Everyone noticed Sir Roy Trotman’s May Day warning to a specific local “Egyptian Jew” and “these foreign people” generally that Barbados was not Syria, Damascus or Libya, but some may have missed his funniest, if accidental, comment last Friday, when Sir Roy apparently happily told the WEEKEND NATION he would continue to call a spade a spade.
How I wish I could have asked whether he might also call a coon a coon or a honky a honky, as well he might. He certainly didn’t hesitate to fling out the J-word unprovoked and, given a chance to soften his remarks, chose instead to insist he had nothing to apologize for, since he meant no offence; it’s like lowering a lighted match into a gasoline tank and explaining you only wanted to check the level.
The English writer Paul Johnson wrote in his “vital litmus test” in the Times in 1977 that “no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy”. Anti-semitism does not say so much about its Jewish targets as about those who willingly gang up against them.
Jews the world over are the easiest minority to abuse, even more than black people. No civilized society should take that first step down the road to Germany, 1939, or Rwanda, 1994; it could swiflty lead to Barbados, 2012. (The only place Jews aren’t the world’s first victims is Israel, where the Palestinians ironically stand in for them in toto.)
But perhaps incendiary remarks not meant to offend are normal in this confusing little place – the West Indies – where the best batsman of the millennium is painstakingly forced into premature retirement and the best West Indian Test batsman of his day is kept out of the side for a year for a moment’s indiscretion, and Sir Roy – a contemporary trade unionist with a title of ancient English privilege – could call someone an “Egyptian Jew” and insist he was calling a spade a spade, because we have no intellectual life whatever to threaten by anti-semitism, intended or not.
In the very confused Bajan context, Sir Roy’s name-calling might not seem so bad as at first blush. When, in a society historically grounded in institutional racism, you have a tacit agreement never to raise, far less intelligently discuss, the subject of race, comments do not emerge – they escape.
Additionally, Sir Roy’s statements hold just enough truth to allow those who want to excuse sloppy thinking, including Sir Roy’s himself, to focus on the historical unfair treatment of Blacks and not on the lie he actually told. Racial superiority or inferiority remains a lie, by whomever told.
It is good to see Sir Roy widely condemned by Blacks and Whites alike; but it would be better if we could see that within the existing framework for communication, his remarks are not surprising. A black leader might lose his following if he did not occasionally call out the honkies and [berate] the intellectual society. But we cannot forget that if you prick the Jew, we all bleed.
