White racism in Barbados

Post date: Apr 9, 2009 7:09:09 PM

Enough Is Enough

There is no white-skinned person like Ikael. Not only is Ikael missed in the ghetto, where he influenced as a stabilizer - he was patient and soft spoken, walked amongst them, listened to their stories and the youth boys on the block saw him as caring of them - but he is also missed by the white folks, who knew that he was one of their own and was there to counter them, when their uncouthness surfaced. Nowadays the most ignorant, devoid of intelligence whites but earning money by all sorts of desolate ways, have crawled out of their layers and are proliferating bigotry.

The now obvious effect of Ikael’s death on the two sides of the fence are: with the black boys in the ghetto it is rage and amongst the white boys it is fundamental, filthy racism spewed forth from every nook and cranny .

In 1962 Enoch Powell’s speech in the Wolverhampton about rivers of blood brought racialism out in open and from that night some English people started to be abusive and had to be shut up. Powell was a member of parliament and wanted to be leader of the Conservative Party and he thought he would get enough votes with racial things.

Enoch Powell is alive in white Barbados for every day non-white Barbadians are affronted: Even if not understood intellectually, the feeling is emotionally there. That is what some techniques are about: “for those who want present-day apologies and reparations for wrongs committed by long-dead people centuries ago.” … The Nation Newspaper.

… “after England dropped them like a sack of bricks, the only sign of importance is the jacket and tie. …. And God know it’s the devil’s own job to get them (black people) to love themselves..” The Nation Newspaper.

What this says is that: “it requires people with this skin and this brain to success in business in Barbados.” A Sir David Seale quote.

Richard Hoad’s column LOWDOWN is guilty of extreme racism. eg. Ten years ago Richard wrote that his initiation into sex came, when a black, servant girl, who took him and his brothers into a room at their father’s overseer’s house and she pulled down her panties and gave them a peep show and that he saw the Ascania, the Golfito and the Surriento - those were large ships, in the 50s and 60s that took black people to England. He continued that he was not prepared for what this black woman displayed between her legs and that anyone of those large boats could have fitted in there. The Nation Newspaper.

That statement is soooo racist and cruel to black women. I shuddered to think how brutalized, cowed and subservient black Barbadians must be that someone can write something like that about their women.

This is nothing to do with decent behaviour; it is common class and not cultured, just original, institutionalised basement mentality. Written policy kept in the sub-basement, two stories under ground, is where the British ministry documents marked “for your eyes-only” was discovered in the 1950s. The document outlined the behaviour to be meted out to West Africans. If a West African did anything for the white boss, it stated, the boss was not to thank, but to kick or hit the West African, and not to quarrel or argue with him because the West African would win an argument, as he was usually right.

Most reactions are instinctive, like a pig rolling in mud, and many will always behave like that, nevertheless, a pig can be hosed down. People must identify offensive behaviour, put it in its own compartment, where it belongs with things that do not matter and have nothing to do with it. That does not mean that it cannot be opened to see that it does not get out.

By and large behaviour is inherited and many whites have accustomed themselves to being big bullies. The strategy has not been altered but for such feelings, which cannot be voiced openly or exhibited overtly because they are illegal, tactics are subliminal, masked carefully but nevertheless just as demoralizing.

The sins of the white fathers followed the children. Direct beneficiary, still benefit disproportionately from bullying and ill gotten gains that the white fore fathers meted out down through the generations, who now live check-by-jowl with black descendants of those who were/are brutalised.

Al Capone was a desperate gangster and if in some way he had eluded the justice system and stashed away his ill-gotten gains for his children; should not the children share in all the vituperation that is heaped on him. It goes with the territory. These sins were not committed centuries ago, they never stopped, and they only began to get ripped away not even washed away by insurrection in the 30s.

It is about skin and grading skin colour, hair texture and nose and although there are skilled, intelligent and decent people with strains of humanity that would break through any streak of heathenism, too many feel separate and believe that some are not equal, real people.

These insults have been taken by black Barbadians because it is felt that it is the Christian thing to do but turning the other cheek is not a philosophy meant for fools. It means that if there is enough strength then ignore but no one should sit back and take bullying.

There are things that people set out to prove. Sometimes when they set out to prove, they get themselves convinced of what they did not want to believe in the beginning. Peter Simmons’ article of last Sunday in the Nation has open itself for the argument that the incidences of racism experienced at Lodge School were isolated and were resolved and have no place in today’s discourse because Simmons did not suffer lost of education denial of job opportunity, or loss of prestige.

Nevertheless:- “We cannot beat the system,” is a bludgeon of exploitation and until every one decides to stand up for his/her own right we will be washed away.

Is it the nature of Africans to be docile or is it that for such a long time that they had to be subservient and have become accustomed to yes sir, no sir? Is it that Europeans have a historical inferior feeling and use reverse psychology to push up and try to show more things and more important people are known? Is that why so many indulge in uppity nonsense?

Equality is not going to come from people, who do not know how to stand up. An um-dis-dat- and-wunna society is a waste of time that allows endemic or intrinsic politeness to be a detriment, when faced with crude behaviour that is not in their character. A literate population is needed to see, realize and to understand all the ways and all loopholes that perpetuates inequality. A literate population will see and understand but a large number are refusing formal education or to go to secondary school or come out of school and go on the block, not realizing that education is a tool.

To not read is to waste time. The majority of Christians, because he was the Son of God, do not know that Jesus went to school; they do not know that Jesus had to learn. Paul went to school and qualified and he wrote many books. Peter learned in the school of hard knocks and Luke, the physician, was a doctor. Andrew was a fisherman. They were businessmen; they were not waiting for the flying fish season.

“We contributing because we ain’t got none of us at the prison, Dodds.” An Indian-Muslim leader said this recently at a talk about Muslim Indians, when challenged about Indians not playing a role in making the society better for all. It is cunning racism of a failed race - brown-skinned people, who talk with different accents and feel themselves incorporated as honorary whites.

Decades ago, in India, with not only the caste system but also the absolute feudal system, he could not get through and most probably pulled a cart. Towards the end of the war he got a chance to hop on a boat and arrived here, where some black fellow said: “come Indian do not walk barefoot come let me put on shoes on you,” and when they got as far as St. Joseph they married barefoot white girls from St. John, walked about with two suitcases, then rode a bicycle and then a car, then they bring in things and pay off custom officers and by god they made it.

The Patels were the first but a lot of them do not remember that they made it with the help of black people. They did not have pretty property; they did not come like tourist; they came to settle and they had nothing. Later on so many came, when late at night an aircraft came in with about 50 Indians with mattresses, blankets and suitcases.

This Indian was talking to black un-informed students so he could fool them with one-sided ideas. A teacher has so much to teach that something they teach the wrong things – like the thing about not trying to embarrass people. The issue is not about middle class for intelligent people usually marry other intelligent people but in Barbados, not in the Caribbean nor the world, to keep whiteness it is necessary to inter marry their own but a lot of whites left the country in the exodus to New Zealand and Australia.

There are not enough whites to run things and black people, who have recently had access to higher education, are employed. Blacks are the police. Whites have money so the black government listens to them and the black university historians let themselves be used to rewrite vagabond, white peoples’ history for them. This popular history - ingested rubbish and regurgitated waste is destructive and disabling.

Today there is a changing of the guard. Besides the work place blacks join horse racing and motor racing clubs and watch polo - now extended to personalities with opportunities of wealth and never mind the colour of skin black and white behave alike and black and white marry.

Empathy increases with social closes. Many, now, of all colours appear to be civilised but are far from; they get through well in amorality and enjoy themselves at their most pretentious best in the mode of the royal buffoon and believe they were born to be privileged.

PART TWO – LODGE and A LOWDOWN WHITE MAN

So silly that it is hard to find words to express a lot of things about Lodge School: for instance, there is black Sam Headley, a head boy at Lodge and he was always full of praises for Lodge School and how well he was treated and that he was a boss there.

His father used to drive with MCW (public works) and was a black gentlemen for want of a better word. He wore khaki pants but he wore them with a Khaki jacket. He was Charles Miller Austin (Brie St. John’s maternal grandfather) at Malvern’s chauffer and Austin persuaded the white powers that be that the same way that they gave their poor white acquaintances bright sons scholarships to Lodge School then he would like one for his poor black chauffeur’s son, Sam.

Those who attended Harrisons College considered Lodge a different place all together, off the planet and in a place called St. John orbiting around the ten parishes like how the earth orbits around the sun with strange, different creatures of different habits like when the Jews came out of Babylon they did not know what to do. Going to Lodge was no privilege, it was a joke to them, and that they were too many dumb white boys there.

Not all were dumb tales have it that the Manning twins were bright; they always came first. Douglas Lynch and his fraternal twin brother, they grew up white and later Douglas acknowledged Quashie, his black foreparent.

Dowding left Harrison College and went to Lodge and won a Barbados Scholar the same year. What happened no one has revealed as yet but he would have run up against Chris Springer, a black teacher family to Governor General to be Sir Hugh Springer, who did not give a damn about colour; students had to be bright.

In a racist letter to the Nation’s Editor, deliberately done to set up Trevor Marshall, a White wrote ludicrously about Trevor Marshall’s and Peter Simmons’ lack of something pertaining to education. The letter proves the truism that in the land of the blind the one-eyed is king.

Richard Hoad regardless of Barbados Scholarship, while he can be admired for his practical life style and in that way is a model citizen, he is a coward, who is cowed by Zionist and will not speak up and say that every time he writes negatively against any action Israel does the Nation pulls his column. Hoad has not stopped writing even though he has expressed alarm that some evangelical Christians around him said that it was better that the Israelis kill of the Palestinian children instead of letting them grow up to become terrorists.

Hoad is fearful not to get “the little pick, when the week comes.” He cannot write from his heart so he drops down to his crotch and thus his constant vulgarity, which he gets away with only because he is white, just like Julian Hunte’s behaviour. Black Barbadians like to see a common lowdown white man. Lowdown’s is boring as a regular meal. Hoad can in no way be described in intellectual terms in more glowing terms than Trevor Marshall and Peter Simmons, please – chalk and cheese.

Why Simmons is incapable of handling lowdown whites is as Samuel Jackman Prescod said “it is not a matter of colour but the unfair advantage of the political oligarchy.” Starting with his father, who, when many middle class people did not support Grantley because they knew his behaviour; Simmons did and Grantley rewarded him with the job at Dodds.

The Simmons have always been staunch unswerving Labour supporter and have had more of the public purse at the society’s expense. It was Peter Simmons, who had to intercede to get the Nation to print one of Marshall’s replies - a man ten times more knowledgeable than Simmons.

There where not many white boys that the black boys could begin to admire. Some admired one of the Draytons; he left and went to England and never came back. He could not fit in with the rest of the whites. He was considered not only bright but thinking; he knew something was wrong and would not have wanted to return to the society that we were and still are.

The choice would have been to join the reformers and they were and are no reformers amongst certain people - keep your mouth shut, go to Harrison, do not play cricket or foot ball and try to win a Barbados scholarship, go to England and marry a white woman.

Middle class social history talks about a white Ward that went through Harrisons College and later managed Fresh Water Hotel – now Paradise Beach Hotel – and “all he could do is add copper and silver he could not tell why one and one is two.”

Richard Hoad had heritage and by implication Trevor Marshall had none, the racist article continued. King Jah Jah had heritage. What heritage do white Bajans have? They had ownership of black people; they inherit land like how the Wild West got turned into American property. Tell a man “you can own as much land as a man can cover in a day,” so a peg was hammered in the ground and someone walked and they owned that much acres.

Their money, their God, they got not by Christian attitude to life but through common motives of greed and acquisition, killing not murder for it was not considered murder to kill a black man it merited a fine of 10 shilling and a warning not to do it again or the next time there will be a charge of one pound.

The truth is layered by a brand new university with a brand new everything, where the tradition has not been continued and all knowledge started with this brand new university; knowledge does not go back to Ancient Mayans, whose books in stone were destroyed by white men and Ancient Egypt, whose libraries there was an attempted to destroy because they contained all the sum of knowledge known to man.

The British monarchy conquered Africa and trained Africans to do what they wanted - gave them a bunch of keys, a cork hat, a hook stick, shoes so that they did not walk barefooted, made them colonials and then gave their children a scholarship.

A predisposition to make the past a mild thing has made so many things so pissy about our history. Old people used to call it: “picking peas out of shit.” The peas are not cooked so they are like bullets. Pick out the peas, a few little blacks that get something or somewhere: “You see what we have.” And no one knows from where they were picked.

Applaud Moravians because they taught the scripture to slaves, the first to open their congregation. The Moravians were a persecuted minority in their own land, same as with the Puritans. They decided they were at the bottom of the scale and the slaves were now below them.Moravians preach that slavery was all right:be a good slave and obey your master.Say that and it will be said that you want to pull down the church.

This essay is in defense of Trevor Marshall for there is some thing about Trevor: he has a polite attitude to many aspect of our history and he is comfortable in himself.

Pedro Welch's problem is that he is in love with whores and whore-house madams. Hilary Beckles is not comfortable in his skin and is not entirely Barbadian whatever his parents are. He went up to England at eleven, went to school in the education system of the England, which while applaudable but to entertain top education is not go to go to a red brick university. Oxford and Cambridge would be the ones, which obtains because even a failure at these two institutions still has sophistication.

Oxford is one of the places of learning; it is a tradition, when you look at the people who graduated from them at fifteen years and sixteen years old. Dunce Scottus was an extremely brilliant youngster. He went to Oxford and confounded scientists with his knowledge of the time.

That is from where the English the word got dunce. It is a sarcastic thing - a parody .

Here is a view of the Hoads from a different class of people that lived alongside of them.

Before the entrance of Lands End there was a white residential area of Fontabelle, where Holburn used to be government house and where Central Purchasing Department and the Nation are now, and all along there were strictly white families and big houses with little figurines like little dwarfs, on the lawn.

That area was like Strathclyde in that blacks did not venture through after six o' clock in the evening unless they were servants and even, when men with bicycles picked up their wives, who were servants, they waited further along the road otherwise they might be charged for loitering.

Lands Ends with the non-whites were more respectable for any one could not rent a house down at Land’s End. The Tudors, there were Samuel Jackman Prescod’s family - the Morrises, Tom and Frankie.

The Morris boys were bright and went to Harrison College; they played football for Barbados and Spartan. Tommy married Ford’s daughter and Frankie married Amelia, Eve, Uncle Jack’s wife’s sister. Beverly Morris married Joe Tudor.

There is something about family connections even even Barrow was part of it. Springers very close to the Gittens, the Sealy – Pet Sealy, a direct descendent of Samuel Jackman family, mothered and looked after Errol Barrow at Kampala until she died - Frankie and Lyle, and Beverly Morris are their cousins and cousins of the Gays. Old Frederick Gay was a police sergeant. He was not a handsome man and had enough money to buy a good size property.

Tom and Frankie and Uncle Jack and my other Uncle Sam all worked as tally clerks and Tom and Frankie could always put their hands on money. I cannot account from where this money came from but some how or the other there was always money. No member of the family that I could remember were mendicant.

These families never accepted bribes nor did they ever pull something to get anybody a job but they knew about all such things and discussed them openly in the drawing room. It was never heard that you cannot talk i-n f-r-o-n-t of the c-h-i-l-d-r-e-n.

Erin, Arthur Gay’s first daughter, her mother was lodged next door to Frankie around the corner in Lower Westbury Road, for a while. Next-door were the Gajadars, St. Lucian Indians, they came quite early and got jobs with Brydens. The Barkers my paternal grandmother and grandfather lived next door to the Tudors, who lived at a place called Lemon Grove.

Hoads lived in the white, segregated Fontabelle alongside the Fields and the Fields were related to the merchant Fields. Gerald Wood was a cousin, who lived at Vaucluse and another Hoad worked at that plantation and ended up living in Beckles Road in a family house.

Some Hoad boys went to Harrisons College. They were good cricketers and L. E. G. Hoad played cricket for the West Indies team after cricket was taken up again after the war and the team went to England. Snuffie Brown, Aunt Dolly’s uncle, played in the West Indian team at that time. A student from Harrison could not play for anywhere else but Teddy Hoad and the Hoads played for Pickwick and not Harrison College.

Pickwick was a white club, where, when the great cricketer George Carew played on that ground he had to walk through a gate for black players not the one especially for whites - ask Carew’s daughter, he used to take her to cricket; she will confirm that.

The young men from Fontabelle and Lands End knew each other and they went around drinking with Joe Hoad and others like a Fields boy that shot himself. Fields used to be called by “Bulldog” his nick name.

Harrisons College had a custom that said that any boy called Smith that turned up there was called Sleepy after the first Smith and all the Fields were called Bulldog after the first Fields. Aunt Dolly’s father Chester Allen was called “Johnny” there after his eldest brother. Lodge gave the cruelest nicknames: Richard Goddard was “Gorilla,” Rocky got his name because he live at the Rock, Trevor Marshall was called “Snuffy” because his hair was red and there was Gully Bore a little white boy.

These young men had enough money and could go anywhere and all had cars or transportation and knew one another and their personal foibles.

Bull Dog bought Rovers car, when they were new about 1947 - 48 and he crashed them. He married a brown skinned girl and they say he was never satisfied with how he was living and one night he went into Nelson Street parked his car and shot himself dead.

Richard Hoad’s brother, Joe’s, legacy from the plantation cottage was that he looked on black girls as available whether they liked it or not and the question is whether he did it to white girls too. Arthur Gay a descendent of the Samuel Jackman Prescod clan met Joe in London and Joe had a Jamaican woman. Joe drove buses for London Transport. He could afford to slum because the Hoads had piece-of-change; he did not have to drive a bus.

The English would think that he was just another colonial. One of these boys was a Lampitt. The Lampitts did not have anything.He went to England and started living off of immoral earning and was in the newspaper; he got sixteen months in jail.

One or two white boys were very bright but there were many white boys, who were never in the top of the class and from early Harrison did not have a white head boy, of course some were prefects.

The thing is to understand.

Harold Haskell, a headmaster was said to be a racist white man but some thought that he was one of the last lot of benevolent white men, who thought: “We got to look after our subject.” And many boasted and wanted to mould Harrisons boys in the image of Rugby, an English public school.

Boys like Ted Went, Jack Dear and Pilgrim never knew that they were not white. During lunchtime they walked around the peripheries of the playing field because the white boys did not want to associate with them and they did not want to associate with the dark skinned boys. They were bright; Jack, his father was a judge down the island, went on to do law and some went off to the war.

Harold Griffith, a black boy, became headboy, his father was Herman Griffith the fast bowler that got Don Bradman out for a duck. People whispered: “A black man got Donald Bradman and he clean bowled him.”

Exclusivity was not confined to whites. Some black fellows were called Sir by their inferior, like in an army a man in three stripes is call Sir by a man with two stripes. But they never called anybody Sir except for at school, where they called all teachers Sir. Many others got through by saying Sir and in the end they praise up and say what a good system they went through but their values are upside down.

Spartan was an elite black club. Old man Gay, when he died was the oldest member at 100 years old. The Brownes (Aunt Dolly’s father and uncles were founding members) George Carew was a member. He liked to dress well always and he was dapper.

Shell Harris, became a cricket commentator. He taught at Roebuck boys school and so did Arthur Gay and in the afternoons when school was let out the two walked up across Weymouth pasture into Queens Park and bowled at George Headley. George took a lot of batting practice he was careful and tried to get on the West Indies team again after cricket started after the war in the great tour that Everton Weekes went on. .

Spartan was a real club. There was Shirley Smith and the Browns and the Walcotts, Frank and Clyde all went to Harrisons College. Son was the head porter. He was also everything – grounds man and waiter.

As members sat and watched practice: Son said: “The next one is on you,” as their turn for a round of drinks came. He knew everyone that drank and knew the crowd and the next time members called for a drink they did not know who paid for it and on the first or second of the month Son came with his book and said: “Your bill is $32.00 dollars.

In the back of the club house there was a private room and certain fellows played poker there and youngsters got roped in. Most were called middle class and lived in the same métier and mode. They did not have to use their money to contribute to their living they lived at their family’s comfortable home and they assume that everyone lived like that and never thought that some did not have money but some did not; a few played great and found it hard to contribute and some dropped out.

They may have despised each other but white Barbadians had always gone to each other’s house and met. The Leacocks meeting the Chandlers and the Piles and ganged up and decide what misinformation to put out and what scallywag thing to do. Some were thieves, Leacock pretended humility all the while he stole Musson’s money and A.E. Taylor was a convicted thief who went to jail and did not tell, where the money he stole was and came out and was rich on his stolen money. These white men found no hesitancy in killing the pro-worker Governor Newlands.

Some are brighter than others and these some said that they could not mix with the rest of them because all they talk about is “these black people.”

The rumour, which this author has not been confirmed – I have great respect for E.K. Walcott in a lot of areas) - is that E. K. Walcott’s maid went into Miss Bootman’s rum shop, where the gas tanks are now at the entrance to Westbury Road and she said that she heard Walcott and a gang of white men at a cocktail party saying they had to get rid of “this man.”

“This man they wanted got to “get rid” of was Grantley Adams, a Barbados scholar, Walcott and these white men would have spoken across the floor with Adams in the House of Assemble, met him at the bench as an adversary yet they shook his hand with their right hand and their left hand in back with a knife. They met blacks only because they could not help meeting them.

Grantley ran to England and many think it is only because he defended Clement Payne but Grantley was scared to go up against these people.

1910s the Mount Plantation belonged to the Earl of Harwood, King George’s uncle but Pile looked after it. Boyce was the white manager and the under manager and book-keeper was a coloured man. Mr. Boyce took sick and the coloured man acted and carried on for him and he became manager and Boyce never returned to work but he lived in the big house and the royal family could not say “here is your severance pay” and let him go.

Even though he did not go back to the job he never moved out of the house and lived there until he died and the coloured man live in a smaller house on the plantation. Boyce did not like work this is a Boyce of Yearwood and Boyce. The Yearwoods and the Piles are cousins. Laurie Yearwood was a good batsman, tall, good looking and owned Hanson plantation and other places. They were the leisurely class, who did not have to work hard for their money.

All were not absolute dunces. A Piles studied law and went to court only once to defend one of his labourers. The few, who became lawyers made money. It was only the black lawyers, who had a hard time, the white ones were solicitors, the black boys were lawyer. Solicitors had to article under another solicitor and not many white men took in black article clerks. Philip Browne, Oliver’s brother was a solicitor. He was one of the few that could walk in. His father Dr. Johnny Brown went to B.G.

It is a sociological phenomena with which the university does not want to deal for by talking to people, who know, the university will not get the story it wants. The university calls them snobs because of the families out of which they came; the schools their foreparents attended, where they and their families lived and socialized. Not only were these families on the same terms socially but they were also superior to the whole mob – white and black.

In agriculture the island is condemned not be able to cure onion rot, or produce an abundance of vegetables, or make millions on our sea island cotton, or go into fishing because Eric St. John has an attitude. He does not set out to Brie to figure that he comes from an aristocratic family and keep that notion alive. While Eric went to Britain and studied building he cannot prove that he has a piece of paper from Bristol in agriculture but the better experience learnt and practiced at the feet of his grandfather where we know all of them things first means nothing.

It is like in the early 60s when the nouveau riche of Britain could afford to buy a flat in the Strand, they built a home library and bought books by the yard. They look like books but all it was was embossed leather with gold-plated titles such as the History of England by Lord Hume.

In medieval time scholars argued seriously about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Now the same thing with education buy a yard of degrees but if you know your stuff you can deal with anybody. The best way to stop a critic’s mouth is to go a little above his head and he becomes afraid and he will not go there.

Our education system needs to be restructured and the best places to educate a child is in the home but when parents do not know it cannot be done and if a child is sent to a school, where teachers are all left-handed, when they see a right-handed person they will laugh at that person.

The aim of present language of arguments is only to have an audience and no time should be spent on them. These silly words should be condemned but it works. Listen to some of the lectures and look in the audience; it is all about “you see me at such and such a body’s lecture? I was there.” In a grand place. It is event planning and nothing more than style.

The difference is in each twenty year generation more and more information is being hidden and we go nowhere and one of the main reasons is that education is seen as just to earn a living not to get knowledge.

Beckles wants a graduate in every house. In Sweden and Switzerland 60 years ago in the 40s every other adult had a degree and it was taken like how we take a school certificate, not to be fussier than anybody else. Men know instinctively how far to go and all that Hitler and the Germans did - invaded and influenced all over Europe - these two countries were not moved they were left by themselves.

Racist whites are not going change behaviour unless they are forced. How do we deal with them. The fault dear Brutus lies not in our stars but in that we are underlines. It not what to do with white people; it is what black people must do.

PART III – THE PRIMATES continued next issue