A Week of Wistful Confusion

Every Labor Day in Brooklyn, New York, a million or more people gather on one of the borough's grandest boulevards, Eastern Parkway, to watch and participate in a unique spectacle of costumes, music, and dance known as the West Indian-American Day Parade. This year I listened to local newscasters noting, in keeping with my memory, that the parade had changed considerably since it began 42 years ago, when I was fifteen and living in Brooklyn with my West Indian father and Jewish mother.

One of the main changes is that today's parade is much more inclusive of all the islands, British-rooted and otherwise. At the beginning, it was based almost entirely on the culture, style, and traditions of Carnival in Trinidad (which is also a part of the history of Mardi Gras in New Orleans).

For those of you who don’t know West Indians or anything about them – particularly about those who, like my father, emigrated here in the 1940s and 50s and settled largely in New York City – they are heavily British-influenced black people with a nearly Edwardian sense of propriety and protocol and a corresponding moral/religious outlook. There are some cultural and personality differences from island to island, but there used to be a very definite, overall West Indian Type (and from what I hear from my one West Indian peer, things haven’t changed much).

It may surprise or interest white people to know that in my father’s day, there was considerable antipathy between West Indians and American Blacks, which hasn’t entirely disappeared. The latter were still, in large numbers, mired in poverty and the continuing social consequences of slavery, Reconstruction, and the era of Jim Crow that led to the early days of the Civil Rights Movement and the full-scale introduction of heroin into black communities (The Ghetto).

In contrast, West Indians (whom American Blacks used to call the Black Jews; this was not intended as a compliment) were puritanical, industrious, committed to education and training, thrifty (polite for cheap), good at operating small businesses, and nearly obsessive about owning property.

Indeed, before the gentrification of Brooklyn’s famous brownstone and limestone neighborhoods by yuppies and their decorators (except for the always-elite Brooklyn Heights) in the 1990s, a good many of those old, gracious houses (single-, two- and three-family homes, mostly), were owned by West Indians – including my father (the kind of limestone my parents bought for $17,000 in 1964 now sells for $1.5 million).

Article Author: Jeanne Browne

Jeanne Browne (aka MizB) writes the blog “MizB Views From the Tower,” which focuses on contemporary culture, politics, media, major social issues and language; the Blogcritics Feature "NewsWire," an ongoing critique of TV news in all its forms; and …

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