Caribbean identity is a hierarchical hybrid between European and African racial poles

Evidence

In reality, what is “West Indian” or “Caribbean” has come to be cognitively constructed as the product of cultural and racial hybridization. To be “West Indian” is to be located along a continuum spanning from the “pure” European at one pole to the “pure” African at the other. These refer to putative notions of racial and cultural purity. However, in the hybridized reality of Creole space, racial and cultural purity cannot exist together. The Creole at the European end of the spectrum is always tainted by contact with the “uncivilized” that has emerged historically as a creation of the European discursive imagination. At the African end, the Creole is the historical product of redemption from a past rendered “savage” in the panoptic gaze of the conquering European. Such redemption is achieved in contact with Europe’s civilizing influences. The extremes exist as cultural hybrids. They represent the implications of a culturally compromised racial purity. Without a compromised polluted culture, the European could not be accommodated within the social space. For the racially pure African, accommodation at the “lower” extremes of creolite is accomplished through cultural redemption. The combination of racial and cultural hybridity determines location in between the extremes. For the European, this pertains to the degree of cultural and racial pollution. It implies a descent from civilization. For the African, creolization implies ascent made possible by the acquisition of European cultural forms and by racial miscegenation whose extensiveness is signified by color. This, in essence, is the meaning of creolization. It is a process that stands at the center of constructs of Caribbean identity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3204

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines creolization as the hierarchical placement along a racial and cultural continuum between European and African poles.
• XREF: Connects to broader literature on colonial racial hierarchies, passing, and hybridity — echoes work like Edouard Glissant and creolization theorists. — connects to: Roots-style genealogical ancestry distorts Caribbean identity — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 411