Washington DC's Caribbean Carnival, which is in its 11th year, takes more than 500,000 Caribbean people "back home" with its parade of life, color and unity. To the dismay of many attendees, the parade moved from its original home on Georgia Avenue to the downtown area, where the white, business-class atmosphere with its federal buildings made some feel as though their culture was an exhibit in an art museum.
Many have blamed the Windies' decline on the MTV generation, who are more interested in American basketball than cricket. And cricketers, although still idolised in the Caribbean, would never earn the amounts of Michael Jordan or Shaquille O'Neal. In this sense, James placed cricket on the same level as Western literature. "We live in one world," he wrote in a 1969 essay, "and we have to find out what is taking place in the world. And I, a man of the Caribbean, have found that it is in the study of Western literature, Western philosophy and Western history that I have found out the things that I have found out, even about the underdeveloped countries." Throughout his life James viewed cricket as a means of helping unite a disparate set of islands, of establishing a Caribbean as opposed to an island mentality. He had little difficulty in understanding why Norman Tebbit should make cricket the basis of his loyalty test - or why most black people would fail it.
