Jamaica is an island of bewildering mixed bloods and ethnicities. Chinese, Lebanese, British, Indian, Jewish and aboriginal Taino Indian have all intermarried to form an indecipherable blend and vitality of Caribbean peoples. Contrary to popular belief, Jamaicans are not all black. Many gradations - Asian, African, Arab - can exist within a single Jamaican family. In some ways, this multi-shaded community of nationalities was a more "modern" society than post-war Britain, where thousands of Jamaicans migrated in the 1950s and 1960s. British calls for racial purity often puzzled these newcomers from the West Indies, as racial mixing was not new to them. Jamaica remains a nation both parochial and international in its collision of African and European cultures.

The lighter your complexion in Jamaica, however, the more privileged you are likely to be. An insidious "shadism" has ensured that a minority of white (or near-white: what Jamaicans call "local white") inhabitants still control the plantations and other industries. So anxious are some Jamaicans to "whiten up" that they use skin-bleaches - a sad after-effect of the aristocracy of skin that evolved under the British during slavery.

As Jamaica is predominantly black, it might be thought that racial prejudice does not exist there. Jamaicans often claim that they have no "colour prejudice", only "class prejudice". Class snobberies were certainly rife among British sugar planters, as they ranged down the social scale from attorney to overseer to bookkeeper. But these were not British class distinctions (the typical planter preferred to forget his class origin): rather, they were a variant designed by men who needed to keep their "position" in West Indian society as a reward for their self-exile.

Inevitably, planter snobberies were shaped and defined by colour or, more properly, ethnicity. In order to bolster their social status, planters in the slaving era evolved an elaborate ranking of skin tones beginning with their white eminences at the top and descending to the "salt-water Negro" at the bottom. Between true black and pure white were mustees, mustaphinos, quadroons, octoroons, and Sambos (children of "mulatto" and African mix). These names have a strange poetry in their sounds, but they conceal an elaborate taxonomy of prejudice. Consequences of this "racialised" system - the minutely calibrated hierarchy of skin tones devised by the slave-driving British - have survived in Jamaica to the present day.