Trinidad’s cricket clubs reproduced a stratified color-and-class hierarchy in colonial society.

Evidence

The membership of the various clubs was determined by occupation and social class and at that time, even more sharply than now, that discrimination would be virtually the same as differentiation according to color. Queens Park Club, the controllers of cricket in the island, were white and wealthy; Shamrock, Catholic French Creole traders and cocoa planters; Maple, middle class of brown skin; Shannon, the Black middle class version, white collar office types, and teachers; and then Stingo, the tradesman, artisan, worker… . Add to that that almost everybody played or took an interest in cricket and that it was played for up to eight months of the year, and some estimate of its potential for social and sublimated social expression will be grasped. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1178

Categorization

• SEED: A concrete case for how leisure institutions encode and reproduce racial-class hierarchies — an essay on sport as colonial stratification machinery could centralize this stratified-club list.
• XREF: Parallels the way the reading audience sees stratified leisure/spectator hierarchies in other colonial analyses of the Black Atlantic.