Letter to the Caribbean Diaspora from LANDS’ Turtle Island Unit
José Martí went to the US to find Cubans to fund the revolution. It is said that Marcus Garvey came to the US seeking funding for an educational project similar to the establishment of Tuskegee University in Alabama by Booker T. Washington. Today, much of the Caribbean diaspora emigrated not just to make a better life for themselves but also to support their families back home. As many have come to realize however, that better life does not include racial justice & evading brutality at the hands of those employed to protect the state.
Our existence has been criminalized in our homelands as well as in the US. Therefore, our cry for society to value Black lives cannot be restricted to the US borders. We must recognize that there is a direct connection between the militarization of our homelands and the brutality of policing that we are opposing in the US. As we are all enraged by the murders of George Floyd & Breonna Taylor by US police departments, we have to channel some of that energy into condemning the overall system that enables the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) to murder Susan Bogle and the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) to murder Germaine Ferguson with immunity.
Policing in the US and in Jamaica both evolved out of anti-Blackness and an apparent need to control the Black population. The Jamaica Constabulary Force was formed in response to the Morant Bay Rebellion, a direct clash between Black liberation and white supremacy, while Slave Patrols in the Southern US evolved into racist police departments that continue to terrorize our communities today. The mask peels away as you begin to assess the role that police departments play in our society - whose rights do they protect, and whose rights do they subjugate? Black & brown working classes are policed heaviest in the US, Black and brown working classes in the Global South policed the heaviest on the global scale.
Police brutality in Jamaica is an extension of US imperialism. Perhaps, our mobilization against this issue locally has been spared by the fact that we recognize that the powers that be are external and working-class Jamaicans have little influence in changing this global order. The diaspora has a role to play by connecting the struggle that is part of our experience from birth in the homelands, and continues to be our experience in Brampton or Flat Bush. The US Police Force is armed and trained in the same ways as the Jamaican police. Weapons supplied by the same gun manufacturers, cooperation and deployment of the same dehumanizing, racist tactics that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have mastered in recent decades.
As the centre of the global economy, the treatment of Black people in the US is reflective of how Black people are treated globally in social and political spheres. We recognize that our communities are the most vulnerable within the US, whether the crisis is created by a pandemic or the institutional structures of racism. Caribbean people work in great numbers as essential workers, as caregivers, as medical professionals in the USA and in the UK. The racist capitalist response to coronavirus by the US state has killed many of our people. At the same time we witnessed the shamefaced bullying and theft of Caribbean nations’ ventilators and critical public health equipment during this global pandemic; the continued the Blockade against Cuba; the sanctions against Venezuela; and the coordination and support of military right wing coup regimes in our region continues to kill many more in our homelands.
The diaspora must maintain an anti-imperialism relationship with our homelands, encourage diasporic contributions and denounce imperialist contributions. The people of our homelands have clarity on abolition and self-determination from which we must learn. The historic examples of the Cuban Revolution and the fight to end Apartheid in South Africa understood that any challenge to slavery and imperialism requires a transnational front.
The duality of our experience of constant criminalization means that our cry for racial justice must echo through the streets of Kingston, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos & Gaza. As we chant to “disarm, defund and dismantle the police” across US cities, we must demand that there be a dismantling of the military state in Jamaica enabled by the designations of Zones of Special Operation (ZOSO) or States of Emergency (SOEs). We must call for a Jamaica, Caribbean and a world that is free of US militarism, racist violence and looting from Black working-class communities. We must call for the end to the US and Israeli funding and training of the police and military in our homelands. A world in which Black Lives Matter calls for the end to imperialism & military occupation disguised as cooperative military bases.
This is a press release by the Turtle Island At-Large Unit, in particular which represents the members of LANDS who live or study abroad in what we call North America, as well as their allies who are from there.