Confronting

Confronting the Color Crisis in the African Diaspora: Emphasis Jamaica
by Dr. Louise Spencer-Strachan

Afrikan World InfoSystems, 88pp, $5.95
ISBN: 1879164043


The social, political and economic cohesion of a people depends on their ability to mutually identify with each other and cooperate to the end of enhancing their shared quality of life.

The social cohesion required for Afrikan peoples across the diaspora to achieve full social and political liberation, economic independence and prosperity, is threatened by the misidentification by too many Afrikans with their White oppressors. Evaluations by Afrikans of each other on skin-tone and other physical traits, adversely influencetheir social politico-economic development across the diaspora. Essaying the politics of skin-tone as they are played out in Jamaica, as a case in point, Dr. Louise Spencer-Strachan deftly demonstrated how the illusory identification with their former slaves and colonial masters - which forms the basis for class divisions, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and intergroup conflicts - seriously impairs the political and economic self-actualization of Afrikan-Caribbean people and Afrikan peoples in general.

Expertly reviewing the history of ancient Afrikan high-cultures, the rich and oft-troubled past and contemporary cultural history of Afrikan peoples as the basis for her astute analysis of the nagging crisis of identity in the Caribbean and the Afrikan diaspora, Dr. Spencer-Strachan provides perceptive and practical approaches to its productive resolution.

Dr. Louise Spencer-Strachan has begun an open discussion of a topic not often examined even by those of us who are on the journey of freeing minds. Dr. Strachan has researched the causes of the phenomenom of color coding, and more importantly, has shown color differentiation among our fols has taken on a life of its own.

                                                                       Eugenia Bain
                                City College, City University of New York