Examining the Legacies of the Colonial Racialised Class Formation of the Education System in Jamaica: Towards an Anticolonial and Reparative Development Education Praxis

Abstract: This article uses racial capitalism (Robinson, 2020; 1983) and an anti-colonial discursive framework  (Dei, 2000; Dei and Asgharzadeh, 2001) to delineate the raced-classed ontological formation of schooling in Jamaica that exists in the wake of African slavery (Sharpe, 2016).  The legacies of racial-colonial-capitalism shapes educational inequality and discrimination as it pertains to rural, poor, unemployed and precarious working-class Afro-Jamaican children.  The implications of this for racially ordered class formation are discussed, particularly for poor and rural dwelling students who, if they have the opportunity, matriculate through grades one to six primary schools that are often under-resourced.  These students are less likely to attend more rigorously academic traditional high schools that were founded during the colonial era to serve the children of the white planter and upper middle classes.  I argue that the government of Jamaica’s (GOJ) efforts to disrupt the legacies of colonialism in schooling are undermined by a collision of neoliberal economic forces that are external to Jamaica and the country’s maintenance of a colonial tiered structure of schooling.  Invoking a reparative justice framework, this article calls for a movement towards a development education practice, education policy and a race-class praxis that is liberatory and empowering.

Key words: Education; Schooling; Race; Class; Colonialism; Capitalism; Anti-colonial Theory; Racial Capitalism; Reparations; Jamaica; Caribbean.

Introduction

Jamaica is a predominantly African-descendent society and a clear example of how the ‘development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions’ (Robinson, 2020: 2), directions that fuelled and justified the violence and horror of the Maafa that brought stolen Africans to the island, and other regions of the ‘New World’ to cultivate its lands.  Modern Jamaica exists in the wake of this (Sharpe, 2016).  So, too, does its education system which is also an integral part of the ongoing legacies of colonial racism and shapes educational inequality and discrimination as it pertains to rural, poor, unemployed and precarious working-class Afro-Jamaican children.  I delineate the implications of this for racialised class formation because rural dwelling and poor students who either fail to, or manage to, matriculate through under-resourced primary schools are not attending or are less likely to attend the more rigorously academic traditional high schools whose foundations were laid in the colonial era.  These institutions existed to serve the children of the plantocracy and the upper middle class exclusively and not the enslaved (Davis, 2004).

Contrary to Cook’s (2021) assertion that there are more direct policy-based interventions to disrupt the legacies of colonialism in schooling in the twenty-first century, using racial capitalism (Robinson, 2020; 1983) and an anti-colonial discursive framework (Dei, 2000; Dei and Asgharzadeh, 2001), I argue that these policies are not always being operationalised because they are actively being undermined by a composite of neoliberal economic forces that have reinforced colonial class divisions in schooling and Jamaican society.  Such an anti-colonial interruption in the development education literature is necessary as it pertains to Jamaica, and the broader Anglo-Caribbean, to subvert the colonial racial-class legacy of schooling that pervades the society.  I call for a movement towards a development education practice, education policy, and a race-class praxis that is liberatory, empowering, and reparatory justice-oriented in service to our children (Freire, 1968; Rodney, 1969; hooks, 1994).  

Racial capitalism and anti-colonial theory: a necessary intervention in development education

Reflecting on Cedric Robinson’s (2020; 1983) seminal text Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Bedour Alagraa remarked: ‘In order to accomplish the compulsory “fixing” of the working class within their subordinate position in the “lower orders”, Biblical articulations of difference … were invoked’ (Alagraa, 2018: 305).  According to Alagraa, Robinson offered a historiographical corrective to the emergence of race that signalled its intimate ontological entanglement with social class.  I raise this point here to trouble the notion that the phenomenon of class is raceless.  Too often race is not taken up in discussions about class because it is dismissed as a form of ‘identity politics’ – as though the identities that define human beings are not important or somehow irrelevant for class formation and the ways in which people experience class (Meade, 2024).              

The raced formation of class is vital to understanding the emergence of capitalism. Robinson delineates this in Black Marxism where he extends South African anti-Apartheid scholars’ Martin Legassick and David Hemson’s (1976) concept of ‘racial capitalism’.  Legassick and Hemson used racial capitalism to critique a widely held liberal belief that increased flows of international capital to South Africa would subvert Apartheid and replace it with a multiracial democracy and fair and efficient capitalist relations.  Their work implied that dismantling Apartheid without overthrowing capitalism would maintain the embedded structures that produce and reproduce racial inequality and worker exploitation (Kelley, 2020).  Robinson would later adapt racial capitalism, taking it further conceptually to indict the system of capitalism for gestating the racism that made its emergence possible (Alagraa, 2018). 

Orthodox Marxism limits our understanding of conflict to an undifferentiated – in racial terms – ‘proletariat’ that is unified by his (and not her) struggle as a labourer and does not acknowledge that racism and racialisation were first perfected in the European continent.  The European racialism ideology produced proletariat classes (Irish, Jewish, Roma, Slavic, and other peoples) who were victimised by dispossession, colonialism, and forms of enslavement (Kelley, 2020).  This prototype, that required racialised Others (Kapoor and Thompson, forthcoming) for success was then exported, modified, and deployed to suit the various contexts of colonial conquest and occupation through genocide, administered to Indigenous peoples, and African chattel slavery, thereby expanding capital accumulation.  Therefore, racial capitalism as a framework keeps race in full view and inscribes it as a constitutive feature of the rise, expansion, and flourishing of modern capitalism (Dantzler, 2021).  Importantly, through his use of racial capitalism, Robinson interrupts the West’s obfuscation of the epistemic contributions of the Black Radical Tradition.  These contributions were/are produced because of, in spite of, and in opposition to, the ongoing violence of Empire, giving birth to a global Black radical consciousness movement for justice (Biko, 1978; Alagraa, 2018).

Relatedly, and yet distinctly, anti-colonialism, which is a response to all things colonial – past, present and future – invites us, colonised people in particular, to think and reflect on the historical problem of colonialism and its legacies (Biko, 1978).  As a discursive framework, it is less concerned about a traditional fixation with/on ‘particular intellectual orthodoxies’ (Dei and Asharzadeh, 2001: 299) that are ill-equipped to understand and explain the social realities of marginalised and subordinate people.  The anti-colonial discursive framework is attuned with changing academic and political questions; thereby, making it a counter oppositional discourse to coloniality (Fanon, 1963).  As an intellectual and material praxis, anti-colonialism calls us to understand:

1. The alien and imposing forces of colonialism and neocolonialism and their innerworkings so that we may challenge them;
2. The ontology of dominant-subordinate relationships must be theorised; and colonisation, decolonisation and imperialism must be analysed intersectionally and in an integrated manner, paying keen attention to how/when their modes of operation change over time;
3. Spiritual ways of knowing are axiologically important;
4. Anti-colonialism is an epistemological creation of colonised people because it captures our experiences as subjects of the colonial and neocolonial and it puts forward a ‘literacy of resistance’ (Kempf, 2011);
5. Colonisers must be called to consciousness and encouraged to acknowledge their complicity and take responsibility for the remediation of oppressive colonial systems in partnership with colonised people; and;
6. Colonialism is a transhistorical, and not a historical phenomenon, persisting in myriad forms throughout time and space.

To achieve these, anti-colonialism requires a dialogue with the past so as to engage the historical determinants of the here and now, and the possible future (Simmons and Dei, 2012). This requires a decolonial orientation because when one talks about anti-colonialism, they are automatically talking about decolonial praxis (Dei and Jaimungal, 2018).  And, this necessitates one to consider who the producers of dominant knowledges are within the contexts of history, social location, identity, and politics.  Second, the intrinsic link between anti-colonial theory and decolonisation implores a keen understanding of the reality that remedies to the problem of colonialism cannot solely be produced by academicians, particularly those who occupy space in institutions in the West; and third, there must be an acceptance that there is no panacea to fix the world’s complex injustices.  As such, multiple epistemologies and politics need to be invoked in order to address them.

Racial capitalism and anti-colonialism are conjointly applied here because, I view them as both taking on interlocking systems of domination and control; and these are capitalism, racism, and colonialism (Gerrard, Sriprakash and Rudolph, 2022).­­­  Although racial capitalism more explicitly attends to race, class, and capital accumulation, the fluidity of the anti-colonial discursive framework, imbues it with the ability to speak to these phenomena because of its counter-oppo­­sing orientation to all things that are colonial, i.e., anything that is imposing, violent, dispossessive, or the like.  Both racial capitalism and anti-colonialism are radical intellectual projects, derived from the blood, sweat, tears, deaths, afterlives, and lives of the oppressed (Kapoor and Thompson, forthcoming) who have existed under the ‘downpressions’, as the Rastafari put it, of racial-colonial-capitalism in the ‘New World’ and in the broader terrain of the ‘darker nations’ (Prashad, 2007).  Applying these concepts to the study and praxis of development education is not only prudent, but necessary because coloniality, racism, and classism continue to shape what occurs in schools and in other sites of learning and education around the world (Andreotti et al., 2018; Rose, 2019).

The legacies of the colonial racialised class formation of the education system in Jamaica

The logics of race ordered colonial society in Jamaica, elevating the lives of members of the white plantocracy and relegating the enslaved to zones of non-being where they had no ‘human’ status (Fanon, 1967).  In this state of exception, they possessed no political life (zoe), only a biological-animal life (bios) that was exploited in the service of capital accumulation (Agamben, 1998; Mbembe, 2003; 2019).  Justifications for the perverse ideology that Africans were natural born slaves and, therefore, possessing of an inherent propensity for merciless utility were held by the Christian church, which clung to the belief that God not only mandated slaveocracy, but predestined Black people to be a ‘slave race’ (Eltis, 1999; 2007).  This religious and moral dogma – that was also believed to be necessary for Africans’ ‘soul salvation’ (Cannon, 2008) – concomitantly gave rise to the ‘mis-education of the negro’ (Woodson, 1933).  That is to say, (mis)education, was utilised to advance and sustain the system of triangular trade (Williams, 1944).  For example, enslaver, Bryan Edwards (1789) documented that many of the Africans that he ‘owned’ were literate and numerate.  As a result, he strategically organised them to avoid an intellectual cross pollination that might lead to their developing a plot to gain their freedom, or worse, overthrow slavocracy itself.  Even African American abolitionist, Fredrick Douglass’s ‘master’ remarked, an enslaved person having learned to read and write was an enslaved person ‘running away with himself’ (Givens, 2021: 12): away with his ‘owner’s’ property.  In contrast, the elite white families of the planter class educated their children at home until they were of age to be sent to Britain to complete their studies (Nugent, 2002).  Poor white families sent their children to schools that were constructed using charitable endowments from benefactors, and the enslaved barred from formal schooling (Miller, 1987; Schneider, 2018).

Prior to official Emancipation on August 1, 1834 – although the Declaration did not take effect substantively until 1838 – the Negro Education Grant was implemented by the British House of Commons to assist missionary groups who endeavoured to proselytise – but not free – Black people by schooling them on Sundays.  Although the Negro Education Grant was supposed to be available from 1835 to 1845 in yearly increments of thirty-thousand pounds, it was progressively reduced over a five-year period until the colonial government announced its cessation in 1841.  This halted the missionaries’ education expansion projects, proving that ‘nothing resembling a universal education provision could result from the Negro Education Grant’ (Gordon, 1958: 45).

The colonial ethos towards education was to extend the opportunity to learn to Black people for the purpose of maintaining the existing colonial social hierarchy and the plantation economy in the post-Emancipation years.  Critically important to achieving this objective was the bifurcation of the grades one through six elementary school system that made way for the children of the gentry to attend private preparatory (‘prep’) schools, making publicly funded primary schools the domain of the Black masses (Davis, 2004).  This created the divergent pathways to post-secondary education.  Prep school graduates typically went on to attend ‘traditional high schools’, whose foundations were laid in the colonial era for elite white children.  And despite their being roughly the same age and also having matriculated through grades one through six, primary school graduates were more likely to attend ‘technical’/ ‘non-traditional’ high schools that were established by a grant from the Carnegie Foundation in the early 1940s (Miller, 1999).  According to Bourne et al. (2015: 1):

“The traditional high school … represents, 1) excellent academic performers, 2) competency and highly knowledgeable students, 3) students who are more likely to meet the requirements to attend universities, colleges and nonskilled professions.  On the other hand, the non-traditional high school students are those who are less knowledgeable, more fitting for skilled professions and least likely to enter universities or colleges, which surmounts additional psychological stress on students at the primary school [level] … to perform in keeping with success, knowledge, competence and societal expectations …”.

From Bourne et al.’s (2015) description, we ascertain that embedded in the ‘hidden curricula’ of traditional and non-traditional high schools is tacit preparation for relating to the productive economy in particular ways (Anyon, 1980).  The differences in structuration in the two streams of schooling, i.e., pedagogical, evaluative, etc., emphasise the development of certain cognitive and behavioural skills in relation to work, capital, authority, and societal expectations (Ibid.).  Today, ‘the Jamaican education system continues to reflect the dual system of the nineteenth century, and the socioeconomic structure [of society] corresponds to the segregation within the education system as the country progresses’ (Cook, 2021: 153).  In other words, the racialised and classed foundations of Jamaican society are reflected in classrooms and will likely remain a fixture therein as the island-nation advances into the future, with white and Brown (mix-raced) Jamaicans maintaining higher levels of educational achievement than Black Jamaicans (Gordon, 1991; Evans, 2001; Kelly, 2020; Cook, 2021).

The fact that there was no fundamental break away from the education of colonial times has not been without significant challenges. According to Miller (1999), the State made an implicit judgement that the model was inherently good and only needed to be ‘Jamaicanized’ / ‘Caribbeanized’ and expanded to reach a broader base of people.  From an anti-colonial perspective, these challenges stem from a collision of historical colonialism and neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1966).  By this, I mean, the colonial tiered structure of schooling, which emerged out of the classificatory logic of race (Wynter, 1994), was met by new economic imperialisms that have made the provision of education difficult in the current time-space weakening its capacity to serve as a mechanism for upward class mobility.  In addition to the social consequences of this, there is a deep theoretical meaning behind the insidious ongoing legacy of colonialism in schooling.  It is implicated in Jamaica’s post-colonial mimicry (Bhabha, 1994) of the raced-classed colonial society that preceded it, further separating the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ and advantaging a small group of elite people ‘who were really the beneficiaries of colonialism … and of [the colonial] period’s process of economic exploitation’ (Manley, 2011) as Michael Manley, the former People’s National Party (PNP) leader, remarked in a 1977 interview. Manley’s words not only signal a continuum of the colonial in Jamaican society, but a fixedness of a racial capitalist hierarchy that made the metaphorical playing field uneven in the country’s post-independence years.

Attempting to break colonial patterns of racialisation and classism and move towards an egalitarian society, Manley declared ‘free education for all’ in 1973, promising the removal of secondary and tertiary school fees.  Upper class Jamaicans, who were comfortable with the existing social arrangements, were vehemently opposed to this and believed that the-then prime minister was mismanaging the economy and leaning towards communism (Haughton, 2022). Critiquing this declaration, Keith (1978: 47) postulated that it ‘enlarged … marginal educational benefits to the working class without altering the elite bias of the secondary grammar [traditional] schools themselves’, making it a ‘pseudo rather than real’ (Ibid.) kind of educational reform.  There were limits to the state’s ability to deceive the Black masses into thinking that the reforming of the education system was tantamount to re-making it to suit the diverse economic and social needs of the population (Ibid.).  In light of the un-addressed ubiquity of class, race, and colour divisions in Jamaican schools, Hyacinth Evans (2001: 150) called for a ‘radical reorientation’ and ‘new consciousness’ in education praxes on the part of schools, teachers, and society on a whole, that would critique and work to uproot coloniality and the enduring legacies of racial capitalism.

Despite efforts to increase education’s bandwidth in the years following adult suffrage (1944) and independence (1962) (Miller, 1999), stratified and skewed resources were, and still are a consistent problem (Evans, 2001; Stewart, 2015; Thompson, 2020, 2021, in press).  This is not only because the two-tiered prep school-primary school divide remains in-tact, but because new imperialisms that have infiltrated the country via the loan agreement conditions of international financial institutions (IFIs), in particular the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have deeply impacted education spending and resourcing (Miller, 1992; 1999; Thompson, 2020, 2021).  Hence, the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) concluding the PNP’s socialist-democratic free education for all programme in 1986.  When Manley returned to office in 1989, he would uphold the JLPs decision, announcing that new thinking on the matter determined that those who had the means to pay school fees should so not to burden the public sector budget and the increasingly volatile Jamaican economy (Burke, 2012).

 IMF structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), which exist to ‘help’ heavily indebted countries restructure their debt to external creditors, have worsened existing colonial divisions in schooling and engendered new ones.  This is because, SAPs not only require loan recipient nations to open their economies to foreign exchange and devalue their currency to make the cost of doing business cheaper, but they must also diminish their public spending.  Since 1977, the year that SAPs took root in Jamaica, education has been on the chopping block, thus, the Ministry of Education and Youth’s (MoEY) capacity to provide an accessible and effective public-school programme was further compromised, causing schools – and by extension the State – to rely on the international community for support, including members of the Jamaican diaspora (Thompson, 2020, 2021).

As an active Jamaican diasporan and researcher, I am intimately aware of this phenomenon and know first-hand the challenges that austerity in education cause (Thompson, 2020, 2021, forthcoming).  Overcrowding; old, decrepit, and inaccessible buildings; unsafe play conditions; near defunct and barely operable bathroom and sanitation facilities; understaffing; and inadequate teaching, learning, and clerical materials are some of the obstacles that I have witnessed in the last decade at the invitation of dedicated principals and teachers at the primary school-level (Thompson, 2020, 2021).  These educators were seeking help for their schools because their meagre MoEY-issued budgets were not enough to make ends meet.  Their willingness to clean and maintain their institutions, fundraise, and spend their own money on school supplies, and sometimes, food, bus fare, and clothing for students who are the most in need signal that stark inequities are a historical and contemporary reality in schooling.  Hence, the deep dependency that the Jamaican education system has had on charitable support from organisations such as the Carnegie Foundation (as mentioned above); the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) (now, Global Affairs Canada); the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), British Development Division (now, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)); and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to fund schooling at all levels (Thompson, 2020). 

It is important to note that these welfare-like relationships pre-date the SAP-era (Ibid.). And they have also been forged with international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs), and government agencies that rarely acknowledge or take the time to explore the historical and structural causes of the problems that they seek to remedy (Fricke, 2022).  INGOs, NGDOs, and government agencies’ failure to cultivate new perspectives about the ontological existence and persistence of oppression under racial capitalism remains glaringly absent, and therefore, limits the transformative possibilities of their initiatives (Ibid.).  The same can be said about IFIs’ involvement in education projects (Rose, 2019).  This critique is timely given the signing of the Jamaica Education Project (JEP) loan agreement between the World Bank and the government of Jamaica (GOJ) to address the country’s post-COVID-19 learning crises in 2023 (Ministry of Finance and Public Service, 2023).

The solicitation of funds from the international donor and IFI communities to support the delivery of public schooling has reincarnated old colonial dependencies that are reminiscent of the paltry Negro Education Grant, discussed above, that was administered from the metropole of Britain to educate enslaved Africans.  Similarly, charitable giving to Jamaican schools has resulted in failed and incomplete projects and it has also reified colonial divisions in schooling. Nowhere has this become more visible than through the money and gifts-in-kind that schools receive from their alumni who reside in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, where the vast majority of the Jamaican diaspora is based.  Traditional high schools typically receive more support because their alumni tend to organise formally by obtaining charitable status and hosting elaborate fundraising events (Thompson, 2021).  Transnational-diasporic alumni giving to traditional high schools widens the resource gap amongst schools, leaving technical high schools as well as primary and basic schools (pre-schools) and the students that they serve behind (Ibid). 

Taking note of this, and seeking to capitalise on the Jamaican diaspora’s sense of responsibility and attachment to their schools, a registered charity called the National Education Trust (NET) was founded by the GOJ in 2010 to mobilise ‘financial and quality resource investments for the education sector … to bring transformative impact to underserved areas in the education system [and] achiev[e] greater levels of access to education and learning’ (NET, 2024).  The NET’s efforts to solicit funds on behalf of the GOJ both locally and internationally is an articulation of a public-private philanthropic partnership (PPPP) (Maxwell et al., 2023).  In many states, PPPPs and public-private partnerships (PPPs), that draw on investments from corporations, have become go-to policy responses to the deleterious impact of neoliberalism on education (Fricke, 2022).  In this respect, the very existence of the NET is an admission – without explicitly stating it – that the GOJ is incapable of delivering a public-school programme without help from donors.  In a personal communication, this was confirmed by a representative from the MoEY who remarked:

“We just want persons to know that we are truly grateful for all the help that the schools receive from [the] Diaspora, from any organization as a matter of fact.  Because we are cognizant of the fact that the [MoEY] cannot provide all the resources that our schools really need on a daily basis.  So, any help that we can get, any external help, is greatly appreciated” (Thompson, 2021: 302).

Ruminating on this sobering reality, it is difficult to ignore that under-resourcing appears to be a feature of school systems globally (Dei and Jaimungal, 2018).  However, this is particularly harmful to African-descendant children, and other racialised students, who live in the afterlife of slavery and an incomplete emancipation project that structures the present-day (Manjapra, 2022). 

Therefore, the racialising and colonising logics that sought to enslave both minds and bodies during ‘official’ colonisation cannot be divorced from their current contexts.  Poignantly, Best (1968), Perry (2023), and others have argued that the IMF and other IFIs, such as the World Bank’s, control over Jamaica, and other Caribbean countries’ economies, is an extension of the plantation economy that is an encumbrance on their sovereignty as nation-states.  A spatial construct that evolves and takes on new forms over time, the plantation was ‘pure’ under slavocracy, ‘re-modelled’ in the post-Emancipation era, and ‘further re-modelled’ in the post-colonial era (Best, 1968; 2012; Perry, 2023).  And it remains a constant feature that limits Caribbean nations’ decision-making power and actions after independence (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979).  In Walter Rodney’s (1981: 216) seminal monograph How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he wrote:

“It is obvious that capitalists do not set out to create other capitalists, who would be rivals.  On the contrary, the tendency of capitalism in Europe from the very beginning was one of competition, elimination, and monopoly.  Therefore, when the imperialist stage was reached, the metropolitan capitalists had no intention of allowing rivals to arise in the dependencies”.

What Rodney described is the strategic making of underdevelopment that began in the racial and classed enclaves of Eurocentrism.  In no uncertain terms, former colonies’ hands – and feet – were tied by these hierarchising logics that were not meant to disappear when they achieved their independence but hold them firmly in ‘their place’ today.  For this reason, I submit that the GOJ’s inability to deliver adequate public services to its population because of IFI involvement, including appropriately resourced schooling, is not a matter of happenstance. Nor is the country’s maintenance of a polarising colonial structure of schooling.  The metaphorical wheels of the sugar machine, that refined ‘white gold’ for export and sale through the triangular trade route (Muhammad, 2019), are still turning in the Caribbean, reproducing colonial race-class formations in schooling and society; especially as it pertains to rural, poor, unemployed and precarious working-class Afro-Jamaican children.

Towards an anticolonial development education policy/praxis: Epistemic and material reparations, now

Sriprakash (2023: 783) asked: ‘what forms of reparative redress are needed to make future systems of schooling just?’.  I further probe seeking to ascertain how reparations from Britian, and other Western countries who benefitted from enslavement, can pay the ‘education debt’ (Ladson-Billings, 2006) owed to Afro-Jamaican children?  How can we, not only reimagine schools, but build new schools founded on both educational and intersectional justice (Love, 2019; Neal and Dunn, 2020)?  How do we reject the ravages of racial-colonial-capitalism in educational spaces and centre healing, love, joy, and flourishing?  There are no easy answers to these queries.  However, appealing to the descendants of Africans whose mis-education fuelled the system of triangular trade and whose duty it is to seek redress for the violences wrought against them (Shepherd, 2019), I argue, in a similar manner as Brissett and jules (2023), that both epistemic and material reparations are needed to counter educational injustices.

In an epistemic sense, to lay hold of reparative futures in education and schooling requires a Sankofa moment.  One that calls us – perpetrators and injured parties – to look to the past, with its atrocities, for wisdom to look ahead.  For this reason, Brissett and jules (2023: 11) called for ‘the formal and explicit recognition by global powers within the modernist development structures that historical trauma has affected the descendants of enslaved peoples beyond materialist ways’.  In other words, countries that carried out, and expanded their empires, via the Maafa should acknowledge and affirm that mental slavery is one of its enduring legacies in the twenty-first century (Longman-Mills, Mitchell and Abel, 2019).  And as discussed throughout this article, the process of schooling reinscribed racial colonial violence.  This occurred through the deployment of a ‘plantation pedagogy’ to simultaneously hold captive the minds of enslaved Africans, and freed Africans in the post-Emancipation era, to reinforce their role as human machinery in the cultivation of lands and the refining of natural resources for trade (Marquez, 2024). 

For epistemic reparations to occur, a movement away from the plantation pedagogy model, which today is manifested in Caribbean classrooms through ‘command-and-control’ and ‘knowledge transfer’ approaches to teaching and learning that centre Western ways of knowing as per ‘global standards’ in education (Brissett and jules, 2023), is needed to make classrooms spaces liberatory (hooks, 1994).  Spaces where a critical consciousness can emerge that requires us to think historically about our collective future (Rodney, 1969; hooks, 1994; Thompson and Tong, forthcoming).  A ‘Reparative Pedagogy’ (Smith, 2019) – so to speak.  One that will incite a ‘revolution of awareness through teaching and learning’ and be ‘reflective, promote … critical thinking, [be] culturally keen, and grounded in the language and history of the region (Murrell 2002: 59)’ (Ibid.).  One that calls upon students – both in and outside of classrooms – to challenge all oppressive systems, even the ones that Jamaica, and the wider-Caribbean, depend on (Ibid.).  And, finally, one whose teleological goal is to produce another politics that transcends the realm of racial capitalism and coloniality (Thompson and Tong, forthcoming).  This is a much-needed anti-colonial intervention in development education policy and praxis that often reinforces assumptive frameworks that construct education as only a path to upward social mobility or a force of social reproduction (Sriprakash, 2023).  Education can and must do more than this.  More than sustain ‘educated’-‘uneducated’ and ‘literate’-‘illiterate’ hierarchies (Hickling-Hudson, 2002; Moon, 2022; Sriprakash et al., 2020).  And more than produce labourers for the existing racialised, classed, and gendered productive economy. 

Thinking about the need for material reparations to counter educational injustices, requires an acknowledgment of existing calls for reparatory justice in the Caribbean (Beckles, 2013; Beckles, Shepherd and Reid, 2019; Eugene, 2024, and others).  These calls have been met by both silence and contestation from European metropolises, especially Britian, who benefitted from African slavery, as well as Indigenous genocide, and Asian indentured labour (Beckles, 2013).  And the vast majority of Caribbean citizens, who are the most impacted by the legacies of British colonialism – and I aver that these are African-descendent people – believe there is an ethical, legal, political, and moral reparation case to be answered for the crimes against humanity that were committed through slavocracy, and the subsequent system of racial apartheid (Ibid.).

To prepare and formalise the case for material reparations, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) established the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC) in 2013.  The CRC proposed a pathway to justice, truth, and reconciliation through its articulation of a 10-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice.  Point 6 of the Plan calls for ‘Education Programmes’ (CARICOM, no date) to make recompense for the ‘flawed education system, inadequate schools, high illiteracy, and … [colonially instituted] structural discrimination’ (Ibid.) that pervades Caribbean learning institutions.  According to the CRC, ‘European States which presided over this system have a responsibility to build on the laudable efforts of the CARICOM post-colonial regimes, build educational capacity, and provide scholarships’ (Ibid.) to the victims and descendants of historical and contemporary racial-colonial-capitalism. 

The CRC asserts that the development of the Caribbean region requires an educated population.  From a structural functionalist perspective, point 6 of the 10-point plan is pragmatic and a good starting point for thinking about reparatory justice within the context of education in the Caribbean.  In theory, it may widen access to education and schooling so that bearers of the legacy of enslavement, and other forms of racialised oppression, can access basic and advanced technical knowledge to contribute to the productive economy, and consequentially, national and regional development.  However, it would be remiss not to point out that point 6, and the CARICOM reparations campaign en masse, is a neoliberal policy construction that does not provide a critique of, or solution for, the ongoing problem of racial capitalism to which the problem of educational injustice is attendant.  Instead, reinforcing – and inadvertently reproducing modernisationist approaches to development which are rooted in the logics of racial capitalism – the Caricom Reparations Justice Program (CRJP) invites the participation of European governments in ‘prepar[ing] … victims and sufferers for full admission …’ (Ibid.) into the global capitalist system (Eugene, 2024).  

I argue that an anti-colonial orientation towards taking reparations is needed in the Caribbean (Wittmann, 2013; O’Marde, 2019).  ‘Take’ in this respect means a mass mobilisation of impacted African-descendent, and other racialised peoples, and their organisations and activist groups, standing on the legal entitlement of the claim to reparations, whilst launching ‘initiatives of a moral, diplomatic and political nature … to … force them [perpetrator countries] to the negotiation table’ (O’Marde, 2019: 248).  At this table, or series of table meetings, the terms for the distribution of material reparations can be laid out in a manner that transcends the existing neocolonial order of late capitalism, which includes the paternalistic international development industry that positions perpetrator countries as benefactors and not the historical and contemporary plunderers of the ‘developing world’ / ‘global south’ / ‘majority world’ whose natural resources and labour built their nations (Hickel, 2015). 

Bearing this in mind, material wealth must be returned to the Caribbean, but not in the form of official development assistance (ODA) (Richards, 2019; Brissett and jules, 2023) or foreign direct investment (FDI) (O’Marde, 2019) programmes.  These entities are riddled with conditionalities that favour donor countries and have, in many instances, been proven to have no (positive) qualitative impact (Kesar and Kvangraven, 2024).  Although only a starting point, all post-colonial country debts held by IFIs and banks in the West should be cancelled to allow Caribbean nations to redirect the exorbitant amounts that they pay in debt servicing fees to public purveyances, including public schooling which requires much more resourcing than it is currently afforded in the SAP-era.  As discussed earlier, under-resourcing has reified historical colonial divisions in schooling, and therefore, increased the education debt to Afro-Jamaican/Caribbean children.

An amalgamation of racial, capitalist, colonial, post-colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal forces have shaped, and are shaping, Jamaica and the rest of the contemporary Caribbean’s societies and education systems.  Moving towards a development education practice and policy that attends to this reality is imperative, making epistemic and material forms of repair a matter of intergenerational justice (Sriprakash, 2023).  This is a charge to fulfill moral and ethical obligations to past, present, and future people in the spirit of world(re)making. I have attempted, in this article, to emphasise the need to continue this conversation to achieve this end.

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Giselle F. Thompson is the Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Education at the University of Alberta, where she teaches in the Social Justice and International Studies in Education graduate specialisation and the Bachelor of Education programme.  Her award-winning research exists at the nexus of critical studies in the sociologies of race, education, gender, diaspora, and international development and seeks to understand how colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and modernity operate globally and are implicated in the ongoing (mis)education of Black people.  She is particularly concerned with how anti-Black racism in its various iterations including, but not limited to, lack of accessibility, under resourcing, and curricular deficits impede holistic learning for Black school-aged children and youth and diasporic groups in both local and transnational contexts.  Her current research project examines the ways in which the transhistorical phenomenon of Black motherwork is deployed in school settings and in other sites of learning to resist these social maladies, whilst transmitting ethics of love, care, and concern.  In 2023, she launched the University of Alberta’s first Black Studies course where she used Walter Rodney’s ‘groundings’ as a pedagogical tool to immerse graduate students in paradigms of transnational Black/Africentric thought.