THE MONTHLY GLEANER | APRIL 6 - MAY 3, 2023 | www.jamaica-gleaner.com | NEWS 2 Archbishop of Kingston Kenneth Richards leads worshippers on a march after blessing Roman Catholic faithful during his Palm Sunday service at the Holy Trinity Cathedral Church on North Street in Kingston on Sunday, April 2. Palm Sunday is the last Sunday in Lent and marks the beginning of Holy Week, the most important week of the year for Christians. RUDOLPH BROWN/PHOTOGRAPHER PHOTO OF THE WEEK JAMAICA AND other regions are set to benefit frommillions of pounds in“substantial” restorative justice funding over the next decade after the sole shareholder in the United Kingdom, Guardian Group, apologised for the media company’s links to transatlantic slavery. Last Tuesday’s apology coincided with The Guardian’s disclosure of academic research tying the newspaper’s founding financial backers to slavery. The quantum of proposed compensation to Jamaica was not declared, but the Scott Trust said that it expects to invest more than £10 million (US$12.3 million) in restorative justice support for descendant communities in the Caribbean nation, as well as the southeastern United States’ Sea Islands/Gullah Geechee. The research findings showed that much of the wealth of founder, journalist and cotton merchant John EdwardTaylor, and other financiers, was derived from chattel slavery. Sir George Phillips, one of 11 Guardian investors in Manchester’s cotton and textiles industry tied to slavery, co-owned a sugar plantation in the western Jamaica parish of Hanover. In 1835, Phillips unsuccessfully attempted to claim compensation from the British government for 108 people enslaved on the plantation. British slave owners received compensation of £20 million after the abolition of slavery in 1834. The Scott Trust last week acknowledged and apologised for the origins of the wealth used to fund The Guardian and expressed regret that the media company’s editorial positions, in its early decades, often supported the cotton industry and, therefore, the exploitation of enslaved Africans. COMMITMENT The trust also committed to deepening its coverage of the Caribbean, South America, and Africa, as well as of black communities in the UK and the US; funding journalism training for persons from under-represented backgrounds; and financing further slavery research through theWilberforce Institute at the University of Hull. The academic research was commissioned in late 2020 by the Trust and conducted by the University of Nottingham. The Scott Trust’s restorative justice initiative will be overseen by a four-member advisory panel of experts to guide and review its programme. Consultation will be had with descendant communities in Jamaica, the US, and the UK, as well as other experts and stakeholders. Ole Jacob Sunde, chair of the Scott Trust, said that the organisation was “deeply sorry”about the role of Taylor and his partners. “We recognise that apologising and sharing these facts transparently is only the first step in addressing The Guardian’s historical links to transatlantic slavery, which was a crime against humanity,” Sunde said. “In response to the findings, the Scott Trust is committing to fund a restorative justice programme over the next decade, which will be designed and carried out in consultation with descendant communities in the US, Jamaica, the UK and elsewhere, centred on long-term initiatives and meaningful impact.” And KatharineViner, editor-in-chief of The Guardian News &Media, said the media entity was facing up to the fact that its founder and partners sourced their wealth from“a crime against humanity”. “As we enter our third century as a news organisation, this awful history must reinforce our determination to use our journalism to expose racism, injustice and inequality, and to hold the powerful to account,”Viner said. The Guardian campaign will likely give wind to the advocacy of reparation advocates, who claim that Jamaica is due almost a third of £7.5 trillion in compensation for slavery. ‘Deeply sorry’ Jamaica to get millions in reparation funding from UK Guardian Trust FEW THINGS in Edward Seaga’s political life pained himmore than P.J. Patterson’s statement to a campaign crowd that if he descended the platform and moved among themno one could tell the difference. “Mr Seaga felt it was unkind because of all the things he had done for the Jamaican poor,” Prudence Kidd-Deans, one of Mr Seaga’s closest aides, told this newspaper. Ms Kidd-Deans might have inserted the word ‘black’ to qualify the poor Jamaicans Seaga had helped, and who he believed were being rallied against him on the basis of race. Seaga, a former prime minister and leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), was a white Jamaican of Arab descent. Patterson, who was Jamaica’s longest-serving prime minister, is unmistakable black in a country whose population overwhelmingly looks like him. Patterson was normally a mild-mannered politician. But his code-switching on the hustings said everything. As did, most people believe, Finance Minister Nigel Clarke’s pinning of the“Massa Mark” tag on Opposition Leader Mark Golding in Parliament last week. Both instances – notwithstanding Dr Clarke’s dizzying employment of sophistry on Tuesday to argue otherwise – arrive at similar places. It did Dr Clarke little credit that rather than apologise to Parliament, where his indiscretion occurred, and to Jamaica for his unfortunate remark, he doubled down on the statement and sought to mark his critics out as either fellow travellers of Mr Golding’s People’s National Party (PNP) or incapable of grasping nuanced arguments. Dr Clarke is patently wrong on both counts. EASY POLITICAL GAIN Nigel Clarke is a black Jamaican. Mr Golding is white. Dr Clarke insists that he does not engage in identity politics, especially with respect to race. Until last week, his record on that front was impeccable. Prior to the finance minister closing the Budget Debate, Mr Golding, celebrating his party’s upward movement in opinion polls, claimed that his PNP was being blamed by Labourites for every problem faced by the JLP. “Damn fools!”Mr Golding quipped. He has subsequently apologised for the remark. In Parliament, Dr Clarke chided Mr Golding for the statement, saying it painted his party’s supporters as idiots. It did not sound like Mr Golding, Dr Clarke teased, but rather like “Massa Mark”. Employed against white people in the Jamaican context, ‘Massa’ is a pejorative term/ word that evokes the privilege and power of slave owners and their descendants, who still wish to lord it over black people. Dr Clarke insists that was not the context in which he used the term, but rather to describe, as is often done in Jamaica, “a perceived attitude of those with power in relation to others, not a colour. It describes a perceived disposition, not a race”. “And it is an acceptable termof the Jamaican language that frequently appears, non-racially, in the written and spoken word,” he said. Perhaps! However, that was not how some of Dr Clarke’s parliamentary colleagues interpreted his statement. One declared that ‘Massa’ was an appropriate designation for Mr Golding because he was the“descendant of a slave master”. MESSAGES DISTORTED The sobriquet ‘Massa’ in reference to Mr Golding appears a further nine times in Dr Clarke’s prepared speech. He, however, did not use the word again, perhaps because of the uproar that occurred in the House when PNP member Angela Brown Burke attempted to have Dr Clarke withdraw the statement, and rudely defied the Speaker on being pressed to withdraw her own unparliamentary remarks. Indeed, Dr Clarke told Parliament he has nothing for which to apologise. “I regret that some persons may have viewed my remarks as racially motivated,” he said. “To again be clear, this was never my intention. To apologise, however, would be to legitimise what simply is not true.” No one believes that Dr Clarke is racist. And there is a possibility that what he claims was his intention was indeed the case. But sometimes people do not communicate what they intend. The messages are distorted by the dissonance of their own making. In which event, Dr Clarke’s“Massa Mark”message, as transmitted, was very much in the vein of a code-switching, like if he were to offer to step into the crowd. Maybe on reflection, Dr Clarke will appreciate why he owes Parliament and Jamaica an apology. Dr Clarke erred again Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke [ EDITORIAL ]
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