Whiteness and the "Magic of Money" in Olive Senior's "Ascot" (Critical Essay‪)‬

"'That Ascot goin go far,' Mama say, 'Mark my word,'" the narrator's mother informs us in the first sentence of Olive Senior's short story "Ascot." What makes the mother so sure of Ascot's impending success? As the reader learns soon after, it is Ascot's color: "Mama and all the rest of the women did like Ascot who is Miss Clemmie outside son for Ascot come out with fair skin and straight nose and though him hair not so good it not so bad neither" (26). Thus, the text immediately presents the reader with the notion that, somehow, Whiteness serves as an asset, while African traits are seen as a liability. Published in 1986 as part of Senior's Commonwealth Writers' Prize winning collection Summer Lightning and Other Stories, "Ascot" focuses on the internalized racism of the members of a Jamaican working class community that sees the title character reap both psychological and material benefits from a fixation on the symbolic meaning of Whiteness. What Richard Patteson has said of Senior's first two short story collections--that they "are explorations of Jamaican experience and identity within a larger network of competing cultures" (16)--applies to "Ascot" with force. In her short stories, an "awareness of that enveloping, sometimes corrosive larger culture is never very far in the background" (Patteson 16), and the Whiteness overshadowing Senior's Jamaica from the colonialist poles of England and the U.S. actually moves into the foreground in "Ascot." Colorism has long been recognized as one of the legacies of colonialism to the Caribbean and other parts of the world; Whiteness, though, in Senior's short story, comes to be regarded not only as a kind of property, but it also resembles money in some of its key aspects, especially in the propensity of money to be regarded as a "natural" repository of value, obscuring its social and symbolic function. The function of Whiteness in Senior's story serves as a reminder that "Blackness," in a postcolonial context, is a relational term that draws its meaning in part from its role in the overall economy of color and "race."