Jamaica has a past which include slavery and oppression much the same way Blacks have suffered and continue to suffer in the United States. The difference between our two systems is that for the most part the slave masters either died out or left Jamaica. In the United States they remained,. But back to Jamaica.
The slave-masters left but they left a group of people who believe in the idea of superiority based on certain characteristics they define.
So we have a dichotomy which is the so-called upper-class and well.… everyone else. It’s kind of the same situation which was left in Rwanda after the Colonizing Germans and
Belgians left. The movie blood diamond was a unique window into what
Belgium King Leopold did before leaving Rwanda . They created two groups between the people, the Hutus and the Tutsi from the very same people.
This caused the people to continue to fight among themselves on manufactured difference, long after they had left. The Hutu-Tutsi strife stems from class warfare, with the Tutsis perceived to have greater wealth and social status (as well as favoring cattle ranching over what is seen as the lower-class farming of the Hutus). The Tutsis are thought to have originally come from Ethiopia, and arrived after the Hutu came from Chad. The Tutsis had a monarchy dating back to the 15th century; this was overthrown at the urging of Belgian colonizers in the early 1960s and the Hutu took power by force in Rwanda. In Burundi, however, a Hutu uprising failed and the Tutsis controlled the country. Jamaica’s so-called upper-class basically boasts some of the very same characteristics. Wealth and
lighter skin color, the more contemporary characteristic is based on who manages to secure some sort of education and is able to use it to separate and differentiate themselves from everyone else. There has been a paradigm shift as it relates to color however. Though color has not been removed from the equation as a defining point-to-prove class, education and wealth-accumulation have leveled the playing field somewhat.
The Hutu and Tutsi speak the same Bantu tongues as well as French, and generally practice Christianity and many geneticists have been hard-pressed to find marked ethnic differences between the two, though the Tutsi have generally been noted to be taller. The Tutis are from Ethopia and the Hutu generally from Chad, both groups are Africans. Jamaicans of all stripes speak the same tongue.
Jamaicans uptown Kingston 6 and 8 delude themselves that a few social differences set
them apart from their contemporaries in Kingston 12 and 13 .
The crime situation on the Island is fueled partly because of anger on the part of those in Kingston 12 and 13 , pretty soon gated communities and security guards will not be enough.
Despite more of its members now have undergraduate and graduate degrees than arguably any other police department in the world the upper caste in Jamaica still holds the Police officers of the JCF in contempt.
In order to fully understand this one would have to understand the full history of the JCF and how it came into existence and the struggles it has faced as an entity for law and order, while having to cope with the country’s bourgeois’.
Read more here: The Jamaica Constabulary Force