Because this is a dispute that has tended to break down along class lines - with lower-class Jamaicans remaining the most adamant about the ways race and class interact to reproduce their marginalization with respect to political and economic power - it becomes important to question the assertion that black America does not resonate with the majority of Jamaicans, whose attention instead should ostensibly be directed toward black Jamaican heroes. Paulette, a striving lower-middle-class woman in her early thirties whom I had come to know well during the course of my extended fieldwork in a rural hillside community just outside Kingston during the late 1990s, reflected with me on her own process of 'coming to consciousness' about her heritage and history. She remembered that her parents did not emphasize a 'black history' to her while she was growing up. Nevertheless, as she grew older, she began learning more about Jamaican history by listening to a radio show on IRIE-FM about African and diasporic history hosted by Mutabaruka, a Rastafarian dub poet known for his Afrocentric (and revolutionary) lyrics, and by reading about African Americans, information that was supplemented by the television programmes broadcast during Black History Month. 'They'd show certain programs on TV and I'd see how they'd handle black people, and I'd get so emotional that I'd turn off the TV', she recalled. 'It's just recently I can really sit down and watch. I don't know if it's embarrassment or anger or what. I'd watch these programs and probably go out on the road and see [the one white landowner living in the community] and just hate him. I'd think, "you're one of those".'  
Paulette also mentioned that she would teach her daughter, who was three years old at the time, about black history in order that she should 'know and love herself', especially since she anticipated that her daughter would ultimately attend a university in the United States: