Afro-Caribbean emigration to the United States has a long history. Yet Colony of Jamaica though it was, when Colin Powell's parents left it, then it did not have the racial problems of the United States even now, never mind in the 1930s.
Jamaica first acquired an indisputably black Prime Minister when Powell was a few weeks short of 30. In 1992, when both parties eventually decided against offering Powell the Vice Presidential nomination, a black man of his own generation, P.J. Patterson, began 14 years as Prime Minister of Jamaica. Patterson had not cut his teeth or made his name by using his Ronson and Zippo cigarette lighters to set fire to the straw huts of Vietnam.
Powell's parents left the British Empire, in which black people were by then doing rather better than in the Empire that they chose instead. From Vietnam to Iraq, via plenty of other places, their son's war crimes for the New Empire were all the worse for the fact that he was black.
He was no Muhammad Ali.
ReplyDeleteHis background perhaps made him feel that America was not yet quite his to criticise. I am being very charitable indeed here.
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