[Christine M. Du Bois, Sidney W. Mintz] Images of )

The New Americans
Recent Immigration and American Society

Edited by
Steven J. Gold and Rubén G. Rumbaut

A Series from LFB Scholarly

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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

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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

vii

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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

ix

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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

xii

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

xiv

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

xvi

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

xviii

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

2

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

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

3

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

4

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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,

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

5

“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

6

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.

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

7

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.

8

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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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9

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

10

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

11

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

13

“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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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.

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

15

“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

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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.

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

17

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

18

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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,

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

19

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.

20

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

21

“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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

23

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

24

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

25

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

26

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

27

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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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29

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'

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

31

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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”

A Police Raid and the Research Problems It Revealed

33

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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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35

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.

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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

38

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

Why Media Representations Matter

39

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

40

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

Why Media Representations Matter

41

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.

42

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

Why Media Representations Matter

43

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.

Why Media Representations Matter

45

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

46

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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.

Why Media Representations Matter

47

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

48

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

Why Media Representations Matter

49

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

Why Media Representations Matter

51

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

Why Media Representations Matter

53

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

54

Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

Why Media Representations Matter

55

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

West Indians in Print and Television News

59

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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.

West Indians in Print and Television News

61

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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,”

West Indians in Print and Television News

63

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

West Indians in Print and Television News

65

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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.

West Indians in Print and Television News

67

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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73

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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75

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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77

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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81

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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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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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 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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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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“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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[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.

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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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[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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131

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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137

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).

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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
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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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147

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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149

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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.

Conclusion: The Dilemmas of Reputation

151

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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Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media

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

Conclusion: The Dilemmas of Reputation

153

“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

Conclusion: The Dilemmas of Reputation

155

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

157

158

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

Appendix

159

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.

160

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

Appendix

161

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.

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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

163

164

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-

Notes

165

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

166

Notes

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.

Notes

167

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.

168

Notes

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

Notes

169

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.

170

Notes

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.

Notes

171

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).

172

Notes

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

Notes

173

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

174

Notes

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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175

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

176

Notes

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

Notes

177

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

178

Notes

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).

Notes

179

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.

180

Notes

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.

Notes

181

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.

182

Notes

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.

Notes

183

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).

184

Notes

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