sociologists-from-jamaica

"Praised across the humanities as a Renaissance scholar, Patterson has written globally influential books on slavery and its opposite pole, freedom. His works are profoundly interdisciplinary, mining comparative histories and insisting on the complex significance of culture."

"...Despite the critical acclaim for his fiction, the young scholar cooled to writing additional novels after a visit to , the legendary Barbados-born writer and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner. Patterson found Lamming living in a remote one-room apartment, a bed-sit, above a cottage in north London, and decided to stick with the regular paychecks of academia."

"The present wave of immigrants and their children are rapidly assimilating into an ever-vibrant American mainstream culture, and at a pace greater than the Europeans who came during the previous large wave"

"Going back to the earliest years of the Republic, we find that Black Americans, while being exploited as slaves and workers, and while being shunned socially into rural and urban ghettos, have nonetheless been embraced culturally. Few other groups, with the possible exception of the Jews of Europe, have contributed more to the culture of the group that dominated and excluded them, than black Americans—in music, dance, theatre, literature, sports and more generally in the style and vibrancy of its dominant culture, America is indelibly blackish. Trying to imagine America without blacks, is like trying to imagine Lake Erie without oxygen."

"...It is truly amazing that, for all this progress black Americans remain today almost as socially segregated as they were in the late sixties; that for all this cultural and political progress, combined with striking changes in the racial attitudes of white Americans, black Americans are still twice as unemployed as white Americans, that they continue to earn 65% of the median income of white Americans, exactly the same proportion that they earned in 1970, that the typical white household has 16 times the wealth of a black one, that one in 3 black youth are certain to spend part of their lives in prison, that the police of this nation still enter and treat black neighborhoods as if they are an occupying army and still feel empowered to cut down our black youth with impunity."

"Pessimism is a self-fulfilling malady."

"…it’s not just a culture, it’s a history that needs to be preserved. There have been so many omissions in our history…that’s one of the things I set out to do: to preserve…[it] might have come from my knowledge of how people’s history gets distorted and stolen."

"Louisiana was part of my larger interest in Africa and diaspora, and the need for blacks of the diaspora, and to a certain extent of Africa, to know each other and to understand that you have to get through it together, for political purposes if nothing else…[it] was an attempt to say, “Look, we’re the same thing.” So it’s not just the preservation, it’s also the preaching"

"…you can’t assimilate until you are something. Then you have something to give other people. My position is this: the universe, the universal, is beautiful, but if you imagine the world as a set of plates piled on each other, there’s this one that’s a little skewed because of a particular history in the New World: our history, that of the descendants of the slaves, is skewed, and it is at the bottom. And if you don’t settle that one, all the others will fall and crash. So that one has to be settled, has to know itself, so that it can take its place sitting firmly with all the other plates…It will continue to run away from us. People don’t know what it’s like, being snubbed for how you look, always being seen as the sniper or whatever. How can they know, unless we stick up for ourselves and say this is who we are."

"Reading Dr. Erna Brodber’s novel Myal (1988) is a transformative experience that unchains both truths and memories and moves you to explore what she calls the “half that’s not been told”...A paragon of cultural memory, Brodber lives truly, completely and freely as a cultural historian, sociologist, novelist, teacher, community organizer, social activist, caregiver, mother, entrepreneur, healer and chronicler."

"I think that what Erna Brodber is doing is wonderful because she's coming from that extremely spiritual dimension which is so powerful."

"People read about these things in something called “history” at school, but it’s not made to relate to your real life. You hear about the slaves, and who wants to be related to the slaves? They’re not people, they’re some creature that you read about. So why would you believe it happened to your people, or anywhere near you? So even if we’re doing all these things, you are not quite sure how much of it is sticking—but it’s worth a try."

"not only do I want people to know the history of the underclass, but I want them to go investigate. So, engaging with my work should send you into further investigations into knowledge. So, it’s a stimulus to knowledge search. (2015)"

"…all sorts of things that don’t even look political got mixed up with the 1970s and the new politics. So, that was how, when I came here, how I viewed Mr. Manley and Woodside. Anything that was out of the current order then was now possible. As if Mr. Manley had shattered some sort of glass globe and people could go inside and take what ideas they felt like having. It was really quite revolutionary, if unstructured. (2015)"

"I don’t know that the writers are aware enough of the rural. I mean, there’s nature, they will talk about the blue skies and they’ll talk about the roses, but—my models, which are deeply embedded in the soil, I’m not sure I see anybody else doing that. Because I’m a rural child, I understand these things, I want to understand them. So my metaphors will tend to be coming out of agriculture. (2015)"

"The business of being translated—it’s an honor if people from somewhere else, another language group, another culture, want to hear what you have to say."

"My work belongs to the people who are reading it. That’s how I hold with the work going away: people have the right to put their interpretation and their meaning into it—it is in the public arena."

"The problem of ideology ... has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation."

"Much of my professional life has been concerned with the politics of who we think we are. I've been riveted by the question of how we can understand the chaos of identifications which we seek to reach somehow, 'ourselves'. Of course this arrival never occurs; we'll never be ourselves, whatever that could mean."