Reflections on the value of Black life and human rights in Jamaican society. In historical and contemporary context.

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What Is the Value of Black Life? Thoughts on a Framework for Gender and Human
Rights in Jamaica -- Taitu Heron, Lecturer, IGDS, UWI Mona
Presentation to 3rd
Breakfast Forum, March 15, 2011, Institute of the Gender
& Development Studies, UWI Mona
What is the value of a human life that is worth defending? What is the value of
Black life? Or even wider, of people of Colour? Why do we as humans claim
that we have rights? What makes us know that – dat nuh right? Or that “we want
justice”. And what does gender have to do with it? These questions form the
basis of my presentation this morning.
For women in particular, the United Nations prioritized the issue of human
rights in terms of programmatic, administrative, and methodological
approaches to international relations. Feminist legal scholars have developed a
body of scholarship that demonstrates the emergence of a body of customary
international law that requires governments to expand protection for women,
particularly against gender-based violence. These developments would seem to
lay the groundwork to advance women’s equality both within a national context
and international setting, although based on the increasing levels of gender-
based violence against women and children, we know that that is not the case in
Jamaica.
Arguably, the government of Jamaica’s wholesale and unquestioning
acceptance of neoliberal globalisation, its concurrent impact of economic
restructuring combined with the international political economy of drugs and
arms trade, has also opened up Jamaica society to other vulnerabilities such as
human trafficking, child pornography, gang targeting of young males in drugs
and arms dealing; sex tourism, – all these scenarios put persons in vulnerable
situations where rights are suppressed, ignored or violated. While some of these
scenarios are indirectly caused by the government’s naive and incoherent
development approach towards globalization; others involve citizens’
knowingly exploiting others, including community and family members. So we
ask in our setting - - what is the value of black life?
The international legal standards framed as human rights protections whether
embedded in state constitutions or treaties are often first grasped mostly at the

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discursive level. Globalized legal standards in the area of human rights are
supposed to symbolize ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. Even as mere symbols,
though, they create incentives for states to appear as abiding by global standards
of appropriateness, including standards affecting women, children, the disabled
community, and the elderly.
Human rights norms function to create the spaces of autonomy that can be
adapted to the material and political conditions of those who seek to invoke their
rights. First, human rights norms function as a signpost of a civilized
government’s international obligations. By framing human rights violations as
transgressions that occur internationally and to which all nations in good
standing must respond, activists create strategic opportunities to mediate the
tension between gender interests and group or nationalist consciousness that
may otherwise discourage public claims of harm. Second, harms that are defined
as universal in nature encourage activists to expand their advocacy beyond the
national to use in transnational networks to redefine democratic participation
and create democratic structures in a globalized world. It begins with accepting
our common humanity and embraces equality of treatment and dignity of the
person. Women’s rights activists for instance, often take advantage of
opportunities and political space created by these norms to make claims and
raise issues both in domestic and international fora, relating to rape, domestic
violence, inheritance of property, parental rights and so on. Gay rights activists
for instance, ask us to accept the humanity of gay men (and women) in a society
that expresses a cultural preference for heterosexuality. They ask to accept other
expressions of masculinity and femininity other than the heterosexual one that
we are comfortable with. Activists/Persons with disabilities would ask us to stop
calling them ‘cripple’, ‘handicap’, ‘retarded; and to provide them with fair access
and facilities in schools, public buildings, transport and employment. They
would ask us to remember their visibility.
Human rights framework is thus a challenging one, because it asks us to go
beyond personal beliefs, subjective moralities, prejudices and privileges, and
actually allow and facilitate ourselves and others to live in dignity.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among other International
Human Rights Conventions, such as International Convention of Civil and

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Political Rights, the International Convention on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, The Convention on
the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women, as well has the
Constitution of Jamacia, have on different occasions provided the basis for
activism around certain issues. However, to my mind, this topic, gender and
human rights, in a Caribbean setting, in a Jamaican setting, in a post-colonial
setting in particular – has other considerations that impede a serious undertaking
of this international rights framework that at the policy level is fairly highly
developed. What are these other considerations?
These other considerations are rooted in the historical and contemporary
contradictions between what exists in the letter of the law and policy framework
what is experienced in everyday life. It leads to the question – what is the value
of Black life? Considerations relating to vestiges of its colonial past of slavery
and colonisation and how human beings used to be treated and how class, race
and gender relations were defined by hierarchy, status and the practice of
everyday violence as a means of control, communication and extraction of
labour. Therefore human rights in our context have been defined in terms of
how they have been denied, not by what has been afforded or considered
inalienable by virtue of one’s humanity.
A history of an enslaved and colonised past is marked by extensive violation of
human rights, from the very demarcation of the African and Asians into ‘negro
slaves’ and ‘coolie servants’. I have written elsewhere (Heron, 2005) that people
from a colonized past such as in the Caribbean, became fixed into imposed
categories of non-human races in relation to imperial/European conceptions of
what was considered human – white and male. I further argued that
independence did get rid of this colonial baggage. Therefore the question of
rights and the need to reconstitute and/or defend one’s right as human is still
significant, particularly as we acknowledge this year 2011 as the International
Year for Peoples of African Descent/Ascent. A Jamaican proverb is useful here:
“what is joke to you is death to me”. Thus, how does the colonial context in
which citizens’ rights are institutionalized perpetuate (neo)colonial bias and
elitism in current times? How much of these rights, alter, and therefore, facilitate

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a dignified human life and the practice of ‘full’ human rights, in favour all
Jamaican citizens, man, woman and child?
I have argued that the need to act to defend what one considers a fundamental
human right, (whether this is given priority in a country’s constitution or not);
is dependent almost entirely on the context in which the facilitation of these
rights occur in a manner which furnishes human dignity. In the context of
neocolonial societies such as Jamaica, then, the idea of what constitutes
fundamental rights worthy of defending; which ones are entrenched in the law
books, which ones are not given priority or stipulate conditions; who wrote
them; and in whose interests do they operate, we may need to take a deeper look
into the connection between rights and the emotive defense/reaction in the face
(literally and metaphorically) of the violated and the violator (Heron, 2005).
In this sense, operationalizing and actualizing human rights clearly requires
something more than statements of intent, policy formulation and legal
documents, and a constitution, especially where unwritten norms often are more
powerful than the letter of the law. So for instance, even though as a Jamaican
citizen I have a right by law to walk on a beach front and swim in any sea,
whether or not the security guard following the Big Hotel Boss orders, will let
me in and allow me to walk on hotel property because there is no public access
way to get to the beach is another matter. Because of the ingrained prejudices or
privileges we impart daily on each other, the Jamaican citizen getting to use that
beach will vary depending on the clothes one wears, the language one speaks,
whether you turn up in a car or on foot, your complexion and so on; and most
importantly if you are brave enough and patient enough to make an argument
that you actually have that right.
Another case is to ask where is the toilet? Go to any construction site and you
will find that there are inadequate toilets or changing rooms for the workers,
even more so, if there are female workers, in some cases, they may not even be
a separate bathroom for them. If you walk along the shopping plazas on
Constant Spring road in Kington, or on Barnett Street in Montego Bay, to Pizza
Hut off Mannings Hill Road in Kingston, or to several banks in the New
Kingston area and ask again – where is the toilet? Often, there are no toilets
provided for customers, including children. If you need to relieve yourself, or

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carry your child to bathroom, you have to make a case, in the midst of
statements such as – that is not company policy. One would think that this is
simple, but it is not. It is a case of dignity and seeing that as we human beings,
little persons are people too and establishments must cater for children when
they are with their parents or caregivers.
A third case is a blind teenage boy begging at traffic light? We must ask – how
did he get there AND importantly WHY? So horrific incidents of an 80-odd year
old man getting his throats slashed will pass like a rainy day. Fifth, so too did
the lives of the girls lost in the fire of the Armadale Children’s home. Sixth, two
15 year boys locked up in a don’s cage in an inner city community because of
refusal to sell guns.
The seventh case in point is to ask when next you drive around Kingston or
whichever other urban space – where are the public parks, green spaces for
children and their families to gather? If we understand what is meant by the first
article (a right to leisure learn and play) in the Convention of the Rights of the
Child, we would know that an absence of accessible green spaces for children is
in direct opposition to the cognitive and spiritual development of children.
There are numerous more cases and examples I could point to but what is clear
is that this thing called human rights in our everyday lives calls for walking that
extra mile to capture what may be considered either mundane or invisible. If it
is seen as mundane or invisible, then we must ask – what is the value of that life
why it is seemingly more automatic to put up barriers, deny access or be
dismissive based on norms and more so than the letter of the law; than it is
facilitate ‘good treatment’ or ‘dignity’ with ease. Some of these things are quite
basic and not that difficult to facilitate, but it is the vision to see that facilitation
would actually make a difference in public’s lives.
So I go back to my paper, “A Lost Opportunity” written in 2005, and raise these
salient points again: how then do we perceive the handling of historical injustices
that are passed down from generation to generation, anger and emotion intact
and become normalized behavior and unfortunately normalized expectations of
“the runnings”.

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These injustices hold deep and unforgettable historical/ancestral resonances
that remain and in many cases continue to repeat themselves and will probably
continue until some effort is made to engage with our history, unravel and
resolve and make a psychic and transformative break with the past.
If we have this comprehensive framework offered by the United Nations, of
which the nation-state are part of, and of which the government has signed on
to many international agreements; how come we have not met the challenge of
moving from rhetorical engagement and signage to one of implementation and
enforcement at the national level, and even further at the household and
community levels. David Pilgrim, Barbadian singer/songwriter, has a line in a
song that asks -- Could it be, could it be, could it be, that we are Babylon? This question
is an important one to consider and answer for the 21st
century.
I do not have a conclusive conclusion. I have raised more questions and food
for thought than I have answers. That is because, I believe that we have much
to unravel and resolve and therefore we have much theoretical and historical
analysis to do to understand what is happening now. From my own reading
however, I have seen that the nature of our own constitutional history which
was elite-led placed more focus on civil and political rights in the constitution
and did not provide for protection against gender based discrimination or even
for discrimination in the most general sense. Similarly, not much emphasis is
given to social or economic rights. Our constitution is also state-centric and in
many cases, pre-independence human rights norms are preserved; with the
savings clause preserved. If the state’s approach to human rights is rhetorical
and conservative on paper, then the logical place for making that psychic and
transformative split would be with rewriting the constitution as a new set of rules
from which to live by. The comprehensive human rights framework offered the
UN could then be further theorized according to our particular situation and
then utilized to make this a reality. Make living in dignity a reality.
Thank you.

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References
Taitu Heron, “A Lost Opportunity? A Commentary on the Jamaican
Experience of Independence” in Working Paper No. 6, 2005. Sir Arthur Lewis
Institute for Social & Economic Studies (SALISES) UWI Mona, pp. 56-72.
Stephen Vasciannie, “The Human Rights Project in Jamaica”, the Cobb Family
Lecture 2008.
Deborah Weissman, “Gender and Human Rights: Between Morals and
Politics”. Downloaded from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1655902