The University of Florida campus is alive with the hustle and bustle of approximately 50,000 students – only 3,764 of whom identify themselves as black, according to the UF Office of Institutional Planning and Research.
Among the relatively miniscule black population, there are many different cultural identities other than African American. There is an increasingly large Caribbean population at UF, with people representing a wide variety of countries including Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, Haiti and more.
At first glance, you might look across the Set and see a sharp cultural divide. Just as the title of the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? made that important inquiry, black UF students should ask a few similar questions as well: Why are all the Caribbeans sitting together on the Set? Why are a number of African Americans reluctant to explore a black culture other than their own?
The situation is not unique. It has been proven that people tend to group with others that have a similar background as they do. For instance, each island in the Caribbean has unique music, food, culture and dialects, so it is easier to become close to people who realize and appreciate that.
“I surround myself with people who understand where I’m coming from,” Tresha Miller, the former president of UF’s Caribbean Student Association (CaribSA), said.
However, Julien Subran, a UF student, believes that this separation is due to cultural pride.
“If you call anyone with Caribbean heritage African American, they tend to say that they aren’t and declare their country of origin,” Subran said.
People who grew up in the Caribbean were inherently raised with an awareness of their country, learning about the rich historical mosaic which makes the islands so unique.
Also, the parents of Caribbean-Americans tend to instill a sense of pride and historical knowledge in their children.
Furthermore, there are Caribbeans who are mixed with different ethnicities, such as White, Chinese and Indian, that may not identify as black.
Many people who migrate to America do not want to lose sight of their cultures, so they live as they did in whichever island they came from. Caribbean immigrants tend to group with people from similar backgrounds, shop at Caribbean-owned stores and maintain cultural ties.
Though passing down history and traditions is a major reason why black people still have a cultural identity after centuries of dehumanization, does instilling strong national pride breed stereotypes within the black race?
“I remember my father, who is Jamaican, telling me to stay away from ‘Yankees’” said Bradley Black, a UF student and mediator of the group Conscious Black People.
According to Black, some Caribbeans have a prejudice against black Americans because they believe the typical stereotypes prevalent about black people.
Caribbean people in America have fallen victim to stereotypes as well.
“People think everyone in CaribSA is Jamaican, speaks patois and eats jerk chicken,” Marcia Virgo, former president of CaribSA , said. “There are stereotypes about people smoking [weed], that all we do is party and that CaribSA doesn’t care about problems at UF.”
Billy Holcombe, former president of BSU, has heard the stereotypes as well.
“I have heard stereotypes about African Americans being lazy and about Jamaicans working all the time,” Holcombe said. “It’s all because of a general lack of understanding of each culture.”
Each and every black student at UF is overcoming stereotypes by being enrolled in an institution of higher education. With such a long-lived animosity towards black people, blatantly or not, by the Eurocentric ideals of White America, why are we stereotyping each other?
The only way to combat the lack of cultural understanding and competency is to be open-minded. Some students feel awkward when it comes to attending a meeting for a cultural organization other than their own. But these meetings are the perfect place to learn something new about the world’s people, especially cultures within the African Diaspora.
Christopher Sams, a UF student from Savannah, Ga., opened his mind and attended a CaribSA meeting.
“It surprised the heck out of me,” Sams said. “I didn’t know that there were blacks in Trinidad and Tobago.”
“I saw that the Caribbean and African American lifestyles and cultures were surprisingly different, but alike at the same time. Black people are black people,” he said.
A solution to the vast cultural misunderstanding lies in the collaboration of cultural organizations on the UF campus – BSU, CaribSA, Club Creole, the Jamaican-American Student Association, and also the African Students Union.
“Seldom have I seen ASU, Caribsa, JAMSA and Club Creole all come together for an event,” Subran said.
Though it may not be overtly noticeable to the student body, according to Holcombe, collaborations have been improving.
According to Tresha Miller, coming together is not as easy as general body members may believe it to be, however there is a greater level of understanding when one reaches the executive board of an organization.
“It’s hard for e-boards to get together,” Miller said. “There is a level of selfishness because each group caters to a certain audience.”
Despite the challenges of coming together, many black organizations have had co-sponsored events. CaribSA and BSU hosted an AIDS forum as part of Black History Month, and CaribSA, JAMSA, Club Creole and ASU hosted a soccer tournament.
The opportunity is there for people to explore cultures other than their own. It is up to the students to decide that they care enough to expand their horizons and help to tear down cultural divides.
Cultural barriers are superficial because the experience of people who came from Africa to the Americas in the triangular trade was essentially the same. They were stolen from Africa and brought to the “New World,” “fighting on arrival and fighting for survival,” as the Jamaican music legend Bob Marley sang.
Our ancestors were all stripped of their African families, names, religions and languages and forced to create a new cultural identity wherever the captain of the slave ship decided to take his human cargo.
Both African Americans and Caribbeans fought for independence and the rights to self-determination from their oppressors and colonizers.
“Unity is crucial to stop spinning in circles and move forward,” Black said. “Jamaica has been the number one murder capital in the world, and crack is crippling the people today the same way the F.B.I. used it to cripple American communities in the sixties and seventies.”
The key to unity among black people is to make an effort to learn about what people from various countries have offered to black culture and history as a whole.
"Haiti gave us the first and most successful slave revolts as well as original literature in the New World that led to many others, even here in America,” Black said. “Our heroes of the past and present are the same. Dr. King, Garvey, Nanny of the Maroons, Nkrumah, Ida B. Wells and Nelson Mandela all originated in different countries, but they resonate and speak for the entire black world and all of humanity in a broader sense.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. went on a trip to the island of Jamaica in 1965, to deliver the commencement speech at the University of the West Indies and was inspired by the apparent unity of all races.
“Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, ‘Out of many people, one people.’ And they say, ‘Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.’ One day, here in America, I hope that we will see this and we will become one big family of Americans.,” the great Dr. King said.
His sermon should inspire blacks from all nationalities to aspire to unite as “one big family” of black people and Americans (for we are all living in this country).
Few things unite and inspire people more than music, and as the lyrics of Bob Marley state, “Let’s get together and feel alright” because “none but ourselves can free our minds.”
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