B.C’s B’DOS – West Indian white elephant

ONE SHOT in the BBC’s series on South African apartheid, Have You Heard From Johannesburg?, struck me: a white man on a Whites-only beach, threatening a black protester who – illegally, under existing law – dared enter the beach. “I’ll feed you to the sharks!” he sneered, face contorted with hate; and I imagined a similar scene here. It’s not a happy thought that but that doesn’t make it less accurate to suggest that (minus Burnham’s Guyana, or measured from the 15th century) Barbados is the most racially divided Caribbean territory. There are 20th generation Bajan Creoles – persons born here – with straw blonde hair and periwinkle blue eyes, people who, after five centuries, still can’t take five minutes in the sun. They have their African and even their East Indian counterparts.To someone raised in Trinidad’s racial and cultural polyglot, a genuine melting pot, where Hindi, French and Spanish words have passed into everyday speech (and language itself is the richer for it), it is one of Barbados’ most striking features that, for so long, colour lines have, largely speaking, not been crossed. That rigid division may have generated the welcome by-product of social order, but that order should not blind observers to its foundation: de facto racial segregation; entrenched racial prejudice (on both sides); and the preservation of inherited privilege and concomitant stifling of meritocracy. Since Emancipation, we – the ruling sector, of which I am a minor part – have laboured to keep the masses entrapped instead of struggling to set them free. We do not need rampant vendors of black coral but a nascent black entrepreneurial class. We must all create and participate in wealth.It’s difficult to raise some subjects, even pressing ones, but the greatest Caribbean social problem is what happens next to young black men; “our” future is tied to “theirs”. Though it is neither politically correct nor polite to say it, there is a difference between young black men and everyone else. Young black women, e.g, don’t think guns are cool; and young white rebels are more likely to reach for surfboards. Some problems you ignore – or pass off as something else – at your peril.Race (and racial division) is not the only Caribbean issue, but it remains primary. Unresolved, it will defeat our attempts at civilisation. You can convince your cocktail party cohorts the issue is poverty, not race; and every individual clearly has a social responsibility to lift himself up; but it still remains easy for some and almost impossible for others, because unfair historical relationships have been perpetuated through all manner of devices ranging from church through corporal punishment to chattel-house. Gang members don’t have to understand injustice to react against it; to recognise that is not to enable it, but to take the first step to destroying it.“An elephant in the drawing room” is “a major problem or controversial issue which is obviously present but avoided as a subject for discussion”. A “white elephant” is a “thing of little use, costly to maintain and difficult to get rid of”. The king of Siam supposedly presented a white elephant to a courtier he wished to destroy; and there is a white elephant in the West Indian drawing room.     • BC Pires is in the castle of his skin.