Insights gleaned from Journal articles and Questions Raised as a Result
1/The article, Americas, Sociocultural Overviews: Caribbean, by Karen FogOlwig, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Second edition) 2015, pages 638-643, presents the idea that migration is a defining trait or characteristic of Caribbean societies, perhaps moreso than for other national groups. She states that "…a large number of studies (see Slocum and Thomas, 2003) have documented the key role of migration in Caribbean culture and society. ...research has demonstrated that migration is an integral aspect of Caribbean societies.
"They have shown that most people do not view migration as a means of leaving home with the intent to settle in another place, but rather as a resource that makes it possible for them to explore various opportunities abroad and enjoy social mobility, while remaining part of their Caribbean home community of origin. They therefore generally migrate with the intent to return, and many send considerable remittances to relatives in their community of origin, visit as often as possible, and even invest in homes of their own in the Caribbean. "
She thus notes that Caribbean migrants choose migration primarily for socioeconomic advantage, while they foster and nurture ties to their places of origin to maintain their sense of self-worth in the face of racism in new lands:
"Thus, the great variability of domestic units to be found in the Caribbean should be seen within the context of the extensive networks of relations that link migrants engaged in wage employment abroad with their parents, siblings, and children in the family home in the local community. While some migrants do not succeed at supporting this family – including their own children left behind – many do and continue to be regarded as key members of the family home even if they live and work in distant destinations. This close relationship between migration and family relations has led Karen Fog Olwig (2007) to suggest that migration – despite the often prolonged physical absence that it involves – is an important way of doing family relations within the context of global systems of social and economic inequality. Thus trans-local family relations constitute not only key resources of economic support and social status for relatives left behind but also vital sources of identification and belonging for many migrants who may experience marginalization as ethnic minorities in the receiving societies. "
"…In several studies, Glick Schiller and associates (Glick Schiller et al., 1992; Basch et al., 1994; Glick Schiller and Fouron, 2001) have argued, for example, that a key motivation for maintaining ties to the Caribbean is the rejection of the position as racialized others that Caribbean immigrants tend to be given in the bottom of the American ethnic hierarchy. Thus, many migrants not only actively sustain family relations across national borders but become involved in transnational sociocultural systems linked to ethnic organizations that can act as pressure groups in the receiving as well as the sending society. This has led many scholars to reconceptualize migrants as diasporas, population groups that remain oriented toward a distant homeland."
The records show that Althea McNish maintained her ties with Trinidad and Tobago throughout her life and also formed a Caribbean artists group in England. Olwig also makes a fascinating point about the importance of family land back home to migrants overseas that is relevant to Althea, whose family belonged to the Merikins and so would have received 16 acres of land in Trinidad's southeast when they settled there after the 1812 war.
Olwig states as follows: "Family land can be seen to proffer a similar symbolic resource of import to migrants. As a form of land holding that allows the descendants of the original owner of the property to share land in common, it thus offers an (in principle) inalienable place of belonging in the Caribbean for migrants and their descendants (Besson, 2011).
"This does not mean that it is unproblematic for Caribbean societies to be so strongly oriented toward migration. From a local point of view, the institution of family land, for example, can be viewed as a problematic form of land ownership that makes it difficult to earn a living on the land and therefore leads to underuse of local resources."
This raises in my mind a possible question to pose when conducting interviews with family members, namely, what role did her family's inheritance of land as one of the Merikins play in Althea's life?
I am also led to wonder if this consciousness of being a landowner contributed to Althea's self-confidence when negotiating her place in UK society.
2/ The Introduction: "Cultural Racism" in Colonial Caribbean Migrants in Core Zones of the Capitalist World-Economy. Vol. 22, 1999, also raises interesting questions that I might pose to those who knew Althea.
In that article, it mentions the following:
"Caribbean colonial populations migrated to the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, and the United States after the Second World War. These migrations have many processes in common (Grosfoguel, 1997). First, they were part of a colonial labor migration to supply cheap labor in core zones during the postwar expansion of the capitalist world-economy. Secondly, they migrated as citizens of the métropole. Thirdly, they had a long colonial/racist history with the core. Fourthly, with the contraction of the capitalist world-economy after 1973, first and second generation Caribbean colonial migrants began to be excluded from the labor market. Fifthly, they have been the target of the new racist discourses that attempt to keep them in a subordinated position within the core zones by using cultural racist discourse."
The article goes on to explain that Great Britain was very hostile in its reception to blacks from the Caribbean and there was a keen desire from as early as the 1940s to pass legislation to prevent such migration. However, for various political reasons, such legislation was not passed for many years. From my own following of the news, I know that legislation reached its tragic culmination under Theresa May, in the 2000s, who instituted a horrific policy that saw persecution of hundreds of thousands of descendants of black Caribbean migrants who were legally resident in Great Britain (otherwise known as the Windrush generation). They were denied all their rights as legal migrants, leading to some losing their homes, losing all access to health care, and some eventually dying or being deported to the Caribbean where they knew no one. The UK government is now making a half-hearted attempt to compensate those harmed, while May has indicated she feels no regrets whatsoever over her policy's effects.
But of particular interest is the article's reference to "cultural racist discourse" and what that might have meant for Althea.
"In this kind of racism the word race is usually not even used. Cultural racism assumes that the metropolitan culture is different from ethnic minorities' culture but understood in an absolutist, essentialist sense, that is, "we are so different that we cannot get along together," "minorities are unemployed or living under poverty because of their cultural values and behavior," or "minorities belong to a different culture that does not understand the cultural norms of our country." Nevertheless, cultural racism is always related to a notion of biological racism to the extent that the culture of groups is naturalized in terms of some notion of inferior versus superior nature. Cultural racism is articulated in relation to poverty, labor market opportunities, and/or marginalization. The problem with the poverty or unemployment of minorities is constructed as a problem of habits or beliefs, that is, a cultural problem, implying cultural inferiority and naturalizing/ fixing/ essentializing culture. Culture of poverty arguments fit very well with the new cultural racist formation. Puerto Ricans in the United States and West Indians in Great Britain were among the first groups to be racialized along these lines. The classic studies arguing for a culture of poverty used Puerto Ricans as an example (Lewis, 1966). The way cultural racism is developed in each metropole differs according to the diverse nation formations and colonial experiences. Thus, the nation's foundational myths are crucial in how this new racism is articulated
"…. After the 1964 Civil Rights amendment to the United States Constitution, it became politically difficult to continue articulating a racist discourse based on traditional biological reductionism. In Great Britain this form of racist discourse was not problematized until the 1960's antiracist struggles of West Indians and South Asians and the subsequent approval of laws against racial discrimination such as the 1968 Race Relations Bill. Discrimination on the basis of biological racist discourses became criminalized. As a result, racist discourses shifted and acquired new forms and meanings. Cultural racism became the dominant, discourse about race in France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States. It is the central racial discourse in today's global colonial/racial formation."
The italicization and bold highlights are mine, because the timing of the shift to cultural inferiority as the dominant narrative for racism coincides with Althea's becoming "a founding member of the Caribbean Artists Movement, active between 1966 and 1972" (RCA website).
So this leads me to wonder if the founding of the group and Althea's participation in it stemmed from an awareness among Caribbean black migrants that such a shift had taken place in racist discourses and so the group's founders saw the need to reassert their equality as human beings by emphasizing the strengths of their own culture. So that will be one of the questions I will seek to explore with interviewees from among her peers in England.
A curator featured in a podcast I discovered in my research (featured on my blog) said Althea said she never experienced racial discrimination. Is that so? Why did she feel the need to be not just a member but a founding member of the Caribbean Artists Movement? Perhaps there is some sort of internal conflict going on here that might be worth exploring.
This article makes the observation about migrants who achieve acceptance and better paying jobs, etc: "Those who belong are imagined to share values with, and behave as, White middle classes." That certainly seems to describe Althea, or did it? To what extent did she share those values and to what extent did she reject them as a black Caribbean woman? Was she perhaps very adept at balancing the demands of a racist society and her loyalties to her own people?
I would like to find out when I interview a spokesperson from her family. The McNish Foundation, who manage her estate, have promised to cooperate with me by granting interviews, etc.
3/ The final article I wish to reflect on is titled, Ethnic density effects on health and experienced racism among Caribbean people in the US and England: A cross-national comparison, in the Social Science and Medicine Volume 75, Issue 12, December 2012, pages 2107-2115.
No, I am not investigating Althea's health, but the article makes an important point, quoted here:
"The bulk of Caribbean migration to the US happened in the post-civil rights era (Portes & Grosfoguel, 1994) and currently, one of the characteristics of the Caribbean people in the US is their extraordinary success, not only in relation to other black groups, but in American society more generally (Cohen, 1992). Consistent with this, Caribbean American people are often stereotyped as hard workers (Waters, 1999). In contrast, stereotypes for Caribbean English people include being lazy, aggressive, rude, and using drugs (CRE, 1998). In fact, the broad experience of Caribbean migrants to England has been markedly less positive, experiencing unacknowledged wartime loyalty and treated as an unwelcome problem rather than as valued citizens of the Empire and the Commonwealth (Cohen, 1992), a situation reflected in their disadvantaged socioeconomic position. Two distinct and contextually specific constructions of Caribbean racialised identities appear to have been determined by the differing environments of migrant reception in the US and in England."
As mentioned in Suzanne Model's work, whose book on West Indian migrants to the US is discussed briefly in another page on this blog, Caribbean migrants to the US have generally been viewed as paragons of virtue and success. It is interesting to note that, on the other hand, Caribbean migrants to the UK have been viewed as failures. Althea was a migrant to the UK, not the US, which makes me wonder about why her life story turned out differently from so many of her peers. Of course, realistically, there have been several successful black Caribbean migrants to the UK. But was there a common thread among the successful ones that allowed them to buck the prevailing trend of "failed" black Caribbean migrants to the UK? An interesting side question to explore, once I have the time.
It should be noted, finally, that this work also points out that as Caribbean migrants move into later generations in the US, they too become victims of the same type of negative stereotyping and racism long experienced by Caribbean blacks in the UK.