Simey's Interlocutors: Postwar Jamaican Intellectuals and the Transnational Pathologization of the Black Family

University of Liverpool sociologist Thomas Simey spent three years in Jamaica as Welfare Advisor to the colonial initiative established in 1940 in response to call for increased social funding for the Caribbean.  Simey’s 1946 publication _Welfare and Planning in the West Indies_ confidently proffered blueprints for public policy, social work, and social research for the region as a whole.  In each of these arenas Simey’s proposals would be markedly influential. Indeed, the concerns about “family disorganization” he articulated set the agenda for two generations of research on the “problem” of the West Indian family.

But where did Simey’s analysis of Caribbean society—which emphasized the ways economic exclusion and racial hierarchy distorted communal life and personality development—come from?  What guided Simey's turn toward contemporaneous scholarship on black culture in the United States, which then became key evidence for his diagnoses of pathology?

This paper mines Simey’s unpublished correspondence to reveal the extensive role of members of Jamaica’s emerging intelligentsia of color in shaping Simey’s views on Caribbean family and personality.  Indeed, work that Simey published under his own name is revealed in at least one case to have been written by one such unacknowledged interlocutor, E. A. Maynier, with the help of Maynier's wife, a pioneering gynecologist.  More broadly, we discover the role played by Jamaican intellectuals, several with ties to Howard University, in pointing Simey’s attention to the literature then emerging on black communities and culture in the United States and beyond.

Non-metropolitan professionals of color, I suggest, played an unheralded role in connecting the British and U.S. debates that reframed social scientific approaches to racial disparity in the postwar generation.