On Race

by Nicolette Bethel

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.

Comments

[Bob Knaus]

I am not sure which causes more human misery -- "My god is better than your god!" or "My tribe is better than your tribe!"

Pick your prophet... Marley's "mental slavery", Blake's "mind-forged manacles", St. Paul's "all are one". They have spoken, we have not listened.

In civilized countries, people are free to pick any religion, or no religion, and change it at a whim. Why not apply the same standard to race? Let people call themselves whatever they like.

As a US citizen, I get a census form every 10 years. On the last one, I checked the "Other" box where it asked my race, and carefully penciled in HUMAN.

[Bloggy Boyz]

I would beg to differ with your esteemed opinion. We are an island. We are some 85% Black. The students that you teach grew up in an insular microcosm, living on an island. They grew up under Majority Rule, where the government of the day was Black. They live, work, play and breathe among their black peers. Generally Bahamians do not experience the overt racism that one sees in populations where the numbers of blacks and whites are more closely aligned in terms of order of magnitude.

What you term as the effects of racial origin has another possible explanation -- social conditioning.

Despite Majority Rule, the Black Bahamian has not been empowered at all. We do not own our own economy. We do not own the means to our own production. Any increase in productivity, results in more profits for foreign owners. The Black Crab syndrome is rampant. Opportunities are scarce. Corruption is rife. Nepotism is the rule rather than the exception.

Much of what you ascribe to race, is the result of us not being able to govern ourselves wisely. The social fabric was designed by the weaver (the government) and not the loom.

We have lost our capacity for truth and goodness and altruism. And that is due to the sins of our very corrupt founding fathers, and the legacy that they left -- to this day. Race plays very little in the picture -- in my humble opinion.

[nicob]

It seems to me we don't differ much at all, unless you are misreading what I have said. What you call "social conditioning" is what I call "race". Race is not something that exists in actuality; it is a way of seeing the world and, in our case, a way of seeing ourselves. I wouldn't lay the blame solely on our founding fathers, though. They weren't the weavers. They simply kept making the same pattern they got from the people who governed us before. And as we are continuing to replicate that pattern ourselves, in tighter and tighter weaves, I'd say there was more than enough blame to go around.

We don't need to be in daily contact with white people to know racism; we perpetuate it upon ourselves. By referring constantly to the "Black Crab Syndrome", by giving away our country and our means of production, by choosing to abdicate our responsibility for who and what we are, and by assuming that all that Bahamians can produce is second-rate, we are the racists who make race matter. It's our own social conditioning we have to combat, and nobody else's.