Racial gaps in the West Indies

Ethnic minorities like Chinese and Indians are overrepresented in the economic elite, despite the fact that many came as working-class labourers.

Written by Lipton Matthews.

It is an article of faith in left-wing circles that racial inequality is the product of racist structures. Data concerning racial inequality make America the poster child for “systemic racism”. However, claiming that racism is rampant in America because of racial differences in outcomes is mistaken. After all, such differences are present throughout black-majority countries in the West Indies. Ethnic minorities in those countries – such as Chinese and Indians – are overrepresented in the economic elite, despite the fact that many came as working-class labourers.

It is often argued that blacks were irreparably disadvantaged by enslavement – and there’s no doubt that slavery was a handicap. However, some blacks did manage to earn incomes as entrepreneurs or vendors of agricultural produce. Owing to such exploits, a select few became property owners (though such individuals were atypical).

Many invoke slavery as the genesis of black underperformance without contrasting the various systems of enslavement. In the West Indies, provision grounds were allotted to slaves so that they could reduce plantation expenses by feeding themselves. This was in contrast to the arrangements on Southern plantations. Although such decisions appear inconsequential, provisioning made it more likely for West Indian blacks to become property owners after emancipation. West Indian blacks therefore entered freedom in a more advantageous position than American blacks.

After emancipation, West Indian blacks obtained funds to purchase properties, and some were assisted by missionaries to acquire land in aid of the free village movement. Their ambitions were certainly obstructed by high taxes, inadequate infrastructure and subpar education. Yet such obstacles were not insurmountable, as the historical record attests. 

The uptick in black landownership following emancipation was a consistent trend in the West Indies. In 1842, only four years after the end of slavery, black peasants in Demerara controlled upwards of 15,000 acres – a major accomplishment. Such success was replicated wherever land was in abundance. Jamaica boasted 19,397 people with holdings under 10 acres in 1845; the number reached to 81,924 by 1896. Developments in Guyana, Trinidad, and the Windward Islands were equally remarkable.

The rise of the black peasantry undermines the consensus that immigrants possessed unique advantages that were denied to blacks. Baptist minister Samuel W. Holt in 1866 broadcasted the achievements of black Jamaicans to readers of the London Spectator:

Why, Sir, there is not a single profession or trade in Jamaica which has not among its operatives a negro. There are... negro members of the House of Representatives...negro merchants, negro managers of estates... and negro school masters...a bank has been established by negroes...and receives the small savings of the negro inhabitants.

Black West Indians could prosper as non-black immigrants could; the issue is that non-blacks were successful on a much greater scale. The consistency of minority groups’ success suggests they have certain traits that are conducive to the achievement high socio-economic status. As noted above, West Indian immigrants were rarely from elite backgrounds, which makes their performance even more outstanding.

Although Jewish immigrants were not subjected to the brutalities of slavery, their experience was replete with discrimination. In Barbados they were disallowed from indenturing servants, and Jamaica levied them with a special group tax. Despite these practices, probate records from 1685-1716 indicate that Jewish merchants in Jamaica had about three times as much wealth as English merchants.

Elite Jewish status was attained through entrepreneurship and honing skills that were valuable in a market economy. Most of the Jewish families present in the Jamaican elite in the early twentieth-century had been uninfluential before 1880. Many launched their careers as merchant investors in plantation agriculture. The business magnate Frederick Myers began his career as clerk. Like his predecessors, Myers invested savings into his business, rather than squandering his money on lavish properties. In his early years as an entrepreneur, Myers and his family lived on the second floor of their dry goods store.

Working-class Jews who settled in Curacao as petty traders devoted substantial resources to expanding their businesses. Likewise, Syrian petty traders who fled to Trinidad, and Lebanese who were mocked by Jamaica’s leading man of letters H.G. Delisser, eventually became powerbrokers in the West Indies. And even before the emergence of Syrians and Lebanese, the Chinese were lauded for their business acumen.

The Chinese, in particular, were admired by colonial elites who thought that they were more productive than blacks. And this view remains common in Jamaica and other parts of the West Indies today. In Jamaica (where this writer lives) one Chinese labourer is thought equivalent to five Jamaicans. This sentiment is evident in the commentary of Joseph Edwards who admonished Jamaican engineers for opposing infrastructural projects built by the Chinese:

When our roads are fixed by our Jamaican engineers, and they do not last six months, do they refund the cost of replacing them? Or are they given another contract to pilfer more  from beleaguered taxpayers? These engineers...need to learn how to build roads before they verbally attack the Chinese.

The Chinese in the West Indies have a history of outperforming their competitors by delivering better service. A missionary in 1893 noted that despite arriving in Trinidad penniless, the Chinese quickly became wealthy. Their dominance in the retail sector was so considerable that creoles and especially blacks simply could not compete. Chinese immigrants were not the first to pursue shopkeeping in the West Indies, but were the most efficient. From Jamaica to the Eastern Caribbean, the Chinese exploited gaps in the marketplace and reaped tremendous windfalls.

Thrift, hard work, and a proclivity for saving have been identified as essential to the success of ethnic minorities. Researchers have found that in Trinidad, black entrepreneurs are perceived as engaging in conspicuous consumption to hypersignal social status. Meanwhile in Jamaica,  O. Alexander Miller found that ethnic minorities spent more time on financial and succession planning than their black counterparts. Minorities were adept at transferring businesses to future generations because they did not equate education with status. Quite often black Jamaicans established businesses, but instead of advancing the enterprise their children would become professionals. 

Indo-Jamaican entrepreneurs often involved their children in the family enterprise and rewarded them for pursuing professions that helped that enterprise. While they cultivated strong family and social networks to promote their business interests, black entrepreneurs did not. Miller notes frequently that middle-class black Jamaicans spend too much time socializing on the internet when they should be forging stronger relationships with family and other associates.

Leveraging ethnic networks has been crucial to the success of minorities in the West Indies. These networks are a reservoir of information on business opportunities, market intelligence and insights on government policy. Black ethnic networks are impeded by allegations of envy and distrust. A recurring theme in the literature on entrepreneurship in the West Indies is that blacks do not support each other to the same degree. They have a zero-sum mentality. Contempt for the achievements of another black person in Jamaica is referred to as ‘bad mind.’ This “crab in a bucket” mentality has been explored by Peter Wilson in his book, Crab Antics. 

Researching the craft market in Jamaica, Jovan Lewis noticed that vendors attributed the mediocre performance of black businesses to ‘bad mind.’ Envy can be a serious obstacle to black entrepreneurship in the West Indies, as attested by the entrepreneurs themselves. Deeper analyses show that black West Indians have a warped understanding of market dynamics. What in the West would be considered ordinary competitive practices, such as the copying successful businesses, are dismissed as envy.

This misunderstanding of the market process poses a particularly great challenge for the integration of blacks into the economy. And it has been argued that such lack of understanding is rooted in the pre-slavery culture of the African family, which “had no custom of business cooperation or family support, lacked a tradition of accumulation of material resources for productive purposes, or providing for intergeneration wealth accumulation.”

Minority groups in the West Indies have a longer history of wage labour and formal entrepreneurship than the black descendants of slaves. While historical limitations cannot be ignored, it is clear that blacks have been unable to duplicate the achievements of other groups despite consistent exposure to them.  Evidence from the Caribbean shows there is nothing unusual about lagging black performance, whatever leftists might have us believe.

Lipton Matthews is a research professional and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute, The Epoch Times, Chronicles, Intellectual Takeout, American Thinker and other publications. His email address is: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

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