Shades of consciousness: From Jamaica to the UK

Abstract

I argue that the manner in which we locate ourselves as African or black people, within an inherited racist continuum that equates whiteness with human and blackness with inhuman, must be considered in any conversation about the role shadism (Shadism is a form of racism toward dark skin color. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/04/racism-skin-colour-shades-prejudice?newsfeed=true) plays in our psychological make-up. This requires interrogating how we ourselves as Africans include or exclude people based on phenotype, to ascertain what historical role we play in perpetuating our own psychological oppression for the white supremacist cause. This chapter will feature examples from Jamaica and the United Kingdom to demonstrate why we need an updated approach to determine what it means to be African and black in the twenty-first century.