On the Ghetto

I once taught a young woman who informed me that even though she was born and raised in “the ghetto”, she still came from a respectable family. Her parents were together, she said, and they were law-abiding and ambitious. She’d defended herself from criticism or ridicule before any such thing had come her way; the implication was that she expected people to believe that no one from "the ghetto" could be respectable at all.

I didn’t ask her what she meant by “the ghetto”. I can say that I was a little surprised that this American word had replaced our own names for our own neighbourhoods, but I didn’t think more of it until this year, when I was informed that tourists who have booked rooms at Dillet’s Guest House sometimes have difficulty getting taxis to drop them there. Some have had the experience of being set down at the Fish Fry and left to walk through Chippingham; Dillet’s is in “the ghetto”, and no place for a tourist or (apparently) a taxi driver.

Not only has the American word replaced our name for the area, but White America’s concept of what a ghetto is (a place for minorities, a place for poor people, a rough environment, a place no respectable tourist would be caught in, dead or alive) has overtaken our Black Bahamian understanding. I’m not going to ask how or why. I want to talk about the result. Words, you see, have power. The old adage about sticks and stones may bring comfort to a child who’s upset by having been called names, but it couldn’t be more untrue; words are far more powerful than weapons. Words define who we are. And by referring to the place in which we grow up as a “ghetto” we are creating for ourselves an image that defines us.

So what exactly is a ghetto? The word is not American but Italian, and it came into existence to refer to specific neighbourhoods in Renaissance Italy that were reserved for Jews. The purpose of this restriction was primarily religious. These Jewish Quarters had some things in common with gated communities; they were often surrounded by walls and would be entered by gates that were locked at night. Behind these walls Jewish society, culture and economy often flourished. Although these neighbourhoods were reserved for a specific minority, they were places of rich cultural heritage, strong economic activity, steely family ties, and beauty. As Jews assimilated into European society, they moved out of the ghettos, and by the 1900s they had largely disappeared.

It wasn’t until the Nazi movement in the 1930s that the word “ghetto” took on the pejorative aspects that we associate with it today. The anti-Jewish campaign inspired by Hitler re-established the Jewish neighbourhoods. Jews were turned out of their homes, stripped of their possessions and businesses, and forced to settle in run-down urban areas. These ghettos not cultural havens. Rather, they had all the worst aspects of the most awful city slum: poverty, disease, and terror. They were holding pens for the doomed, places where these people were sent to live and work, and from which they could be rounded up or massacred.

At end of the Second World War the word crossed the Atlantic to the United States of America and was used to refer to poor parts of US cities where non-White Americans lived. By ascribing all the worst oppression of Nazi Europe to American inner cities, those who used the name negated all the greatness that had come out of those areas.

And plenty of greatness had already come out of them. Much of African-American culture originated in Harlem. I’m not talking about hip-hop and gangsta culture, which tend to internalize and perpetuate the most negative aspects of the “ghetto” mentality. I’m talking about the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that inspired Cubism and the African art movement, that celebrated jazz and pan-Africanism and Garveyism and created great African-American intellectuals and celebrities like Robeson and Baker and Hurston and McKay and Hughes. By calling these culturally rich neighbourhoods “ghettos”, White Americans stripped them of their power for Blacks.

Much of the same thing has happened in Nassau. Anthropologists talk about cognitive maps, which are ways in which ordinary people orient themselves in the world, and which give them their identities and their power. When our cognitive maps included the various towns and neighbourhoods of Ova-da-Hill, when they could locate the birthplace of Lynden Oscar Pindling and Orville Turnquest and Milo Butler and countless others who have made this nation what it is today we were stronger, because we understood the strength, historic and economic and cultural, of the areas from which we came. But by lumping all of these places together and denigrating them as “the ghetto”, we have weakened ourselves.

And we stripped our neighbourhoods of their power. Ova-da-Hill is far, far more than just an old part of town. It is a source of our national strength. Back in the day, we didn’t define ourselves by constituencies. Our homes and identities were not left to the vagaries of election strategy. We set the boundaries of our neighbourhoods. The names of our roads were our names. We knew which church named Church Street, who the Lewises and the Taylors and the Dillets were, which meetings gave Meeting Street its name, why corners had names like Dog Flea Alley and Burial Ground Corner. And because we knew this, we knew ourselves.

One more story. I work with a man who has taken on the task of restoring his grandmother’s home in Hospital Lane. His grandmother was one of those freedom fighters from the 1950s on whose shoulders many of us stood to get where we are today. He’s taking his time; it’s an old house, and it’s going to be a long process. To give himself some inspiration, he put up a plaque on the house, commemorating her part in the struggle.

The result of his action was unexpected. Taxi and surrey drivers bring their fares by the home and point it out as part of their informal city tours. That’s interesting enough, but here’s the best part. Schoolchildren who pass the house stop and ask him what the plaque means. When he explains and tells them of his grandmother’s part in our history, they look at one another in wonder and ask him: “You mean to say somebody that important come out of the ghetto?”

The answer, of course, is YES. And they still can.

On Elitism

Last week I wrote about populism, the thing that has made us believe as a nation that elitism (of certain sorts) is the worst sin that could ever be committed. This week, I'm going to talk about the awful sin itself.

Before I go on, let's define that term. It can be the best or superior members of a society or group, or it can be a small, privileged, and often powerful group, according to Webster's. On the web, it's defined in various ways, from a small group of people with a disproportionate amount of public decision-making power to selected as the best. I'm going to be elitist here, and select the best definition for my purposes from the above: the last one, selected as the best.

It would seem these days that we have a problem in selecting the best in our society. We demonstrate an aversion to claiming anyone is better than anyone else, or that people should receive different results based on what they do. Indeed, our reaction to that kind of thinking is becoming violent; from Junkanoo practitioners to the employees of large corporations to the parents of schoolchildren, we Bahamians appear to believe that we should be rewarded for who we are, not for what we do. A competitor threatens to sue to change a competition's results; individuals involved in a labour dispute sabotage the city power supply; a parent threatens to kill the administrators and blow up the school that has not permitted his child to move up to the next grade. The underlying thread in all of these issues is the belief that someone owes me something, not the concept that what I get is a reward for what I do.

In the post-Independence Bahamas, merit, ability, hard work and innovation have in practice been less important to one's reward than skin colour, place of origin, party politics, or family connections. The result: we have bred a generation of young people who believe that the way to get a job (or a house, or a Christmas dinner, or a washing machine) is to wait outside a powerful person's office, not to qualify for it the hard way.

For those people who don't have the patience or the pull to get as far as that office door, the option is simply to take what one wants or needs. The result: those of us who have connections use them. Those who don't end all too often by breaking the law. Ours is a society, it seems, that rewards sycophants and criminals.

I'm going to argue that this is because we have eschewed formal elitism. In doing so, we have created a supremely elitist society, one in which the marginal remain marginal unless they are willing to sell their souls to the powerbrokers — politicians, preachers, and crooks. You see, there's elitism and elitism. There's the elitism that excludes other people on the basis of their backgrounds, their bank accounts, their connections, their skin colour, their last names, their nationality, their language. And then there's the elitism that excludes other people on the basis of their ability to do things well.

I don't believe in the first kind. It's the kind that's predetermined and determining, and it oppresses people, traps them in little enclaves of education, class, colour, political party, and family. It's inflexible, and doesn't provide legitimate ways to get out.

But I do believe in the second kind. It's the kind that strives to develop the best in the society, the kind that rewards hard work and talent no matter where they're found, that enables people who want to get ahead to do so without their having to align themselves with a political cause or a politician or some other patron. It's the kind that I believe has to exist in any healthy society; if it doesn't, citizens will have nothing to strive for, and will live in a vacuum of mediocrity, borrowing indiscriminately from other societies because they don't have much of their own.

In almost every case, the elitism that we now practice in society is an elitism based on the shallowest of criteria: how much money one makes, what one looks like, who one knows. We invest in elite clothing by designers who have never set foot on our soil, and we wear elite shoes; we will even kill one another for the footwear or wristwear of the day. Each decade has its own elite cars. The promoters of elite events (so called because of the prohibitive prices of the tickets, or the social circles of the participants) flourish in the Bahamas; elitist restaurants and real estate are hot commodities, and our national identity and our religious beliefs are exclusionary and elitist. Even our Junkanoo parades are elitist. The A-groups hog the street, the prizes, and all of the press; B-groups and scrap are second-class, and the general public says whey-ya-put-muh. Ours is an elitism that can be bought, not earned. It is only natural that one of the biggest one goals for all of us is to get more money, by hook or by crook.

As for those of us who are born different, with gifts that set us apart from other people — the gift of words, perhaps, or the gift of vision, or the love of beauty, or the desire to dance, to act, to make music — there is no elitism for us. There is no library to free us to read, to learn about worlds beyond our own, or help us invent our own worlds. There is no school of art for those of us wish to create beauty or to express our anger or disappointment visually; there are no grants to enable the poorest of us to afford the very expensive materials that we need to be the best we can be. There is no theatre for those of us who need to go on stage; no film school to train Bahamians to share our vision with the world; no dance programme to allow us to express ourselves through our bodies. There is no school of music in this nation of innate musicians; there is no school, even, for the most gifted of our children, other than Fox Hill Prison. Public elitist education begins at the tertiary level, long after many of the brightest have been lost.

Ours is a society in dire need of the elitism that recognizes and rewards its best before its best all leave. We have the bad habit of waiting for the world to pour acclaim on our people before we join in the celebration; even our athletes have to be recognized on the world stage before we will honour them at home. It is time that we stopped waiting for other people, with other agendas, to recognize what is good about ourselves. It is time for us to become elitist in the right way. It is time we give Bahamians their full rewards for doing their best.

On Populism

There's a joke I once heard about the Bahamas government. If you ever find a good institution within it, don't tell anybody. As long as it's secret, it'll be fine. But if it ever becomes public knowledge, run. Somebody with power will come along and redeploy the equipment and the personnel and share all that goodness around.

You see, we live in a society that believes in populism. Baldly put, populism is the practice of supporting the rights of the common person against the privileged elite. It's a political philosophy that has governed the Bahamas since 1967. There's no need to wonder where it came from; for almost three hundred years the needs and desires of the majority of the people were systematically ignored, to the benefit of a few. In reaction, the Bahamian governments that followed majority rule made it their responsibility to meet the needs of the people. And so we have eschewed elitism, making it a cardinal sin. We have all embraced populism.

And embraced it to the point of absurdity.

We've embraced it to the point of discouraging all activity that set minimum standards for qualification. Nothing must be exclusive, the theory went. Everything must be available to all people.

The kind of populism we employ today in the Bahamas goes something like this: Never put a whole bunch of extremely competent people in the same place. Competence must be spread thin like jam on toast. Excellence must be shared, not concentrated. At all costs, avoid creating anything good in a single spot. Spread it out! Else everyone won't get a chance to taste it.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm a populist myself. But there's ways and ways of protecting people's rights, and some of them make more sense to me than others.

Take the following example: the decision to dismantle the "old" Government High School. The reasoning behind this decision was sound populism. If I'd been a lawmaker back in those days, I might have supported it myself. It went something like this. Education should be available to all Bahamians equally. To get into the "old" GHS one had to sit an entrance examination, and only those who passed it could be considered for a place in the Government High School. Later, this entrance examination was extended to all Bahamian schoolchildren, and those children who preferred not to go to GHS for one reason or another could be awarded a scholarship to any one of the private schools. An elitist system, to be sure. Better to dismantle the system, spread the goodness around, and open the doors of GHS (and all government schools) to all Bahamian children.

There's only one problem with the idea. In order to give all ordinary Bahamian children the benefit of the same quality of education that some ordinary Bahamian children got at the "old" GHS, you need to make every high school as good as the old GHS. In a newly-independent Bahamas where only a handful of people had the kind of education that allowed them to reproduce that kind of quality, it was an impossibility.

Human excellence is not like the gumelemi tree. When you cut it up and scatter it, it doesn't all take root and grow. Rather, it's like the words of the writer of Proverbs: Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. Excellence works best when it's supported, when it's localized and focussed, especially in a populist society. It tends to fade into mediocrity when it's isolated.

And so today we have a public school system where educators struggle to raise the national average grade above a "D". It's open to every Bahamian child, but very few parents who can afford an alternative choose to send their children to a government school. Instead, they invest thousands of dollars on private school educations. On the other hand, if you're is poor, the chances of your child receiving the best education the country can offer are slim to nothing; if you want quality, you must pay for it. Quite a difference from the days when the brains you were born with and the effort you made in school could determine your future. Today's society sports an elitism where money and family connections make the difference. And it's an elitism that is the by-product of a populist decision.

No. I don't believe that the populist answer to elitist power is always to dismantle the institutions that create that power. That's a short-cut, not a solution, a reaction, not a policy. And it runs the risk of short-circuiting itself and creating a society that is both largely mediocre and far more rigidly elitist than the one it tried to correct.

You see, there's elitism and elitism. There's the elitism that excludes other people on the basis of their backgrounds, their bank accounts, their connections, their skin colour, their last names, their nationality, their language.

But there's another kind. This kind excludes other people on the basis of their ability to do things: to jump higher, say, or to sing better or think quicker than other people. These are gifts from God, and they don't depend on your family or your background or the amount of money you have. People are not equal; people are unique. The strengths of my neighbour are not my strengths, and my weaknesses are my own.

I don't believe in a populism that hands out mediocre services indiscriminately to all. I don't believe in the idea that if one is Bahamian (or PLP, or FNM, or "grass-roots", or whatever) that is all one needs to secure a job. That is the kind of populism that disrespects, that caters to the lowest common denominator in society, and that ultimately serves to spread mediocrity and dissatisfaction all around.

I believe in a populism that works hand in hand to develop this kind of uniqueness. I believe in a populism that sets the highest standards possible for everyone, that looks for the signs of talent among all people and provides places and funding that helps those people develop those talents. Where elitist institutions like choirs, athletic federations, theatre companies, Junkanoo groups and dance troupes exist, it builds them up, makes them stronger; where they don't, it establishes them. It recognizes merit. It gathers excellence together, rather than scattering it, ensures that it grows instead of fades. The kind of populism I believe in works hard to provide an outlet for everyone's talent, from ballet to the beating of the goombay drum, and it strives to make sure that everyone gets the chance to dream her own dream.