The Unbearable Being of Whiteness: Dilemmas of Privilege and Belonging in the Decolonizing Caribbean

This essay moves toward a fuller account for the career of race in the 20^th century British West Indies.  The current literature, despite paying lip service to the persistence of a plantation order built on the inherent superiority of whiter skin, European descent and ‘western ways,’ tends to reticence with regard to racial agonism.  While incorporating and even celebrating challenges to the privileged claims of white and lighter skinned people’s claim to rightful rule, this writing nevertheless rarely registers the anxious reactions of those worried about investments in the colonial status quo.  The racially democratic dreams of British Caribbean nationalists, most histories imply, drew little doubt and occasioned little debate.

Against this habitual muffling, this paper amplifies the antagonism around race-making in the late colonial British West Indies.  After briefly probing the historical and historiographical sources of the scholarly silence around race, the essay proceeds by telling essentially a story about a story.  It contemplates a contemporary piece of fiction, Alec Waugh’s Island In The Sun, casting Waugh’s tale as a particularly articulate expression of the postwar British West Indian “color problem.”  Set on the fictionalized British West Indian colony, the 1955 novel adapted for a controversial film two years later is driven by dramatic racial intimacies and conflicts that charge, taint and bleed across personal and political ambitions.  The reception of Island in the Sun in colonies like Trinidad, Grenada and Barbados, this essay argues, betrays the strained efforts to mute the character of white supremacy British West Indies.