Let me state the obvious right at the start: In the Jamaican colour continuum from coal black to lily white, I, like Rex Nettleford, am among the blackest of Jamaicans. It is always a bit of comic theatre to hear thoroughly mongrelised people, which all Jamaicans are, defending their black credentials as if it were constantly under attack and their lives depended on it.

So a brown Jamaican man has 'beaten' a blacker area-born contender in the North East St Catherine by-election. Similarly, a brown man delivered a 'whipping' to a darker opponent in West Portland.

Gregory Mair was returned to a Parliament by a margin of 2,657 votes, 265 more than he received in the September 2007 general election, and handsomely exceeding his own projection of a 2,000, vote margin of victory, even with lower voter turnout. By any measure, this is an extraordinary performance by an incumbent member of parliament in a government with a weak majority, and 21 months into office, and presiding over an economy on its way south.

This is the big story. But media, by and large, aren't getting it. Within the space of a few hours, I, as just one public affairs analyst, received three invitations to discuss the state of the People's National Party (PNP) and why it lost the by-election. These are the times when one deeply wishes that that great and non-partisan political sociologist Carl Stone were alive and working.

The real story

The real story, awaiting rigorous dissection, was how an unpopular political party, kept out of office for 18 years and barely winning a majority to form the Government, can manage to be increasing its level of support under the kinds of hostile conditions of the last 21 months. A rational reading of the matter is that voters are sticking to their decision to give the Bruce Golding-led Jamaica Lablour Party (JLP) government its fair chance at governing, as it was asked to do in September 2007, and will not be deterred by opposition cries of scandal and corruption and mismanagement.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the 70-year-old PNP, why it is losing elections, which can't be fixed by a stint in the political wilderness.

I raised in a radio discussion whether running unknown black candidates plucked at random off the streets of one of the villages of NE St Catherine and only differentiated by the colour of their shirts would have had any significant influence on the outcome of the by-election. I don't think so. The people of NE St Catherine have voted for the parties and their leaders and, historically, on top of everything else, NE St Catherine is a JLP-dominant seat. One of Carl Stone's critical insights into our political sociology is that the whole country and the electorate behave like one big constituency.

Stone also rejected the neat but superficial classification of race and class and their linkage, in which most other scholars have taken such comfort, but which severely distorts social reality. And I follow him. There is no neat black, brown and white Jamaica with class neatly tied to colour. There is a complex, dynamic continuum of colour and class in a thoroughly creolised and mongrelised society.

And despite the trumpeted tensions, race and class harmony, by any international comparative measure, are extraordinarily good, as brown man Norman Manley advised the Philadelphia Bar Association in the racist United States in 1967. The Sri Lankans, as just one current example, have just completed a decades-old civil war pitting the minority and oppressed Tamils against the dominant Sinhalese.

Four broad socio-economic categories

Stone sensibly classified classes in the Jamaican political economy by distinctions of both income and non-material status. In 'Class, State, and Democracy in Jamaica' and an earlier paper on 'Class, Race, and Political Behaviour in Urban Jamaica', he identified four broad socio-economic categories in Jamaican social structure:

1. An upper class of capitalists (large-scale business owners and planters).

2. An upper-middle class, made up of professionals, owners of medium-size businesses, college-level educators, corporate managers, senior bureaucrats in the public sector, and leaders of voluntary associations.

3. A lower-middle class, consisting of small-scale business owners, primary and secondary-school teachers, white-collar workers (in private business, civil administration, and parastatal organisations), skilled workers, and owners of medium-size farms.

4. A lower class of small peasants, agricultural workers, labourers (unskilled and semi-skilled), and the substantial number of rural and urban unemployed (Stone, 1973).

Stone's work delineates a complicated link between class and party loyalty.

I have done some research extensively using the Handbook of Jamaica, which was published between the 1880s and the 1970s. You can literally see in the photographs included a progressive blackening of political leadership and public administration.

Manley, addressing the Philadelphia Bar Association in 1967, told his audience: "We have a two-party system accepted and deeply entrenched ... . Jamaica is second to few, if any, countries that are seeking to solve the problems of racial integration and harmony." Manley wanted a Jamaica "where colour has ceased to have any psychological significance in society".

Psychological significance of colour

The running psychological significance of colour in Jamaica is as much a condition of the darker shades being constantly and contentiously on the colour defensive, as the lighter shades on the colour continuum projecting superiority. And reverse racism is apparently quite acceptable as compensation for wrongs suffered in the past. The colour game is a draining and counterproductive one which this blackie tuttus flatly refuses to play.

And just to note, in closing, the biggest colour licks that I have received from childhood to past 50 have been delivered by visibly black compatriots only a shade or two lighter in colour, who, in delivering them, sought to advance their standing in their own eyes.

,i>Martin Henry is a communications consultant who may be reached at medhen@gmail.com. Feedback may also be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.