On the Upholding of the Law

This week, I want to write about the upholding of the law.

Now, given the fact that we recently suffered a breakout and riot at Fox Hill Prison, you will be forgiven for thinking that this article is about that affair. And I hope you'll forgive me when I tell you it isn't. In fact, what I focus on in this article may strike you as a little trivial, given the magnitude of the recent lawlessness we've witnessed.

But I don't think it is.

What seeded this topic in my mind, you see, wasn't the riot, or the general indifference to petty crime all around us, or even the fact that even before January's over we've had several murders to keep our police from growing too bored.

What seeded it was the fact that one day recently my father-in-law came to me and said, "I see they took the right house down."

He was talking, of course, about the house that was supposed to have been demolished that day last February that my grandmother's house was bulldozed. I found that very interesting, because to take that house down -- even though it was the so-called "right" house -- was in complete contravention of the law.

Of several laws, in fact.

The first one is a law relating to antiquities. A number of houses in Nassau have been listed as being of specific historic importance to the national and cultural patrimony of The Bahamas. Most of them are in the downtown area, and most of them were owned by the great and the good of bygone days, but not all of them fall into that category. In fact, several of the houses along East Bay Street and Dowdeswell Street are the houses of simpler people, made out of wood, a good example of how more ordinary people lived. Many of them were built by their owners, not by forced or hired labour, and they provide us with all we have to tell us about the people who were here before us. Houses that are listed are prohibited by law from being demolished.

The second is a law relating to demolition in general. In order for a building to be demolished, application has to have been made to the Ministry of Works for a demolition order, and the order must be publicly displayed before the demolition takes place. This allows people to know that at some point this building will be coming down, and limits the chance that any human being who has taken to using the building as a shelter is accidentally injured or killed in the process. It also allows for people's homes not to be removed while they are at work, and it theoretically prohibits horrible mistakes -- like the one that happened to my grandmother's house -- being made.

I can hear you now: “So what? People do that all the time.”

And people do it all the time. In fact, there’s a culture of taking down buildings secretly. I know as well as you do that Sundays are the preferred days for taking down buildings secretly, because most of the world is in church, and the chances of getting caught are slim.

You know what we say. A crime is only a crime if you get caught. If you don’t, it’s smart action.

The problem is, in this case, it wouldn’t really matter if you did get caught. This crime is the kind of crime that a wealthy person can afford to commit. There are laws on the books against taking down historic buildings, but there aren’t any real penalties for contravening the laws. If you’re caught (and no one seems to be caught) you can be fined. You can also be fined for doing what most people do, and what some are forced to do by the high cost of building in this town – leaving the building there to rot on its own. But there’s no other penalty but that.

Sometimes it’s a better business proposition to take the risk and pay the price.

So Cascadilla on East Street, a building that once defined much of what is excellent about indigenous Bahamian architecture, is rotting where it stands. It can’t be torn down (except by decree of the government, which as we all well know is above the law), and it’s expensive to fix up. And so it’s dropping down.

And so the house on East Bay Street in which Miss Ivy Stuart-Kamler taught piano lessons to many of the people who later became piano teachers themselves was pulled down on a Sunday while nobody was looking.

And so my grandmother’s house, which was one of the last standing examples of middle class black families’ homes, was bulldozed last February.

And so on and on, despite the fact that there are laws against it. And nobody says a word.

And that brings me to the recent prison break and riot, at the risk of indulging in emotional fallacies. Because there are parallels that exist. I’m told (and this tale could be wrong) that the break-out could have been avoided, because at least one civilian knew about it before it happened. But because our culture has made it our business to turn a blind eye to activities that break the law until they affect us personally, those civilians kept their information to themselves.

The thing is, there’s a connection between white-collar crime and crime of collars of many colours. The connection isn’t in the magnitude of the action. There isn’t any real correlation, after all, between the murder of a prison officer and the demolition of a house. The connection lies within us. Every time we turn a blind eye to white-collar crimes which are committed in full knowledge of the law, it makes it much easier for us to ignore all the rest.

Change in Server, Change in Look

This weekend I moved servers for this blog. It was quite a production, let me tell you! Anyway, here we are on nicobethel.net. Update your feeds -- by next month the old address will be obsolete.

I'm also trying out a new look. Let me know if it annoys the heck out of you.

A note -- the links and archives are in the old style, to remind you of how this blog once looked. Let me know if you prefer it, OK?

Cheers.

On Race, Class, and the Tyranny of Worldviews

I had trouble with the title of this one. I wanted to call this article "On Hegemony". To be truthful, I almost did. What stopped me, though, was the vision that assailed me as my fingers hovered over the keyboard -- the vision of my faithful readers picking up the paper, seeing the title, and throwing it down again unread.

So I changed the title. But I still think that "On Hegemony" would be better. The word "hegemony" -- which sounds, by the way, like a cross between "hedge" and "anemone" -- refers to a way of seeing the world that's created by a small group of people who are in power. In the past, people might have called it "brainwashing", but it's far more friendly than that. Very specific and subtle ways of viewing the world are created by any number of means, from the spread of world religions to the sharing of philosophies to the coverage of news by the mass media. Hegemonies masquerade as truth, and they govern the way in which we see our world in ways that are often so subtle we aren't aware of them.

In The Bahamas, hegemonies undermine our sovereignty in ways we may not even be aware. Because we are so ignorant of our own history and our social context, we are often governed by realities that are not our own. For instance, many of us seem unable to draw distinctions between the Bahamian experience of race and the American one. It has become commonplace to conflate the two. Especially among young Bahamians, who are far more exposed to American constructions of the world than they are conscious of Bahamian realities, there is a persistent belief that "white Bahamians" are controlling the lives of "black Bahamians". This is a belief that, to my mind, is an extension of an American hegemony or worldview that has very little meaning in our country.

Unlike the USA, where there was one society of oppression and exclusion, in The Bahamas there were two separate societies. While it is true that for much of the first half of the twentieth century, there was an unofficial code in Nassau that permitted the existence of whites-only clubs and hotels and restaurants and bars, that code was never written into law.

Now the difference may seem minor -- after all, when you can't go somewhere, what does it matter if the reason is a legal prohibition or a lack of welcome from the powerful? But it is fundamental. The passage of laws has the effect of enforcing a worldview in such a way that one has to become a criminal to want to change them. In The Bahamas, the racial debate of the 1950s and 1960s was a question of common sense and morality rather than a question of law.

What existed in Nassau were two societies, each equally stratified by class. White Bahamian society was never the unified monolith that we like to imagine. While it is true that the richest Bahamians were White, they accounted for only a handful of White families in the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, some of the rest were so poor that the term "conchy joe" had been invented just for them -- they could afford to eat nothing but the conch they dived from the shore. Black Bahamian society overlapped with White Bahamian society economically. At the top were Black (and "coloured") Bahamians of relative wealth and standing like the Adderleys, the Norths, the Isaacs, the Dupuches, and the Butlers, an upper class of blacks that could share some of the economic and educational privileges of the upper classes of whites, but which could not share their social -- or political -- space. This didn't mean that they were excluded from the House of Assembly, either. The Hon. Paul Adderley, currently Acting Governor-General, is the fourth generation of MPs in the Adderley family. What it meant, though, was that until the 1960s their political power was neutralized by the political and economic bloc that was made up of that small group of White Bahamians known ultimately as the "Bay Street Boys".

In this scenario was a third class of people, the "Out Islanders", who were all disadvantaged. If you were a white Out Islander, you would have more of a chance to make it in Nassau than if you were black, but your poverty and lack of connections often made that more difficult than the same kind of advancement would be for the Black Nassauvian upper classes. Race in The Bahamas was not the unifying entrée to power or oppression that it was in the USA.

So for us to imagine today, in the twenty-first century, that "race" in The Bahamas was (or is) in any honest way comparable to "race" in the USA (which shares similarities with the Indian caste system), is a function of a hegemony, or worldview, that is as dangerous as it is invisible. It's dangerous because -- as I've said before -- it erases the differences that come from class, and that transcend many considerations of race.

There's something else that we tend to ignore in the acceptance of that hegemony, something with which I'll leave you to think about, because I haven't made any fast conclusions about it yet. It's this: the people who disseminate the Bad-Whitey rhetoric that so many of us grow accustomed to swallowing, largely through channels like BET and Tempo, are white Americans. And they control, ultimately, the kinds of information and images that get broadcast.

It's no accident, to my mind, that the debate that takes place about race these days is a pretty simplistic debate. It's a debate that focuses on victimology, and it obscures -- deliberately, I believe -- references to the strength and power and intelligence and dignity of people who are not white. By far most of the music and images played on so-called "black" channels are misogynistic and violent; on the other hand, most of the sit-coms that focus on "black" people are stereotypical in terms of the attitudes and achievements of their members. Tempo profiles the great entertainers, but does not feature so prominently great Caribbean thinkers like Eric Williams and C.L.R. James and Rex Nettleford and Arthur Lewis, or great African leaders like Jomo Kenyatta or Kwame Nkrumah or Julius Nyerere. To do so, I believe, would create a worldview in which people of African descent are far more varied and valuable to humankind than the current hegemonies allow.

And so we have to be careful whose worldviews we consume. We need to be ready to question them, to analyze their messages, and not to be blinded by the colour of the faces they feature. Because it's just possible that those worldviews, those hegemonies, are the new masters -- and we are the slaves.

New Articles for a New Year

I've officially decided what I'm going to call the next article:

On Race, Class, and the Tyranny of Worldviews

Put that in your pipes and smoke it.