffoons is a form of exploitation that can wreak psychological damage (1988). None of my informants complained, however, about the clownishness of West Indians in films such as “Cool Runnings.” They seemed content to see any kind of noncriminal West Indian characters. 166. I have included characters whose deeds are generally deemed felonies in the U.S., including violence, extortion, political corruption, and the dealing of marijuana (but not its mere possession)—even when the characters do not commit their deeds on U.S. soil. Thus a character who commits a rape or murder on a Caribbean island is counted as a felon in this statistic, whether or not the Caribbean nation has an exact legal designation of “felon.” 167. “Ras” is one of several terms of address used among Rastafarians. For other such terms, see Homiak 1985. 168. Plaza’s West Indian informants in Toronto described owning a small business as “freedom”—especially as freedom from discrimination in the workplace (1998:256). 169. Portes and Rumbaut (1990:90-1) classify Jamaicans as an entrepreneurial immigrant group. By contrast, after reviewing the literature and 1990 U.S. Census data, Vickerman concludes that the high rate of entrepreneurship among West Indian Americans is a myth (1999:63-7,77). He further argues that West Indians are not even particularly attracted to entrepreneurship (1999:65), and that when they are, Trinidadians are more likely to own businesses than Jamaicans. The discrepancy between Vickerman’s conclusions and my informants’ assertions (as well as Portes and Rumbaut’s classification) may reflect 1) differences between Chesapeake-area Jamaicans and Jamaicans in other regions, and/or 2) errors in the Census data (perhaps Jamaicans often preferred not to report their businesses), and/or 3) differences between the realities of insufficient start-up capital and Jamaicans’ aspirations to go into business for themselves. That these aspirations are real is confirmed by Carl Stone’s finding that middle-aged Jamaicans list owning a small business as their preferred occupation (see discussion in Austin 1984:218-9). 170. This is Ras Basil’s preferred spelling. 171. Ras Basil also noted the importance in the West Indies of the Boboshanti Rastafarians, whom he described as “living apart” from the rest of society and “monastic” in their asceticism (but not asexual—they do have families). There is no Boboshanti community in the Chesapeake region. On the Boboshanti, see Homiak 1985; Chevannes 1994.

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172. Orthodox Rastafarianism posits that Haile Selassie did not actually die; therefore no successor is needed. 173. Ras Basil explained that some Rastafarians eat meat (though never pork), but that in his estimation vegetarianism is an expression of deeper commitment to the faith. 174. Afro-West Indians have long fought unfair treatment in the United States, in a wide variety of ways. During the Revolutionary period, Prince Hall labored for abolition and education for “blacks.” In the 1820s, Denmark Vesey conspired to lead a slave revolt. During the 1870s and ‘80s, lawyer Robert Elliott participated in Southern Reconstructionist politics. West Indian political activism continued in the 20th century (see James 1998). In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey headed a major movement among West Indian immigrants and “black” Americans that furiously rejected association with “whites.” In addition, Peter Ottley and Cleveland Robinson organized labor unions. During the Civil Rights Movement, first- and second-generation West Indians Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Roy Innis played significant roles. In the present, Louis Farrakhan has taken Garvey’s mantle as the major advocate of “black” separatism (see Chapter Two; Watkins-Owens 1996; H. Hall 1976:58-9; H. Hall 1996:23-4; Nash 1993; and Kasinitz 1992:185). 175. The first “black” newspaper in the U.S. was also founded by a West Indian immigrant. Jamaican John Russwurm co-founded the Freedom Journal in 1827 (H. Hall 1976:27). On the history of West Indians’ “black”-oriented journalism in New York City, see Watkins-Owens 1996:158-163,174-5; Kasinitz 1992:51. 176. Exactly how the vision is doubled depends on an immigrant’s social positions. For example, to an impoverished Jamaican, the U.S. can represent a world of new economic and status opportunities for “blacks,” while to a middle or upper-class Jamaican, the U.S. can represent an arena for enhanced educational opportunities yet restricted social esteem. Expanding on W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument about the “double” perspectives of African-Americans, one might even state that Afro-West Indian immigrants have triple cultural vision. They are, like “black” Americans, split by conflicts between their senses of “blackness” and (over time) their “Americanness” (W. Du Bois 1903). To this split they also bring prior cultural identities from their islands of origin. See Clifford 1994:311. 177. Per Francis-Jackson 1995:56, the word means “a Jamaican residing overseas.” Per Douglass 1992:121, the word simply means “Jamaican” and is used by wealthy Jamaicans resident on the isle to refer to themselves. In Britain—at least in law enforcement circles— “Yardie” specifically means a Jamaican outlaw (Gunst1995:136). 178. Jamaican-American teenagers in Waters’s study “said most people thought of drug dealers when they thought about Jamaicans” (1994:812). 179. See Bonnett 1990b:158 and Kasinitz 1992:82.

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180. On the responses of other groups to offensive media imagery, see Turow 1984:91-93 (re “black” Americans and homosexuals); Glick Schiller et al. 1987:176-8 (re Haitian immigrants); and Farmer 1992:208-228 (also re Haitian immigrants). 181. Ironically, Farmer reports that at the height of the early AIDS scare, Haitian immigrants sometimes found it a step up in social respectability to pretend they were Jamaicans (1992:216). 182. Some Jamaicans also told me that they are aggressive. They did not mean the word as negatively as the non-Jamaicans did. Based on the context of informants’ statements and the synonyms they spontaneously used, for most non-Jamaicans “aggressive” meant that Jamaicans are pushy, demanding, hostile, or violent, whereas for the Jamaicans it meant that they are assertive, bold, not easily victimized, sometimes admittedly a bit pushy, and determined. 183. The maroons of Jamaicans were escaped slaves who formed independent societies in the hills and at times went to war with the plantation society below. 184. Ironically, an Afro-St. Lucian told me that this Trinidadian informant is himself “aggressive,” which the St. Lucian attributed to arrogance that the Trinidadian man allegedly derives from his part-East Indian heritage. The St. Lucian felt that East Indians in the Caribbean look down on “blacks.” Yet if this Trinidadian was proud of his East Indian heritage, he never showed it to me. He seemed reluctant, in fact, to speak about why his daughter had relatively straight hair. On the other hand, I agree with the St. Lucian man that this Trinidadian is an assertive person—but so, too, in my estimation, is the St. Lucian himself! Thus accusations of “aggressiveness” abound in the West Indian community; they are often attributed to ethnic or island differences. 185. At this fascinating meeting, the Filipina spoke extensively about the victimization of Asian-Americans, thus countering the stereotype of the successful and conquering Asian; the Rabbi hastened to state that 10% of American Jews live at or below the poverty line, thus countering the stereotype of the rich Jew; and the Chamber of Commerce representative protested against the assumption that her organization is made up of WASP males, thus dissociating business interests from “white” dominance. 186. This organization is affiliated with the PNP and should not be confused with the JLP, the Jamaica Labour Party. 187. Kasinitz notes similar arguments among West Indians in New York (1992:248). 188. For a critique of the media emphasis on “retail” violence rather than on the “wholesale,” state-supported violence of war, including civil wars in the Third World in which the U.S. has intervened financially and with military advisors, see Parenti 1996. 189. On the history of West Indian-oriented journalism in Harlem, see Watkins-Owens 1996:158,160. On the contemporary West Indian press in New York City, see Kasinitz 1992:54,70-3,168,184.

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190. Scholar/journalist Gunst does a superb job of setting posse members’ behaviors in social, economic, and political context (1995). Her work is exceptional, however. Only a few of her fellow journalists have provided such context. 191. My only informants who did criticize the media in this way were two radical intellectuals and two nannies. Although the nannies complained that American images of West Indians like them ignore the social and economic problems they face, actually Chesapeake-area journalism has been somewhat sympathetic to overworked nannies. 192. See Glassner 1999. 193. On the contrary, some informants criticized policies such as the availability of welfare or, in one Trinidadian-American teen’s view, the overly cushy accommodations in U.S. prisons. Moreover, when I asked one workingclass Jamaican what he thought I should write my book about, he immediately replied that he favors deporting fellow Jamaicans who sell drugs in the U.S. He thought the government’s right to deport would be a fine topic. Thus, not infrequently my informants expressed law-and-order views and rejected policies that they felt coddled individuals. 194. I do not wish to suggest, however, that West Indians are more “twofaced” in their interactions than are other peoples. Situational shifts in selfpresentation are a human universal (e.g., see Nagata 1974 and Vincent 1974 on situational ethnic identities). 195. Here I am referring primarily to the first generation of immigrants, although in certain contexts many in the second generation also distance themselves from African-Americans. 196. For a review of the literature on West Indians’ complex relationships with “black” Americans, see C. Du Bois 2000:189-221. 197. Only one author, M. Gordon, contends that West Indians do not even perceive that their foreign status grants them any special privileges with “whites” as compared to African-Americans (1979:v,218; 1983:17). 198. Bryce-Laporte 1973:56-9—but see caveat on p. 60; M. Gordon 1983:17fn.2; Green and Wilson 1989:119; Vickerman 1991:32. 199. Sutton 1973; Lowenthal 1978; Stafford 1987b; Kasinitz 1992; and Waters 1999. 200. M. Gordon 1979; McLaughlin 1981:176; Foner 1985:718, 1987a:22; Bonnett 1990b:153,156,158; Vickerman 1991:317; Vickerman 1999:124; Kasinitz 1992:110,204. 201. I do not, however, need the frequency and repetitiveness of typical reporting on sensational cases. And no matter what the topic, I do need reporting that places events in their broader contexts. 202. Quarles argues that the labor of African-American slaves had even broader historical significance: “Negroes on the plantations of the South produced the staple—cotton—to which the Industrial Revolution owed so much of its explosive world-wide influence” (1964:7).

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203. Wealth in such analyses is defined as the value of “savings and checking accounts, real estate, automobiles, stocks and bonds and other assets, minus debts”; it does not include the value of pension plans, jewelry, and home furnishings (Pear 1991). 204. The census found a ten-fold difference in median wealth between all “white” households and all “black” households. In every “racial” and ethnic group, however, households headed by married couples were generally much wealthier than households lacking married couples. Only 35% of “black” households were headed by married couples, compared to 60% of “white” households (Pear 1991). Yet when one considers only households headed by married couples, the disparity in wealth was still three-and-a-half-fold between “whites” and “blacks.” The difference between “blacks” and “whites” in median incomes was two-fold. 205. Some “whites” may have been displaced from specific job markets by cheap “black” labor, however. Certainly “whites” feared this eventuality and therefore supported restrictions on the kinds of jobs “blacks” could hold. 206. See also Mintz 1970a on Southern “creole” cooking. 207. See Bolton 1982:326. 208. It is not infrequently charged that such borrowings among “white” Americans are merely demeaning parodies or thefts of “black” American culture. While “white” Americans certainly do have a long history of mocking “black” American life styles (see Gubar 1997) and of appropriating their labor and creativity without permission or remuneration, I do not believe that such borrowings are necessarily a negative aspect of “black”/“white” relations. Many of the “whites’” borrowings are quite unconscious; they do not even realize that they have borrowed (as is usually the case with cultural diffusion, given enough time). In such cases, imitation is, arguably, the sincerest form of flattery. 209. For example, media attention to mass murders can encourage troubled individuals to copy the crimes—they crave the infamy of the perpetrators they see repeatedly on TV and in newspapers (Mondics 1999; see also Surette 1998:114-154); likewise media attention to teen suicides may encourage further suicides (Mondics 1999); teacher attention to particular behaviors in the classroom—even if only to scold—often spurs children to repeat those behaviors; consumer attention to advertisements prompts advertising agencies to continue particular campaigns and factories to produce more of the touted item; and viewer attention to TV shows determines whether they will be continued or canceled.

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Index

COCO See : Council of Caribbean Organizations community news, 59, 153 Cortés, Carlos, 108 Cosby Show, 20, 112, 117 Council of Caribbean Organizations, 129, 130, 135, 136, 139, 140 Crown Heights, 7, 59 culture, 15, 17– 22, 24, 25, 74, 93, 101– 105, 127, 145, 147, 154 Dates, Jannette, 108 distancing behaviors, 16–18, 130– 39 drugs (illegal), 1–3, 5, 8, 9, 13, 32, 37, 39–41, 62–65, 67– 69, 74–76, 79, 84–86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 97, 105, 109, 114–17, 119–123, 130, 131, 133–139, 141, 150, 151 embassies, 4, 9, 28, 130, 135, 138 Entman, Robert, 9, 39, 57–59, 71, 73, 100, 107 ethnicity, 3, 7, 14–16, 18, 21, 22, 24–26, 30, 32, 33, 38, 39, 41, 46, 48, 49, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59–61, 64, 65, 70, 72, 82, 83, 85– 87, 92, 97, 108, 109, 132, 133, 140, 145, 146, 148, 150 Ewing, Patrick, 64–67, 69 Ferguson, Colin, 6, 69, 122

accents (in speech), 4, 5, 38, 69, 90, 101, 109, 114, 116, 119, 121, 129, 132, 133, 140 advertising, 11, 99–104 Africa, 14, 31, 47, 48, 75, 125 African-Americans contributions to American life, 74, 153–55 media treatment of, 73–74, 100, 105–6, 121 rejection of West Indians, 5, 16, 132 solidarity with West Indians, 135–39, 145 West Indian distancing from, 16–19 Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Bureau of, 13, 60, 67, 75, 79–82, 85–87, 89, 121, 137 Alterman, Eric, 12 Aronson, Joshua, 49 ATF See : Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Bureau of Belafonte, Harry, 68, 108, 109 Beriss, David, 18 Bryce–Laporte, Roy, 21, 32, 61, 148 Butsch, Richard, 50, 106, 107 Campbell, Christopher, 57, 73, 94, 97 carnival, 26, 29, 40, 46, 67 class, 19, 20, 24, 27, 31, 39, 40, 50, 108, 124, 128, 132– 134

203

204 Fernandez–Kelly, M. Patricia, 48, 49 Foner, Nancy, 3, 17, 18, 25, 32, 33, 148 food and ethnicity, 10, 24, 25 and nostalgia, 25, 102–3 gangs See : posses Gans, Herbert, 53, 54, 58, 59, 77, 94 gender, 29–31, 108, 109, 134 Goldberg, Bernard, 12 Gray, Herman, 57, 59, 73, 74, 105–07, 109, 122, 141 Gunst, Laurie, 9, 13, 64, 75, 76, 79, 80, 87–89 Gutiérrez, Félix, 39, 40, 57, 99 Headley, Bernard, 64, 67, 75, 86 Heyman, Josiah, 54, 78, 143, 151, 155 Howard University, 4, 27, 28, 123, 140 Jamaicans discrimination against, 1–3, 6, 11–12, 21, 22, 37–38, 45, 61, 66, 86–87, 129 response to media by, 132– 39 violence by, 6, 8–9, 39, 62, 64, 66–69, 74, 76, 80, 83, 88, 130, 138 Jhally, Sut, 20 Kasinitz, Philip, 24, 28, 32, 40, 87, 132, 149 Lewis, Justin, 20 Lichter, S. Robert and Linda, 39, 50, 54, 56, 72, 73, 107, 120, 121 Long Island Railroad massacre, 5, 6, 9, 62, 69, 122 mammies, 99, 105, 109, 112, 113 Marley, Bob, 64, 69, 110 Marmot, Michael, 51, 52 Martindale, Carolyn, 58 Mintz, Sidney, 154

Index Miss Cleo, 101 music, 10, 11, 24, 26, 64, 68, 69, 100, 101, 103, 110, 113–16, 124, 129, 132, 154 nannies, 6, 28, 42, 43, 68, 69, 85, 109, 112 O’Barr, William, 99, 100 OCC See : Operation Caribbean Cruise occult, the, 101, 102, 117–19, 122 Operation Caribbean Cruise, 1–3, 13, 37, 38, 63, 66–68, 76, 124, 138, 139 Operation Rum Punch, 79–81 pack journalism, 14, 76–77, 92 Poitier, Sidney, 109, 110 police/law enforcement, 1–3, 5, 7, 11, 13–15, 23, 37, 38, 60, 64–66, 70, 72–74, 76–87, 89–92, 95, 96, 115, 120–22, 129, 134– 140, 150–153 posses, 5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 22, 23, 40, 64, 67, 68, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 85–89, 121, 128, 132–135, 137, 139, 141, 156 Powell, Colin, 20, 21, 41, 59, 66– 70 prisons, 11, 47, 69, 90, 91, 95–96, 115 racism, 14, 15, 17, 19–21, 32, 39, 73, 74, 108, 109, 135, 136, 138, 141, 145, 146, 148–50, 155 Rastafarians, 2–3, 27, 31, 32, 37, 64–66, 68, 78, 82, 90, 101, 103, 111, 113–16, 119, 121, 123–25, 153

Index reputation, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14–16, 21–24, 29–32, 34, 37, 38, 41–45, 49, 55, 56, 59, 60, 63, 70, 81, 87, 89, 92, 124, 133, 139, 140, 145 respectability, 29, 31, 34, 55, 59, 87, 90–92, 97, 133, 135, 141 Rojecki, Andrew, 9, 39, 57–59, 71, 73, 100, 107 Rothman, Stanley, 39, 50, 55, 56, 72, 73, 107, 120, 121 Rumbaut, Rubén, 133 Schauffler, Richard, 48, 49 Schiller, Dan, 32, 42, 54, 74, 142 self–esteem, 4, 22, 46–49, 51, 136, 151 sensationalism, 2, 12–14, 54, 55, 67, 71–72, 81, 91, 94, 95, 98, 127, 136, 141, 150, 152 Seventh Day Adventists, 27, 34 sexuality, 29, 71, 88, 100, 108, 117–18, 122 silence of media, 7, 21, 58–61

205 Steele, Claude, 49 stereotypes, 1–5, 9, 10, 33, 40, 45, 46, 48, 49, 53, 56, 67, 105, 106–23, 130–31, 137, 150, 151 transnationalism, 4, 6, 32, 41–45, 102, 103, 145 Trouillot, Rolph, 61 Turner, Patricia, 33, 100, 105 Turow, Joseph, 56, 77, 93, 106, 107, 121 values, 17–19, 23 van Dijk, Teun, 39, 57, 62, 83, 97 Vickerman, Milton, 15, 16, 24, 32, 33, 110, 111, 146, 148 Walcott, Derek, 10, 68, 69 war on drugs, 13, 153–55 See also: drugs (illegal) Waters, Mary, 16–22, 25, 32, 133, 146–50 "white" favoritism, 21, 146–49 Wilson, Clint, 39, 40, 57, 99 Wilson, Peter, 29–31 xenophobia, 14, 21, 22, 74, 98, 109, 150

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