Popular Jamaican coffee franchise Cafe Blue has apparently crumbled to Twitter criticism of an ad that had been deemed ‘colourist’. 

The company, which posted job listings seeking new members to join the team, was at the centre of controversy on Friday (December 31).

Cafe Blue, in a tweet on Thursday, said it was inviting applications for supervisors, chefs, cashiers and servers. It was not immediately clear, however, if the aforementioned positions applied to select outlets or whether the vacancies covered all six current locations islandwide.

The tweet, which the company has since deleted, saw what appeared to be a lighter skin complexion for supervisors as opposed to darkened tones for ‘regular’ posts, which the timeline reacted negatively to. 

An operator working for Cafe Blue’s parent company, Coffee Traders Limited, told Our Today when contacted on Friday afternoon that there was no one in office to handle media inquiries. 

The Our Today team was directed to Cafe Blue’s Twitter direct messages (DMs) where a request for comment went unanswered up to the time of the article’s publication. 

Among the arguments, Twitter users criticised Cafe Blue for being ‘intentional’ with the skin colour difference between supervisor and other line staff listings, which many concluded further fans the flames of colourism in Jamaica. 

While some contended that the company meant well in the now-deleted tweet, there was little to convince others that another approach—for example, using one skin tone across both images—was seemingly out of the realm of possibility for Cafe Blue.

Colourism, an offshoot of racism, is defined as discrimination based on skin colour, where people who share similar ethnic traits or perceived race are treated differently based on the social implications that come with the cultural meanings attached to lighter skin.

The issue of colourism, or rather debates over whether it exists within Jamaica, have raged for years even in the post-Independence era. 

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According to Professor Henrice Altink, however, race and colour have been an ‘absent presence’ in Jamaica up to this very day.

Professor Altink, who teaches Modern History and sits as co-director of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre at the University of York, in a 2019 book titled Public Secrets: Race and Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica, argued that “race and colour discrimination in different domains – employment, education, criminal justice system etc. – are linked, and that because of cumulative (dis)advantage – (dis) advantage in one domain (e.g. education) having a positive/negative impact on other domains (e.g. work) and accumulates over time – many race-neutral practices have exerted racial effects which, along with differential treatment based on race and colour, have upheld a racially-stratified society with a small number of whites on top, light-skinned people in the middle, and dark-skinned people, who make up the majority of society, firmly placed at the bottom.”