The Editor, Sir:

I am writing with regard to an article in The Gleaner, dated August 3, about slavery being responsible for Jamaicans' violent nature.

I totally disagree with such a claim and I think that it is full time that we stop blaming slavery for everything that we do wrong as Jamaicans. It's just like us to not want to take the blame for our actions and hurl it on to some other source. Slavery has come and gone and by God I am happy that it has ended in some way, but if every time we are going to associate bad things that happen with slavery it's no wonder why whites think that black people are bad and evil. When you think of slavery, you think of blacks and also bad.

Look for good

Why don't we as Jamaicans stop affiliating with the bad in slavery and look for the good. Yes. It's because of slavery why we are so strong and determined as a nation, it's because of what our ancestors went through and struggled in insurrections and revolutions to be free at whatever cost why we as Jamaicans are able to survive despite the obstacles the country may face or has faced.

I do respect the opinion of Professor Verene Shepherd as I have a bachelor's degree in history and archaeology from the University of the West Indies, but I think that even she can be misled by the past. Yes, Mrs. Shepherd, we do know that slavery days were violent and grotesque for slaves, but that's not why we are so violent as Jamaicans for a better word, slavery is not the primary reason why Jamaicans are violent by nature and why we are called the murder capital of the Caribbean.

Jamaicans fed up

Jamaicans are violent because we are fed up of the deprived and deplorable lives that we have been living since slavery. After slavery and emancipation, we anticipated a better life for our people, but all we got from the metropolitan Britain and the subsequent local government were promises, and, as the saying goes, a promise is a comfort to a fool. When we realised that we were being relegated to fools, we decided to retaliate in the only way we know would hurt, violence, which is a form of active resistance that we learned from our slave ancestors.

Active resistance shows our strength and how we do not sit at the pedestrian level at which we are.

I am, etc.,

KAREN

11 Range Crescent

Via Go-Jamaica

blackmadre@yahoo.com