Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

e here (or there) now 81
respectable, lower-middle-class Jamaican family. When I went back home
at the end of the 50s, my mother, who was very classically of that class
and culture, said to me, “I hope they don’t think you’re an immigrant over
there!” I had never thought of myself as an immigrant! And now I thought,
well actually, I guess that’s what I am. I migrated just at that moment.
When she hailed me, when she said, “Hello immigrant,” she asked me to
refuse it and in the moment of refusal—like almost everything my mother
ever asked me to do—I said, “That’s who I am! I’m an immigrant.” And I
thought at last, I’ve come into my real self. 5
And then, at the end of the 60s and the early 70s, somebody said to me
“These things are going on in the political world—I suppose you’re really
Black.” Well, I’d never thought of myself as Black, either! And I’ll tell you
something, nobody in Jamaica ever did. Until the 1970s, that entire population
experienced themselves as all sorts of other things, but they never
called themselves Black. And in that sense, Black has a history as an identity
that is partly politically formed. It’s not the color of your skin. It’s not
given in nature.
Another example: at that very moment I said to my son, who is the result
of a mixed marriage, “You’re Black.” “No,” he said, “I’m brown.” “You
don’t understand what I’m saying! You’re looking to the wrong signifi er!
I’m not talking about what color you are. People are all sorts of colors. The
question is whether you are culturally, historically, politically Black. That’s
who you are.”
The Other
So experience belies the notion that identifi cation happens once and for
all—life is not like that. It goes on changing and part of what is changing is
not the nucleus of the “real you” inside, it is history that’s changing. History
changes your conception of yourself. Thus, another critical thing about
identity is that it is partly the relationship between you and the Other. Only
when there is an Other can you know who you are. To discover that fact
is to discover and unlock the whole enormous history of nationalism and
of racism. Racism is a structure of discourse and representation that tries
to expel the Other symbolically—blot it out, put it over there in the Third
World, at the margin.
The English are racist not because they hate the Blacks but because they
don’t know who they are without the Blacks. They have to know who they
are not in order to know who they are. And the English language is absolutely
replete with things that the English are not. They are not Black, they