Remember that “racist” Super Bowl Volkswagen ad?
The one that showed a white guy talking in a fake Jamaican accent, hinting that Jamaicans are, you know, kinda laid back a little bit?
Well, the Jamaican government just hired the “racist” star of that “racist” commercial.
To star in a campaign to promote… Jamaica!
And this Jamaican writer isn’t impressed, because, well:
… who is going to fix those behavioural and attitudinal problems, which are at least as important as hindrances to progress, if not more, than the macroeconomic problems? We are not heartened by the stories and experiences of our work-work-work prime minister’s chronic lateness for engagements.
Family Life Ministries joins a long line of do-good organisations which, since Emancipation, have been trying to get Jamaicans to commit to marriage. According to the 2011 census, only 24 per cent of the adult population is married, with the vast majority of the others having never married at all.
Major Neil Lewis, an organiser of the Family Life Ministries event, puts it starkly: ‘We can’t continue the way we are with more than 86 per cent of our children being born out of wedlock, with half of those not knowing their fathers’ name and having it on their birth certificate.
When we add to our lackadaisical attitude towards time and work and our dismal family life the high levels of endemic violence, indiscipline, and distrust, and low levels of public order and of commitment to anything but individual here-and-now ‘benefits’, we have a behavioural and attitudinal mix from which, economically, we are not going to be VW’s Germany or Erik Nicolaisen’s United States, any time soon. It’s a lot more than money.
‘But no worries, mon. Everyt’ing will be a’right.’
