Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — April to June 2015

Published: 2 July 2015 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways

• Charleston massacre: grief and resolve across Caribbean-American communities: The murder of nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on 17 June 2015 — by a white supremacist who sat with the congregation for an hour before opening fire during Bible study — was a devastating act of racial terror that reverberated through the entire African diaspora community, including Jamaican-American communities in New York, South Florida, and across the country. The victims — including the church’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was also a South Carolina state senator — were pillars of a Black church tradition deeply resonant in the Caribbean community. The massacre produced a national reckoning with Confederate symbolism, racial violence, and the lived experience of Black Americans that the Caribbean community engaged with from its own complex position at the intersection of Caribbean and African-American identity.
• UK general election: Conservative majority shocks British-Jamaicans: David Cameron’s Conservative Party won an outright majority in the UK’s 7 May general election — a result that polls had consistently predicted as impossible and that confounded virtually every forecaster. The result — 331 Conservative seats against 232 for Labour — was a significant disappointment for British-Jamaican communities that had overwhelmingly supported Labour. More immediately consequential was Cameron’s pre-election commitment to hold an EU membership referendum by end-2017, which the Conservative majority now guaranteed would happen, and his government’s continued austerity programme, which fell disproportionately on the urban communities where Caribbean populations were concentrated.
• Baltimore and the Black Lives Matter movement: The death of Freddie Gray — a 25-year-old Black Baltimorean who suffered a severed spinal cord in police custody in April 2015 and died on 19 April — produced Baltimore’s largest unrest since 1968. The riots, the curfew, the National Guard deployment, and the six police officers subsequently charged attracted national attention and placed the Black Lives Matter movement — which had emerged after the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases — at the centre of American political discourse. Caribbean-American communities, whose members were disproportionately likely to experience police contact and whose experience of racial profiling was well-documented, engaged with the movement from a position of both solidarity and their own distinct community experience.
• Jamaica’s Beijing buildup: Bolt and the national team prepare: As the IAAF World Championships in Beijing approached (August 2015), Jamaica’s sprint squad was the subject of intense scrutiny and anticipation across diaspora communities. Usain Bolt, having recovered from injury concerns that had limited his early 2015 season, was demonstrating championship form as the season progressed, with Justin Gatlin’s impressive sub-9.8 performances providing the competitive backdrop against which Bolt’s championship ambitions would be tested. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, defending her World Championship 100 metres title, and the depth of Jamaican relay teams generated confident expectations across the diaspora community.
• 6th Biennial: twelve months of follow-through: Twelve months on from the 6th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference of June 2014, the MFAFT’s implementation tracking confirmed continued progress across the conference’s working group commitments. The one-year follow-through point provided a natural mid-cycle assessment of which commitments were on track, which required acceleration, and which thematic priorities would need fresh momentum as the planning horizon for the 7th Biennial in June 2016 came into focus.
• Remittances Q2 2015: steady positive growth: Bank of Jamaica data for Q2 2015 showed continued year-on-year remittance growth from all major source markets. The US dollar’s strength against the Jamaican dollar was enhancing the domestic purchasing power of diaspora flows, and the Jamaican-American community’s employment security in a US economy performing well under Obama’s second term was supporting consistent sending behaviour. Total 2015 annual flows were tracking toward approximately US$2.3 billion.

Introduction: Violence, Politics, and Sport

The second quarter of 2015 was shaped by racial violence in America, a significant political shift in the United Kingdom, and the building athletic drama of a Beijing World Championships at which Jamaica’s sprint squad was expected to dominate. This update draws on Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, Caribbean National Weekly, and diaspora community sources through 30 June 2015.

Charleston: Grief, Rage, and the Confederate Flag

The Emanuel AME Church massacre produced a response across the Black community — grief, rage, and a moral clarity about the murderer’s racist motivation that contrasted with the deflecting narratives of mental illness and random violence that initially competed with the community’s naming of what had happened. For the Caribbean-American community, whose members worship in Black churches across the country and whose children attend the same schools and walk the same streets as African-American community members, the attack was experienced as a direct assault on the community’s safety and belonging. The subsequent national debate about the Confederate battle flag — which flew over the South Carolina State Capitol — was one the Caribbean community engaged with from its own understanding of how symbols of racial hierarchy function in public space.

South Carolina’s removal of the Confederate flag from the State Capitol grounds in July 2015 — driven by the moral authority of the Charleston families’ forgiveness of the shooter — was received as a meaningful if insufficient step. The broader question of racial justice in policing, sentencing, and civic life that the Black Lives Matter movement had placed at the centre of American political debate was not resolved by a flag’s removal. But the community’s sense that Charleston had shifted something in the national moral conversation — that the case for reckoning with America’s racial history had been advanced — was palpable.

UK: Cameron’s Majority and What It Means

David Cameron’s majority government confirmed the EU referendum commitment that had been a central Conservative manifesto pledge. Cameron’s stated intention was to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership terms and then put the result to a referendum, which his government was confident of winning. British-Jamaican community leaders followed the referendum’s development with concern: the Leave campaign’s argument — whatever its economic merits — was likely to deploy immigration restriction as a central theme in ways that would be uncomfortable for communities whose members were themselves migrants or the children of migrants. The referendum’s potential consequences for the UK’s relationship with the Commonwealth — including the Caribbean Commonwealth countries whose citizens had contributed so much to postwar Britain — were a particular concern.

Outlook for Q3 2015

Q3 2015 brings the Beijing World Championships in August, Pope Francis’s historic US visit in September, the continuation of the Black Lives Matter political moment, and the beginning of the Canadian federal election campaign. Jamaica’s IMF programme will submit to its next quarterly review. The 6th Biennial’s implementation work will continue toward the 7th Biennial planning horizon. We report next from 2 October 2015.

This Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora and Returnee Update is researched and published by Jamaica Homes News. Sources include Jamaica Gleaner, Jamaica Observer, Bank of Jamaica, PIOJ, MFAFT, Caribbean National Weekly, and PICA. All figures and developments are accurate as of the publication date, 2 July 2015.

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