By C. ben-David
Much of what Jomo Thomas presents in his latest and most thoughtful contribution to anti- black racism is based on the hard facts of life in our deeply divided and stratified society. Still, several of his observations need clarification or rebuttal.
Unlike Jomo Thomas, I have never heard “persons of influence say there is no racism in SVG”. The systemic racism that has always been institutionally embedded in many of our institutions — unlike the racism in the United States, which has become less common over the decades and is now mostly sporadic, random, and nearly totally unpremeditated — ranges from the preference for light-skinned and straight-haired females in our countless demeaning and hyper-sexualised beauty contests, to the desire for fair-complexioned spouses by upwardly mobile or wealthy men, to the various subservient modes of deference given to white foreigners that Jomo Thomas mentions, to the demand by proprietors for photo identification for black shoppers using credit cards or cheques (a requirement rarely demanded of white people), to the predilection for a white or Mulatto Prime Minster over the past 36 years – and a Mulatto opposition leader desperately champing at the bit — because other candidates were deemed to be “too black,” to the disproportionate amount of property and wealth held by white and Mulatto people, to all the negative physical and behavioural stereotypes constantly applied to our black people ranging from calling them “ black and ugly” (as Jomo acknowledges) to referring to them as “worthless naygers” when their behaviour refuses to conform to socially and culturally appropriate (read: British-based white) norms.
Indeed, it is the actions, beliefs, and values of many black people, male and female alike — not their colour, not their hair form, nor their nose, lip, or backside shape — that many black and non-black people in SVG and the United States find offensive. This behaviour, some of it escalating in recent decades, ranges from loud and lewd public profanity, to sexual promiscuity and licentiousness, to dysfunctional single-parent family life, to all manner of criminal behaviour including rape, wounding and murder.
It is such behaviour, even if it is exhibited by a small proportion of black people, as in the case of violent crime, connected as it is to socio-economic class, rather than the physical attributes of race, that account for the racist attitudes of our local black, mixed, East Indian, and white populations.
This distinction is what Ralph E. Gonsalves — a white man who has called himself the blackest Prime Minister the country has ever seen — was partly referring to when he allegedly said, “being black is not a colour; it’s an attitude” and why the “worthless nayger” pejorative is sometimes applied to our “outcaste” white people as well.
Prime Minister Gonsalves’ use of the term “attitude” is an important one: there is a fundamental and far reaching difference between racist attitudes and racist behaviour, a distinction often summarised as the difference between prejudice and discrimination. While the former is unfortunate, as long as these beliefs are not operationalized to negatively impact the life chances of the targeted group – in this case black people — they can and should be dismissed as the ideology of ignorant people. Moreover, in countries like the United States and regions like the Caribbean, most of those undereducated or unenlightened people who might want to actually discriminate against others based on their race have little power over their own lives let alone the lives of black people.
Jomo Thomas is also incorrect when he nostalgically implies that the 1960s US-based Black Power movement was transformative in our little corner of the world. Indeed, all the groups and all the efforts he mentions were of no lasting consequence whatsoever, either socially, politically, ideologically, or economically — with the possible exception of providing grassroots political training for our current white prime minister — if only because former Prime Minister Robert Milton Cato, a black man married to a white woman, was able to easily dismiss local efforts at black empowerment by pointing out the elementary fact that SVG was already a black power country with a democratically elected black leadership and majority black electorate.
Despite the valiant efforts of the various black power groups listed — all now defunct and largely forgotten — as Jomo Thomas’ entire piece tells us, the more that racial beliefs change in little SVG, the more they stay the same.
Nor is Jomo Thomas correct to say that, “… colonial England committed genocide on our Garifuna/Kalinago forebears, enslaved thousands of Africans kidnapped from the African continent and brought them here to work for free.” There was no systematic genocide committed against our indigenous people even though the Second Carib War led by the wealthy slave-owning quisling Chatoyer did result in what is called “ethnic cleansing” because a large number of Garifuna and Kalinago were involuntarily exiled to Central America, an ancient practice around the globe when one ethnic group defeated another in warfare. Moreover, Africans were not “kidnapped” by white slave traders but were instead purchased from black African kidnappers as part of a global enslavement institution going back thousands of years which, unfortunately, is still ongoing in Africa but was viewed in many places even up to the late-19th century as normal, natural, moral, and legal.
As for the intersection of race and class already mentioned, Jomo Thomas plays down the fact that as the decades have unfolded our system of social stratification has become more and more based on the latter rather than the former with proportionately more black people controlling a bigger slice of our national wealth through their innate abilities, proper upbringing, advanced education, ambition, and work ethic. This is a healthy development we should all celebrate and encourage.
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This is the most balance article I ever read from C-Ben David since I became a regular reader of these articles. However, I don’t agree with his repudiation of Mr Thomas assertion that England did not involved in genocide when they purchased African slaves.The very transaction and the evil that was associated with this transaction was nothing less than genocide no matter how you dress it up to make it seem acceptable. Legally one cannot trade humans, it is abhorrent and illegal. It is not a tradeable commodity and therefore illegal and the fallout from this activity is genocide.
Do you and Jomo Thomas actually know the meaning of genocide (see https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml)?
Slavery is actually antithetical to genocide because it involves keeping captive people alive and healthy as long as possible so as to exploit their productive and reproductive power as much as possible.
Though many slaves were brutally worked to death, deliberately murdering slaves because you hated them — an act of genocide if carried out in a systematic and large scale fashion — would be destroying your own property and resources no rational slave owner would ever do.
Here is a thing to note, when we write or speak of race, according to our Bible there is only but one race of people, the Human Race, though we can talk of varying nations! To note this fact we read;
“God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things.
And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;”
for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’ Acts 17:24-28 New King James Version (NKJV). Yet discrimination, bigotry and prejudice have served in the exploitation of certain peoples by others, who thus perceive themselves to be profoundly superior in what they term as intelligence