White Supremacy in the Education System: Enduring Coloniality in the Jamaican Textbook

This presentation considers education in a postcolonial site. In a country of very few white bodies, and even fewer visible white bodies, white supremacy still makes itself felt in a crucial Jamaican space. White supremacy, or “coloniality,” can be identified through text: through the epistemology underpinning that text. A study of secondary level Jamaican textbooks reveals the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which coloniality endures in a black-majority postcolony more than sixty years after ostensible independence from the United Kingdom. A close reading of these texts reveals in some a central tension between Jamaican-focused depictions of history and culture and the persistence of the British-derived, imperialist web in which Jamaicans have been caught for centuries. My presentation will show that in a country often celebrated internationally as an icon of anti-imperialism, even after decades of deliberate attempts to decolonize the curriculum, there is an epistemological battle at play in the classroom. Overall, the textbooks represent a “third space” wherein the margin (Jamaica) and the core (Britain) are enmeshed in complex ways. In this hybridity, marginaliity is reinforced, as some texts de-centre Jamaicans in their own stories. Coloniality’s epistemological assumptions and models are often left unquestioned, even as efforts are made to present Jamaican subjectivities. This both obscures the need for extrication from the Eurocentric web and makes that disentanglement very difficult. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of strategies that have been engaged and are envisioned to counteract this manifestation of white supremacy.