Racism In Jamaica

I am Jonathan Blackwell and I was born in 1870 in Great Britain. I was born into a bourgeois family in London and my father owned two factories. From a young age I was groomed by my family and my social group to become a capitalist. Therefore when I went to one of the best boarding schools in the country and went on to Oxford. However, one day as I was walking to one of my classes while in college a man handed me a pamphlet about the exploitation of factory workers in London by the wealthy capitalists and elites. This writing interested me so much that I felt the need to look further into it and that led me to join a club called The Young Socialists of Oxford where I learned more about socialism and communism to my parents distress. The ideology …show more content…
I took a job as an office clerk, and whenever I was not working I would attempt to interview and observe the oppressed. Of course the ardent racism that the peoples of Jamaica face by the plantation owning gentry is no surprise to me today, but when I first arrived in Jamaica I still had a paternalistic view toward the negroes and mulattoes of Jamaica. I believed in the propaganda that we were fed in England that we were helping the peoples of Jamaica and had their best interests in mind “ London 's non-interfering trust in local paternalism proved disastrous for post-emancipation, racially tense West Indian societies” (Smith). The absentee gentry left behind a bourgeois class of managers to maintain their estates, and these managers did not care for the welfare of the negro population at all. While the negroes had been given the right to vote the property requirements needed to vote made it so that very few voted which caused a small group of oligarchs to control the colonies politics “out of a population of 350,000 blacks, 81,000 colored, and 13,000 whites, only 1,903 names were on the voting register, and only 1,457 persons had exercised the right to vote” (Smith). While religion is the opiate of the masses it is also important to stress the religious differences between the blacks of Jamaica and the whites, because the negro …show more content…
I found it very interesting that in India the treatment of the subjects was the best out of all of the colonies that I had visited. One of the factors that probably tapered the officials repression was the fact that they did not view the Indians to be as inferior as the African populations that they governed. In fact a bourgeois class of Indians are employed all over the empire including in Sierra Leone “ The British practice of indirect rule sought to create an Indian elite that would serve British interests” (Cole & Symes). What likely prompted the hands off approach that the Indian government is taking is the Sepoy rebellion that happened decades prior to this which at least led to the dissolution of the East India Company “After the mutiny the British were compelled to reorganize their Indian empire” (Cole & Symes). One thing in India that is very similar to the other colonies is the exploitation of peasant laborers in order to gain cheap raw