Editor’s Note: This open letter was drafted in June by Jamaican academics regarding a series of recent incidents that demonstrate rampant state abandonment, anti-Blackness, and classism pervading Jamaican society and politics. The letter, initially signed by 27 Jamaicans whose work broadly investigates many of the issues addressed by the letter, was delivered to the Prime Minister, Dr The Most Honourable Andrew Holness, ON, PC, MP; and the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Mark Golding, MP on Friday, August 21. We invite Jamaicans at home, in the region, and the wider diaspora to add their signatures to this Open Letter to the Government of Jamaica.
Dear Dr Holness and Mr Golding:
Re: The accumulation of unbearable humiliations
We are a group of concerned Jamaicans. We are writing this letter out of a profound sense of despair and sadness over the current state of our beloved Jamaica. Three very disturbing events have motivated our intervention: the deaths of Kemelia Paul, Latoya Bulgin, and the fates of those still awaiting hurricane relief.
On June 10, 2026, news broke that thirteen-year-old Kemelia Paul died due to injuries she sustained on May 16, when she was seriously wounded by the father of her cousin while attempting to stop his assault on her relative. As Kemelia was fighting bravely for her life during her hospitalization, it became public that her family had to crowdsource funds to pay for the necessary surgical supplies unavailable at the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), our largest public hospital.
At about the time we learned of Kemelia’s stabbing, a video began circulating on social media showing the police killing of Latoya Bulgin, a resident of Granville, St James, on May 17. Ms Bulgin’s slumped body was subsequently pulled from her car and thrown onto the flatbed of a police pick-up, atop spare tyres. There are other facts about these two cases that we avoid reciting here because we do not want to participate in making anti-Black violence into a spectacle to be dissected in sensationalized and dehumanizing debates. Some may ask: anti-Black violence in a Black country? Yes, from our research we find that the way these events recur with routine and nauseating familiarity, echoing events we comfortably name as racism when they happen in other places, requires that we honestly point to the logic of anti-Blackness that is at work in Jamaica as well.
The third event is much less discrete: it is the interminable ordeal of Jamaicans waiting for assistance to reassemble their lives following the devastation of Hurricane Melissa, now regarded as the second-most-intense hurricane on record. The storm officially resulted in 45 fatalities and 109 injuries, the loss of tens of thousands of homes and other structures, and the destruction of people’s livelihoods, including farms, livestock and essential, expensive equipment. If the initial preparedness and response were lauded for their promptness, the painfully slow pace of state-supported recovery and reconstruction has worsened suffering, displacement, and distress. This event is now a long-drawn-out nightmare that many hope will end soon. Disturbingly, there is no immediate, foreseeable end to this catastrophe: the Auditor General recently revealed that less than 2% (approximately JMD$26 million/USD$164,480) of the available recovery funds have been spent. The remaining JMD$1.44 billion dollars (approximately USD$9 million) sits comfortably in government accounts, unused. This is beyond alarming.
These events—a teenager dead because of domestic violence, a woman killed by a state agent, including the mistreatment of her body like trash, and the blatant disregard for the mass suffering of vulnerable Jamaican citizens, many of whom were already marginalised and deprioritised by the state—lay bare the compounding violences and humiliations that ordinary Jamaicans must suffer daily. We wish to underline, too, that the violence and humiliations stem from practices routinised by state neglect and abandonment and are also rooted in systemic anti-Blackness.
Despite their seemingly disconnected contexts, the confounding nature of this violence and the underlying traumas all accumulate into a common feature of Jamaican life: the ongoing disposability of Black life. Indeed, these events exemplify patterns to which we have become awfully acquainted: domestic violence, police brutality, and callous abandonment by the state. While political parties of all colours co-opt the public’s outrage to browbeat their opponents, we underscore that both parties are responsible. Kemelia’s story reminds us of generational social and economic crises that structurally contribute to domestic violence, and a healthcare system that further imperils the lives of poor children like her, just as it fails to provide adequate care for so many others. Ms Bulgin’s tragic death reminds us of the entrenched misuse of security forces to repress (not fix) social problems, amplified by the fact that Ms Bulgin was also involved in protests of a prior police killing when she herself was subjected to similar treatment. Crucially, too, Hurricane Melissa alone did not victimize the long-suffering; rather, the fallouts from the failing recovery response remind us of infrastructure programs designed for middle- and upper-class mobility and the movement of money, while the majority are abandoned to a steadily declining built environment that leaves them vulnerable not only to natural disasters, but exposed to all other kinds of social and physical risks as well.
Motivated by a deep sense of concern at the unrelenting series of horrors visited upon the Jamaican people, we feel compelled to speak to the urgency of this moment. The violence and humiliations of such events that routinely leave people injured and dead are compounded because it does not seem to be a priority of the state. It is primarily working-class people, the majority of whom are Black and disenfranchised, who are routinely abandoned by the state. Structural, symbolic, and material violence becomes their portion. They are often left for dead—and blamed for their own abandonment—by a system that actively denies the obvious: anti-Blackness and elitism still shape the future we are building for modern Jamaica. These systemic forms of exclusion demand urgent attention, not just tepid Parliamentary conversations.
Why must poor people continue to beg to save the lives of their families when there are state-funded institutions established to do so? All statutory institutions— from public hospitals to the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM)—are set up in our names. They are funded by taxpayers’ money and collect funds, purportedly in the public interest. Ostensibly, these institutions are guided by a mandate to advance our vision of the future. In that spirit, it cannot be ignored when state administrators collect funds from concerned citizens and other sympathisers in the aftermath of an environmental disaster that has left many dead and homeless, while others grieve the loss of their loved ones, income and a sense of emotional and psychic well-being, and these monies do not make it to those in need—and appear to be held as seed money to build shiny arks for the powerful few. In like manner, we must all be outraged when the police, presumably acting under the noble mandate of ‘protect and serve’, break the law at a whim, and in the process kill and endanger citizens.
The government’s message—and here we refer not just to the sitting administration—seems to be that to deal with violence and crime, people must accept the suspension of their rights. In effect, we are told: ‘excuse the violence of the state as we deal with those whom we have criminalized or deemed the real problems’. But, it must be noted that those whom the state ‘deals with’ or criminalizes in this way are also victims of earlier forms of state abandonment. They exist as the Black, underemployed, who live in places deemed ‘undesirable’, and who are often the same people viewed as being in the way of the state-backed development. In effect, we are being invited to stomach the reality of the state acting with unfettered power because somehow the violence is being inflicted for ‘our own good’. The government communicates to us, everyday citizens, in words and deeds, that it has other priorities than care, justice, and creating an inclusive society.
Given state abandonment and the way it is justified through anti-Blackness, we believe we are being lulled into cosigning a future in which most Jamaicans simply do not exist. As our country invests in shortening Black life, many Jamaicans cannot imagine themselves in the future that the state is marching towards. Indeed, the architects of the state’s vision of the future appear to be building an ark that leaves most Jamaicans to drown. This is not a future to uplift ‘the sufferer’, but, rather, one built on their corpses. The current state of life for the majority of citizens would offend and grieve the hearts of those who struggled and bled for our freedom and independence.
This vicious cycle of state violence will only beget more violence if it is not urgently cauterized. In this cycle of violence, we see the duppies of colonialism. We must confront and rebuke said duppies by acknowledging how our present is connected to a past we have not fully reckoned with. We must process the long collective trauma of denialism and abandonment. Part of that response requires a program of national reparations and accountability, truly inclusive governance, political enfranchisement, and redistribution of critical resources. We need a radical program of transformation that dismantles the interlocking systems of oppression, especially the laws inherited from colonial governments – once and for all! Indeed, any viable solution must openly confront and undo the engrained anti-Blackness—indicated by the multiple and intersecting vices of colorism, classism, misogyny, and homophobia; invest in real alternatives to the default criminalization and incarceration of poor Black youth; and prioritize socioeconomic inclusion and resource redistribution to redress historic inequality.
We are aware there might well be a temptation to dismiss this letter out of hand. We are also aware that the opposite response is possible. But what is certain is that only an immediate and serious response that begins by listening to everyday Jamaicans about their plight offers any hopes for a better future.
Sincerely,
Alex A Moulton, PhD; Agostinho MN Pinnock, PhD; Rachel Goffe, PhD; Tashanna Walker-Valentine, PhD; Traci-Ann Wint, PhD; Jovante Anderson; Ronald Cummings PhD; Patricia Daley, PhD; Courtney Desiree Morris, PhD; Leo Douglas, PhD; Marcia Douglas, PhD; Honor Ford-Smith, PhD; Doreen Gordon, PhD; Brian Meeks, PhD; Beverley Mullings, PhD; Patricia Noxolo, PhD; Alana Osbourne, PhD; Kaneesha Parsard, PhD; Kevon Rhiney, PhD; Danielle Roper, PhD; Nicosia Shakes, PhD; Georgia Silvera Seamans, PhD; Faith Smith, PhD; Nicole Smythe-Johnson, PhD; Deborah A. Thomas, PhD; Cosmo D Whyte, MFA; Jermaine Young, PhD
If you are Jamaican at home, in the region, or the wider diaspora, please consider adding your signature to this OpenLetter to the Government of Jamaica.
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