A So Black People Stay: Bad‐mind, Sufferation, and Discourses of Race and Unity in a Jamaican Craft Market

Craft vendors in St. James, Jamaica, interpret the competive strategies of fellow vendors as acts of animosity understood through the trope “bad‐mind.” Despite facing a marketplace increasingly constricted by foreign‐made souvenirs imported by emigrant Sindhi Indian wholesalers, vendors attribute their economic failings and the conditions that create them to a chronic black Jamaican disunity inherited from slavery. In this context, vendors reconcile their limited prospects and normative expectation of failure through the rationale of “sufferation,” a notion broadly availed within Jamaican society, to contextualize and rationalize economic adversity. What emerges is an ethnicized framing of the market as a construct through which inferences of citizenship and racial discourses are produced.