The purpose of this paper is to explore how ethnicity remains relevant to the workplace experience of minority ethnic graduate employees in contemporary British organizations. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 30 British Black Caribbean graduate employees drawn from a range of public and private-sector organizations to examine the ways in which they felt their ethnicity impacted on how they experienced their places of work.
The most obvious and immediate conclusion from this state of affairs - highlighted by The Weekly Gleaner in the September 11 edition - is that, 177 years after the abolition of slavery, Jamaicans still struggle with questions of race and identity. Self-esteem and status, to a large measure, hinge on the colour of a person's skin. Indeed, the Jamaica conundrum over a complexion-coded approach to status and sense of belonging can be observed daily in the young women and men who bleach their skins in ineffectual searches for resolutions in their favour. They are, of course, spurred on by a popular culture that declares its love for 'mi browning' - brown or lightskinned Jamaicans. 'In this societal arrangement, black or dark-skinned Jamaicans, who are the vast majority, are broadly at the bottom of the social ladder. They are, concomitantly, also at the bottom of the economic ladder.'
