Conspiracy theorists probably had a field day last Sunday evening.
That was when Prime Minister Freundel Stuart came to Brooklyn to mix, mingle and address several hundred Bajan New Yorkers in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush community.
First, was the reason he didn’t attend last year’s “cocktail sip” after having been invited by the Friends of Barbados (DLP) Association, the ruling Democratic Labour Party’s arm in the United States.
“Last year, I am given to understand that an invitation was sent to me to attend this event, but some strange conspiracy of circumstances resulted in my not getting the invitation on time and therefore the expectation that I would have been here was cheated of fulfillment,” Stuart said.
Next, was the matter of the weather. With the temperature having plunged by at least 30 degrees in two days, making the evening much colder than the planners had hoped, there might have been a conspiracy by unseen hands to turn the air around Nazareth Hall, a high school facility, into something of a frigid zone so that the warmth of the welcome on the inside would have been seen as a true reflection of Bajan hospitality.
“The warmth is to be found in here (building) and contrasts sharply with the experience outside,” Stuart said.
Those remarks were but a lead-in to an interesting observation: the politics of the Barbadian community in New York.
For there was a time when Bajans in the City were said to comprise their nation’s 25th constituency, a period when there were only 24 seats in the House of Assembly.
“When in 1981, we moved from 24 to 27 seats, New York used to be described as the 28th constituency,” the Prime Minister observed.
“And in 2003, when we moved to 30 seats, New York has been described ever since then as the 31st constituency. So we see you as an essential part of what we are doing in Barbados.”
The involvement of Bajans and other West Indians in New York in politics back home is nothing new. Indeed, their presence in the City’s politics is as old as the hills. At the height of Britain’s colonial sprawl, a time when the sun didn’t set on the British empire in the first and second decades of the 20th century, West Indians were in the forefront of the anti-colonial campaign.
Unrelenting critic
For example, Reginald Pierrepoint, a Bajan activist in Harlem, was an unrelenting critic of British colonialism and an advocate for self-determination for Barbados and its neighbours. Marcus Garvey, who came to the United States in 1916 from Jamaica, preached economic independence and captured the interest of ordinary Black people across the land and in the Caribbean.
In later years, that strident political leadership was assumed by such Barbadians as Richard B. Moore, Thomas Russell Jones and Shirley Chisholm, who made the politics of New York and the economic and social development of Black New Yorkers their major priorities.
Little wonder, then, that as the Caribbean immigrant community expanded rapidly in the past 40 years, almost every Caribbean leader found New York to be an essential hunting ground for support, both in coin and kind.
New York City is a metropolitan centre that thrives on local, state, national and international politics, one of the few places in the country with a keen eye on what happens in the rest of the world. Hence, Bajans’ intense interest in global affairs and in what’s happening back home.
That focus can be traced to a simple fact: there isn’t a home in Barbados without a close or distant relative in New York, Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, Hartford or any other American city. Access to relatively cheap telephone calls to Bimshire, the Internet, the NATION newspaper and STARCOM radio, for instance, plus their ability to find out what’s going on behind the scenes in their birthplace, often before most people in Barbados have been told, enable them to form and voice opinions on every conceivable subject.
Politicians find that situation appealing.
