Hartford to Montego Bay

Britain voted leave, and a political signal was sent that transcended trade law: a message about belonging, about borders, and about whose presence in Britain had always been considered optional

Briefing

• UK votes 52% to leave the EU on 23 June 2016; Caribbean community in shock.
• David Cameron resigns as Prime Minister the morning after the referendum.
• Racist incidents spike across England in the days following the vote.
• Orlando nightclub shooting kills 49 in June; diaspora grief cuts across communities.
• Jamaica-UK trading relationship under CARIFORUM EPA faces post-Brexit review.

The morning of 24 June 2016 arrived in the Caribbean communities of Hartford, Connecticut and of Brixton, south London with the same piece of information: Britain had voted, narrowly but clearly, to leave the European Union. The result — 52 per cent to leave, 48 per cent to remain, on a turnout of 72 per cent — was described by its supporters as a victory for democracy and by its opponents as a national trauma. For the Jamaican and wider Caribbean diaspora, the result was something else: a signal.

The signal was not primarily about trade or regulatory alignment or the free movement of EU citizens. Caribbean British people were not EU nationals. Their right to be in Britain did not depend on EU membership. The trade arrangements that governed Jamaica’s exports to the UK existed through CARIFORUM, not through direct EU membership. None of the formal legal structures that governed Caribbean people’s relationship with Britain were directly altered by the leave vote. And yet the Caribbean community understood the vote immediately as something that mattered to them, because what the vote had revealed about British political culture — about the appeal of arguments rooted in border control, in immigration reduction, in a vision of Britain as a place that had let in too many people from outside — was something they had been watching develop for years and had hoped, against the evidence, would not win a national majority.

The Atmosphere After the Vote

In the days following the Brexit vote, reports of racial harassment and abuse increased sharply. Community organisations, the police hate crime units and civil society monitoring groups documented the spike. Some of the incidents were opportunistic: people who had harboured racist views for years found that the political atmosphere had given them permission to express them publicly. Some were more organised. The common thread, in communities from Brixton to Birmingham to Bradford, was a sense that something had shifted in what Britain was willing to normalise.

For the Caribbean community in Britain, the spike in racist incidents was disturbing but not entirely surprising. The Brexit campaign had not been explicitly racist. But its central argument — that Britain had lost control of its borders, that too many people from outside had come in, that this needed to stop — had been made in a country where non-white people had been navigating the consequences of that argument, in various institutional forms, for the entirety of their time in Britain. The Brexit vote had not created British racism. It had given it a political validation that had immediate consequences in the street.

Hartford and the American Caribbean Diaspora

Hartford, Connecticut had developed one of the most substantial Jamaican communities in the United States outside of New York, Florida and Atlanta. The city’s Caribbean community — concentrated in the North End and spreading through neighbouring towns including New Haven and Bridgeport — had maintained strong connections to Jamaica and to Caribbean communities in Britain. The Brexit vote was followed in Hartford not as a foreign event but as a development in a shared story: the story of what happens to Caribbean people when they build lives in countries that have not always been entirely comfortable with their presence.

The American presidential election of November 2016 was approaching, with Donald Trump having secured the Republican nomination. The conversation in Hartford’s Jamaican community, as across the Caribbean diaspora in North America, connected the Brexit result and the Trump campaign as expressions of the same political moment: a resurgence of nativist politics that drew on anxiety about immigration, about demographic change, about the perceived loss of a more homogeneous national identity. The diaspora was watching both with the specific attention of people who knew that abstract political movements had concrete consequences in their own lives.

Jamaica: Watching From Montego Bay

In Jamaica, the Brexit vote was followed closely. The island’s relationship with Britain — diplomatic, economic, cultural, personal — was not abstract. Hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans had family in Britain. Jamaica’s trade with the UK, while not the dominant channel for its exports, was significant. And the political signal sent by the Brexit vote — about the direction Britain intended to take, about the kind of relationship it wanted with the rest of the world — was of direct relevance to a country that had been managing its post-colonial relationship with Britain with considerable care.

The Jamaican government’s response to the Brexit vote was measured: the bilateral relationship would continue, trade terms would be negotiated, and the formal partnership of the Commonwealth provided a framework for engagement that predated EU membership and would outlast it. But Jamaican civil society, and the diaspora communities whose voices fed into Jamaican public debate, were more candid about what the vote had revealed. Britain was changing. The question was how Jamaica — and the diaspora — would respond.

The first half of 2016 had also brought one other significant event: on 12 June, a gunman had entered a nightclub in Orlando, Florida and killed 49 people. The Pulse shooting was an attack on the LGBTQ community, and it fell across Caribbean diaspora communities — including Jamaican communities — with a particular complexity, given the island’s contested history around LGBTQ rights. But the grief was not contested. People died in Orlando that June, and their families were the families of a diaspora that stretches from Hartford to Montego Bay, from Kingston to Brixton, from one side of the Atlantic to the other.