Color gradation within colonized families encodes a hierarchy of social worth.

Evidence

I was the blackest member of my family. The story in my family, which was always told as a joke, was that when I was born, my sister, who was much fairer than I, looked into the crib and she said, “Where did you get this coolie baby from?” Now, “coolie” is the abusive word in Jamaica for a poor East Indian, who was considered the lowest of the low. So she wouldn’t say, “Where did you get this black baby from?,” since it was unthinkable that she could have a black brother. But she did notice that I was a different color from her. This is very common in colored middle-class Jamaican families, because they are the product of mixed liaisons between African slaves and European slave-masters, and the children then come out in varying shades. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 743

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The ‘coolie’ displacement — naming the blackness she can’t name — is a textbook illustration of race-thinking as a hierarchy, relevant to the toolkit on how racism circulates through everyday speech.
• QUESTION: Worth carrying: how does the denial of the brother’s blackness (‘unthinkable that she could have a black brother’) reveal the internalization of blackness as the lowest social position?