Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — July to September 2011

Published: 2 October 2011 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• Bolt disqualified, Blake wins: Daegu’s extraordinary drama: The 13th IAAF World Championships in Athletics, held in Daegu, South Korea from 27 August to 4 September, produced the most shocking single moment in Jamaican athletic history since Ben Johnson’s 1988 Seoul disgrace, but in reverse: Usain Bolt, the world record holder and defending champion in the 100 metres, false-started in the final and was disqualified, handing the gold medal to his training partner Yohan Blake. It was simultaneously humiliating for Bolt and a moment of extraordinary emergence for Blake, who at 21 became the youngest-ever 100m world champion. Bolt recovered his composure to win the 200m gold and ran the anchor leg for Jamaica’s 4x100m relay team, also winning gold. Blake then completed a sprint double by winning the 200m silver behind Bolt.
• UK riots: the direct impact on British-Jamaican communities: The riots that swept across England from 6–11 August 2011 — beginning in Tottenham, north London, following the police shooting of Mark Duggan on 4 August and spreading to Hackney, Brixton, Peckham, Birmingham, Manchester, Salford, and other cities — had a direct and complex impact on British-Jamaican communities. These communities were concentrated in precisely the urban areas where rioting was most intense. Businesses were burned, properties looted, and community institutions damaged. The political aftermath — in which the Cameron government emphasised criminality, gangsterism, and “cultural failure” rather than poverty, police relations, and structural inequality — produced a sharp political disagreement between British-Caribbean communities and the government narrative.
• Occupy Wall Street begins: diaspora economic anxieties find a movement: On 17 September 2011, a few hundred protesters occupied Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, launching Occupy Wall Street under the slogan “We Are the 99%.” By the end of the quarter the occupation had inspired solidarity camps in scores of US cities, in London’s St Paul’s churchyard, in Toronto, and across Europe. The movement’s critique of financial inequality and the capture of the political process by the top one per cent resonated acutely with Caribbean diaspora communities, whose experience of the post-2008 recovery had been stagnant wages and constrained remittance capacity.
• Bruce Golding resigns: Jamaica’s political transition underway: Prime Minister Bruce Golding announced his resignation on 23 September 2011 — just after the end of this reporting quarter, but with implications already clear within it. The announcement ended more than a year of mounting political pressure over the government’s handling of the US extradition request for Christopher “Dudus” Coke, the Tivoli Gardens don. Golding had admitted in May 2010 that his government had hired a Washington lobbying firm to oppose the extradition request. His announced departure on 23 September — with Andrew Holness nominated to succeed him as JLP leader and Prime Minister — ends a prime ministership that began with considerable promise in 2007 but was consumed by the Dudus affair’s political toxicity.
• Diaspora community organisations: rebuilding after the riots: British-Jamaican and broader Caribbean community organisations in London, Birmingham, and Manchester moved rapidly after the August riots to assess damage, support affected community members, and organise community-led clean-up efforts. The riots’ politicisation — which made supporting affected communities feel, to some, like condoning the violence — created difficult terrain for community leaders who were simultaneously condemning the rioting and demanding that the government address root causes. The contrast between the government’s ‘fightback’ rhetoric and the community’s own analysis of causation was sharp.
• Remittances through Q3 2011: tracking toward US$2.0 billion for the year: Bank of Jamaica remittance data for the first half of 2011 placed Jamaica on course for annual remittances of approximately US$2.0 billion — maintaining 2010’s level. The maintained level, despite continuing economic pressure on diaspora households in the US and UK, reflected the diaspora’s structural commitment to family support that persisted even when household finances were constrained.

Introduction: A Quarter of Shock and Change

Q3 2011 delivered, in rapid succession, an athletics result of world-historical shock, civil unrest that tore through the heart of the British-Jamaican community’s home neighbourhoods, the birth of a global protest movement, and the resignation of Jamaica’s prime minister. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, IAAF, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, and Caribbean diaspora media through 30 September 2011.

Daegu: Bolt, Blake, and the False Start That Shook the World

Usain Bolt arrived in Daegu as the dominant figure in world athletics — the world record holder over 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay; the Olympic champion from Beijing 2008; the world champion from Berlin 2009. The 13th IAAF World Championships were expected to extend his dominance. What happened instead in the 100m final on 28 August will be replayed in athletics’ history as long as the sport exists: Bolt’s signature pre-race showmanship, the starter’s gun, and then the immediate red flag of disqualification for a false start under the IAAF’s ‘one false start’ rule introduced in 2010.

The gold medal went instead to Yohan Blake, Bolt’s training partner under Glen Mills at the Racers Track Club. Blake, 21, ran 9.92 seconds — hardly the fastest final in World Championship history, but a result that gave him the gold and the title of youngest-ever 100m world champion. The British-Jamaican and Jamaican-American diaspora community’s reaction was complex: shock, sympathy for Bolt, but genuine celebration for Blake. Jamaica’s athletics pipeline had delivered a worthy successor in the waiting. The 4x100m relay gold, anchored by Bolt, and Blake’s 200m silver behind Bolt’s gold restored some of the narrative, but the false start remained the defining image of Daegu for Jamaica.

The UK Riots: British-Jamaican Communities at the Centre

The immediate trigger — the police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham on 4 August, followed by a peaceful family protest at Tottenham Police Station on 6 August that turned confrontational, and then spread — produced the most serious civil disturbances in England since the Brixton and Toxteth riots of 1981. Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton, Peckham, Clapham: the neighbourhoods that burned had been home to British-Caribbean communities for three and four generations. For British-Jamaican residents, this was not abstract civic disorder — it was damage to the streets they grew up on, the shops that served their communities, the churches and community centres that anchored neighbourhood life.

The government’s response, framed by Prime Minister Cameron’s ‘fightback’ speech and the mass sentencing programme that produced custodial sentences for first-time offenders convicted of looting, was experienced by many in the British-Jamaican community as compounding the injury. Community leaders who had spent careers building relationships with the Metropolitan Police found those relationships strained. The riots’ causes — the complex interaction of poverty, youth unemployment, the phasing out of the Education Maintenance Allowance, cuts to youth services, and the toxic state of police-community relations in the areas where stop-and-search was most intensive — were ones that Caribbean community organisations had been documenting for years.

Bruce Golding’s Resignation: End of an Era

Bruce Golding announced on 23 September 2011 that he would step down as JLP leader and Prime Minister — just two days after the close of this reporting quarter, but with the political dynamics already playing out through September. The Dudus affair’s damage to Golding’s personal credibility had never been fully repaired after his May 2010 admission of the lobbying contract. Andrew Holness’s succession as JLP leader and Prime Minister — the youngest prime minister in Jamaica’s history at 39 — signals a generational transition within the JLP, though the timing with an election due before end 2012 means Holness’s tenure may be brief. Diaspora observers noted that Holness had been among the more engaged JLP politicians on returnee and diaspora policy questions during his years in the party’s younger ranks.

Occupy Wall Street: The 99 Per Cent Speaks to the Diaspora

Occupy Wall Street’s birth on 17 September touched a nerve in diaspora communities that had lived the post-crisis economy’s inequalities most acutely. Caribbean-American homeownership, concentrated in New York, New Jersey, and Florida — the cities and states where the housing bubble had inflated and burst most dramatically — had taken disproportionate damage. The foreclosure crisis had hit diaspora communities hard. The movement’s language of the “99 per cent” captured something that community organisations had been trying to articulate for three years: that the financial crisis’s costs had been socialised while its causes had been concentrated in the financial sector that the bailout protected.

We report next at 2 January 2012, by which time Jamaica’s general election — which must be held before end-2012 but which Holness may call earlier — will likely have been announced or held.

This Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora and Returnee Update is researched and published by Jamaica Homes News. Sources include Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, IAAF, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, and PICA. All figures and developments are accurate as of the publication date, 2 October 2011.

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