Beneath the Surface: Why Many Jamaicans Struggle to Recognise Racism – And What It Means for How We Build Our Future

There’s a point, in any great design journey, where you have to stop admiring the surface and start interrogating the foundations. It’s easy to look at Jamaica—sun-soaked, defiant, bursting with colour—and believe the national motto, Out of Many One People, is a truth entirely realised. But if you’ve ever stood inside a half-finished home and seen hairline cracks zig-zagging across the plaster, you’ll know: appearances can deceive.

And so it is with race in Jamaica. We are a majority-Black nation, confident in our culture, proud of our history. Yet in the same way a home can be structurally unsound despite its fresh coat of paint, inequality can exist here—unseen by many—because we’ve been conditioned not to look for it.