On Race

Before I begin, let me make one thing quite clear. I'm writing about race, not racism. The first one is the idea that human beings, like animals and plants, are members of different groups that are physiologically and genetically different. The second one is making distinctions — social, political, economic and otherwise — based on these differences.

I'm writing about race.

It's an idea that has been around for a while, but not forever. It's an idea that can be traced back to a specific political point in history — and by history, of course, I mean the history of the world, and not of the Bahamas. The idea of "race" was invented, and its invention had a function. That function: to conquer the world.

You see, it's a fundamental human trait to organize in groups and to create some cohesive group identity. It's also a fundamental human trait to look at other groups and define them by how they are different from our own group. Anthropologists call that ethnocentrism, the belief that every group does things in the best way possible, and every other group's way is inferior.

The idea of race, however, takes this tendency and solidifies it, makes it universal in application. No longer does the idea of each group doing things its own best way have currency. Different groups are categorized according to their physical appearance, and slotted into place on a ladder of superiority. And of course the people who do the slotting (who happen to be Europeans) put themselves at the top. By doing so they are exercising the fundamental human practice of ethnocentrism.

But it doesn't mean they're right.

What the invention of race has done for people of a non-European heritage is to pervert the tendency of the group to look at other groups and consider its ways superior. On one level, this happens; we believe that we are better than other West Indians, for instance, for any number of unjustifiable reasons. But on another level, groups who fit into the racial categories invented by Europeans to fill lower rungs on the ladder see themselves as a whole as being inferior on a global scale.

The trouble is, race doesn't actually exist. Not genetically, at any rate. A few years ago geneticists completed a genetic typing of the entire world, and discovered a number of very interesting things. The first was that "race" and genetics do not go hand in hand. There are more genetic similarities between Jews in Israel, and black Jews in South Africa than between those South African Jews and the Shona next door, from whom they are physically and linguistically indistinguishable. The second was that no group of people, no matter how apparently similar its members may be on the surface, is genetically "pure".

It turns out that the things that we have been taught to regard as fundamental to our own identity here in the Bahamas, things that are so deeply ingrained in us that we are unaware of their existence (no matter what our superficial skin colour happens to be), are based on a lie.

But it's a lie that is alive and well in the Bahamas and in the world. And we still believe it.

We may not claim that belief with our mouths, but we show it with our actions. Many, many Bahamians believe in their very cores that white people are superior. Many, many Bahamians have swallowed the lie of races so completely that they believe not only that white people are superior, but so, in varying degrees, are yellow people, red people, and brown people. Black people (which most of us are) lie at the bottom of the heap — right where the Europeans placed us when they invented that ladder to begin with.

You doubt me?

Seat a white person, a brown person, and a black person into a restaurant and watch what kind of treatment each gets.

Ask three people to tell the same fiction. Make one of them white, one of them black, and one of them in between. See who gets believed.

Or hold a PTA meeting. Set up tables with a black West Indian teacher, a black Bahamian teacher, a black Bahamian teacher with an English accent, a brown/red/yellow teacher, and a white Euroamerican teacher. Have each them tell a parent the same bad news about her child and see what happens.

Every one of us carries in our psyches the idea of this racial ladder, and has been raised to believe it.

So we tell young beautiful black girls they are "ugly", but call plain brown girls "pretty"; we call young brilliant black boys "stupid", and consider ordinarily intelligent brown boys "smart"; we believe Bahamians of the paler hues always to be "rich" (as though money were encoded on their skins), while we expect blacker Bahamians to be "poor".

Too many of us believe, though we don’t always say it, that we are not going to "get anywhere" in the world because black people just don't. Part of that belief is justified by the idea of victimization. But part of it is rooted in the idea that black people are limited because they are black.

I had a class of students who complained because most of them had got Ds and Fs on a particular assignment; the best of them had got Cs.

"Dr Bethel," one said, "you're marking us too hard. You're marking us on some university standard from away. We're only high school graduates. You can't expect us to be on the same level."

I told her that I was marking them on that university standard because 200-level courses at COB were of the same standard as 200-level courses anywhere. I told her that I didn't expect Bahamian students to be any less capable than students abroad. I've been abroad. I know. But I heard what she was really saying: don't judge us by those standards; we're only black.

The ol' bottom-of-the ladder syndrome had struck again.

On Service

I've got a question. Why is it that in this country, service is a dirty word?

I'm not talking about the kind of service that we charge money for, the kind of service that makes us a "service" economy — though I could be. I'm talking about the kind of service that regards it as an inherent part of any blessing to give a bit of it away — not to the pastor who hooked us up to the Good-Things Pipeline, but to people who have given us nothing, because they have less than we have.

I'm talking about loving our neighbours as ourselves.

I happen to sit on a committee whose mandate it is to find out what it is we need to be teaching our young people in order for them to become productive citizens of the Bahamas, and not troubled, destructive, or homicidal. It's a committee that has been struck for the purpose of examining the place of service in our nation; we're finding it a tough, tough task. The reason? Most Bahamians, apparently, would rather cut off their right hands than accept the idea that service is a good or necessary thing.

Let me illustrate. I recently met a lawyer who confided to me that she hated lawyers. Too many of them, she said, are greedy, confrontational, and arrogant. She hates having to work in a profession that encourages those kinds of attitudes, and spends a lot of time thinking about how she can get out of it and into another career. Too few of her fellow lawyers entered the profession to help other people. Too many of them have an eye for the big buck, and not for the small man. Too few of them care about rendering affordable services to people who need it.

The sad thing is, we could easily have been talking of doctors, or of politicians, or even of certain clergy. More and more in the Bahamas, it seems that very little care is available to people who cannot afford to pay for it, be it legal, physical or spiritual, because very few people who can afford to are willing to give anything good away.

Now I have to admit I find this a most peculiar state of affairs, especially in a nation that proclaims itself "Christian". I was raised by a set of people who believed fundamentally in a cosmic law of reciprocity. The more you have, they taught me, the more you have to give away. Of he to whom much is given, much will be required. And the more you give away, the more you will get in the end: cast your bread upon the waters, and it will come back to you.

When I was 16, I earned a scholarship to a place that reinforced that teaching. The United World Colleges were established in the 1960s for one main purpose: to work towards world peace by training students to be their brothers' keepers. We were thrown together for two years with people from all over the world, people very different from ourselves, and we were asked to live and work with these people in the hopes of learning how very similar we all are fundamentally. And the cornerstone of that education was the principle of service. Because we had been chosen, we had a responsibility to give back: to our fellow students, to our countries, to the world.

I came back to a country where service was a dirty word.

It was not always thus. When we were poorer, service was a good thing. Now it may be that this was because serving was the only way that Black Bahamians could make a living; the best jobs available to us were in the service professions, whether they were domestic servants, shop assistants, or (for the very gifted) secretaries, nurses, teachers, and minor civil servants. But beneath this lay a greater sense of collective responsibility in our communities. What one achieved was achieved for all, and what one earned, all shared. Adversity and poverty made us one another's keepers.

Prosperity has made us comfortable, and it has also made us selfish. It has taught too many of us that the important question is "What's in it for me?", whatever "it" may be. And so we have elections which are won on the basis of how much the voters think that politicians or governments will give them; we have talk shows in which callers' most common complaint is that somebody has failed to deliver; and we have churches that talk about salvation as though it were a commercial exchange between Christians and God. What we no longer have is a sense of interconnection with one another, a sense of our brothers' keeping. We should not be surprised that our children are sociopaths.

I believe that no individual is independent of the people around him. For one person to be wealthy, somebody else, somewhere else, has to be poor. As a society whose roots lie in some of the most heinous exploitation in history I believe that we ought not to be seeking to join the ranks of exploiters, but to be building a more level playing field.

I do not believe that the government must build that playing field for us. In fact, I believe it is the government's responsibility to give us the answer that John F. Kennedy gave the American people when he first came to power:

Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.

And so I believe in service. I believe that whenever a person has a surplus of anything — of talent, of privilege, of wealth, of luck — some of that surplus ought to be given back to people who have not got all that much.

I'm talking, in concrete terms, about legal aid. Clinics. Tutoring. Coaching. Giving bits of what we have so that other people can benefit.

And I don't see it as a youth thing either. I believe it's required of us all. I'd like to see a society in which, for one week a year, every Bahamian doctor or lawyer will provide services for those who can't pay; where every CEO gives up a week of time or salary to build houses — good houses — for the homeless; where everyone who received an education that is out of the ordinary gives up a week to share some of that education with people who are getting none.

You see, I believe there's a little trick to the principle of service. Asians call it karma; Jesus called it bread. Cast your bread upon the waters, and it will come back to you.

In sandwiches.

On History

October, we are learning, has been dubbed Bahamian History Month. As a result, the airwaves have been resonating with talk about national heroes, honours, and heroes’ parks.

At the same time, though, I’m sure there are some Bahamians out there who are observing these activities with a jaded eye. What national heroes? What’s all the fuss about? Why shove aside Columbus, for heaven’s sake, who is a hero of universal magnitude (having put our islands on the European map) for a clutch of Johnnies-come-lately in three-piece suits?

Too many of us, still, thirty years after independence and thirty-six years after we began to govern ourselves, believe that things Bahamian are second-class, gauche, nothing much to write home about. And too many of us who think that are black.

Last year I taught a class of English students the beginning principles of argumentation. They were a bright group, eager to engage with the topics we raised, anxious to master new skills. They had only one limitation, through no fault of their own: they knew very little about Bahamian history.

It surprised me then, but it shouldn’t have. After all, history has never been our strong suit. The success of Majority Rule in the 1960s created a kind of intellectual myopia that led us to reject everything that oppressed us before in our embracing of our newfound freedom. Unlike our neighbours in the USA and Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica, we did not embark upon a massive campaign of education about the Bahamian people, political or otherwise. The first comprehensive Bahamian history book was written by an Englishman, the second by a white Bahamian. The majority of us existed the ever-living Now.

In the three decades that we have been content to go with the flow, to sail along, catching the currents wherever they take us, we have allowed what is past get taken by the slipstream. Our old buildings decay, our elderly die; too much that is fundamental is being forgotten. And we have raised up generations who know so little about themselves and their past that think they are descended from nothing.

The result? In 2002, I met this class who were bright and curious and almost completely ignorant about their own heritage. They were conversant enough with the heritage of other people to be able to talk knowledgeably about Dr. King and Malcolm, even about Nelson Mandela and Marcus Garvey, but they did not know very much at all about Stephen Dillet or Alfred Adderley or Randol Fawkes. Most of them were equally vague about Bahamian leaders of much more recent vintage, like Kendal G. L. Isaacs and Arthur D. Hanna. What I did, therefore, was create a quiz about their nation. I’d feed them these questions in batches of ten or twenty at a time, with the carrot that they could earn themselves a bonus by doing well.

It frightened me how few of them earned the bonus. It should frighten you.
Here’s a sampling of the questions.

1. What was the name of the first premier of the Bahamas?
2. What was the HMS Flamingo and why is it significant?
3. What two objects were thrown out of the window on Black Tuesday, and who threw them?

Not that hard, right? Surely these are things that all young Bahamians must know?

Wrong. I ended giving out the bonus to those who got ten of the seventy-five questions correct.

Please don’t think I blame these students. I don’t. It’s not their fault; it’s ours. You see, we’ve been nothing if not pragmatic for the last thirty years. We have designed our school curricula according to what is most convenient for teacher and student alike, rather than according to what is necessary for a healthy nation. So history is an optional subject. You may learn about people who are dead and gone if you choose, but it is not a requirement for graduation. But because we seem to pick the books for those courses according to what is most available, convenient, and cheap, too many of the history books in the schools are American, not Bahamian. We seem to believe that as long as the history is Black history, all is well; our children will learn about strong role models of African descent that way. Never mind that they have no idea who Stephen Dillet, Alfred Adderley and Randol Fawkes are. They have been educated about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. They still have something and someone to look up to. Right?

Wrong.

Greatness, it is said, occurs when people stand on the shoulders of giants. But we have removed our giants from the reach of our youth, and our carelessness with history has given them nothing but dust on which to stand. We’re teaching our young people three lies about themselves:

1. Bahamian political history is inseparable from American civil rights history.
2. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are heroes for the Bahamian civil rights movement as well as for American one.
3. The Bahamas produces no national heroes of its own.

It’s the last point that I consider most damaging. As great as the heroes of the American Civil Rights movement are, especially the martyrs of the movement, we need to be careful about how we teach our youngsters about them. We are not Americans. The Bahamas is a sovereign nation, and we have a history of our own.

You see, we are more than simply people of African descent who happen to live on the fringes and crumbs of the United States of America. We are not the last outpost of the Uncle Sam; the gold, aquamarine and black of our flag stands for something different from the red, white and blue. Indeed, in many cases it is we who have taught them; African-American intellectuals like James Weldon Johnson and W.E. B. DuBois have roots in the Bahamas; a Bahamian minister, Dr. J. Robert Love, inspired Marcus Garvey, and a Bahamian, Joshua Cockburn, captained one of Garvey’s Black Star Cruise Line ships.

Here’s my fervent hope: that all this talk about national heroes and honouring those who serve the Bahamas is making people think. It’s about time, after all. We have been moving in fast forward for so long now that we have yet to stop and look at the past. That’s fine, for those of us who lived it. But what about those who come after us?

It’s our responsibility to return to them the shoulders on which they ought to stand.