"Gay Is Not My Culture!" Critical Perspectives on Homophobic Identities Among Second-Generation Caribbean Boys in a New York City Public School

• In Event: 52.036 - Identities of School(ing) in Urban Contexts

Abstract

This paper critically examines the cultural production of homophobic identities among Caribbean boys in New York City. The study suggests that anti-gay prejudice is espoused and expressed by some US-born Caribbean boys as a strategic feature in the performance and politics of ethnic authenticity. Furthermore, the project illustrates how young Black Caribbean men perceive homophobia as an expression of moral masculinities. With Jamaica and other Caribbean islands known across the world for their widespread homophobia and restrictive laws on human sexuality, the paper points out how homophobia travels across diasporic circuits and finds reinforcement in local, peer networks in U.S. public schools. Anti-gay prejudice, findings suggest, is only a signature feature of the Caribbean ‘culture’ (Thomas, 2007), but an expanding polemic marked by historic cultural and curricular erasures in the homeland and host society.

This project takes its cue from a small but significant body of research critiquing homophobia in Jamaica, the Caribbean and its diaspora communities. Whereas as scholarship and public policy reports critique the prevailing religious and patriarchal logics of homophobia (e.g. Christian, Islamic, and Rastafari fundamentalist exegeses of sacred texts); overt and covert acts of violence toward gay and transgender young people (e.g. the mob killing of cross-dresser Dwayne Jones in Montego Bay, Jamaica); and legislative bans of same-sex relations (e.g. ‘buggery laws’ in Jamaica, Belize, Barbados and other countries); remarkably little attention has been devoted to U.S. public schools (and in the Caribbean) as subliminally violent sites of anti-gay heteronormativity. Findings confirm that homophobia is not simply a feature of toxic hyper (or underdeveloped) masculinities in Caribbean diaspora communities, or prerequisite for desired peer group relations, it is a core building block of the soft structure (or institutional habitus) of public schools in the Caribbean, the US, UK, and other parts of the world (Carter, 2012). In this regard, homophobia is not Caribbean culture, however widely experienced and imagined, but a powerful political tradition that ebbs and flows in many nation-states.

Based on a 14 month-long comparative, cross-national ethnography of second-generation Black Caribbean young people in London and NYC, this paper focuses on findings from 28 in depth interviews with 14 secondary school boys, 5 focus group interviews with working class and middle class Black Caribbean boys, classroom observations, and semi-structured interviews with 10 parents and 5 teachers in one of the few large public schools remaining in New York City to ascertain the peer group rewards gained from expressions of homophobia. The paper builds on the work of Bourdieu’s notion of organizational habitus and Connell’s conception of hegemonic masculinities to elucidate the interrelationship between self and structure in the development of homophobic masculinities. (Bourdieu, 1989; Connell, 2007; Reay, 2004)

In a national and international context informed by concerns for human rights, diversity, and justice, this study points out that homophobia is not a foreign formula or a cultural good, but signifier of hegemony co-constructed through Caribbean ‘culture’ and a U.S.-based public school curriculum that often erases queer people of color from the canons of knowledge.

Author

• Derron Wallace, Brandeis University