The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Recently, I listened attentively as a 5th grade student gave the meaning of the colours in the Bahamian flag. She said that the black in the flag stands for the strength of the Bahamian people. I was surprised by this. When I attended school during the tumultuous 1980s, we were told by our teachers that the black stood for Black Bahamians. Nothing in the flag represents the White minority.

As impressionable students, we were informed that the Free National Movement was dangerous for The Bahamas simply because the opposition party had aligned itself with the White United Bahamian Party. I was under the impression that Sir Lynden O Pindling and Sir Milo B Butler had founded the Progressive Liberal Party. Our Black educators, to the best of my memory, never informed us that White Bahamians, Sir Henry Taylor, Cyril Stevenson and William Cartwright, founded the PLP. I commend a PLP Cabinet minister for admitting this important historical fact to a government school on Grand Bahama recently, although in the age of social media any attempts to engage in historical revisionism would prove futile. White Bahamians should not be made to feel alienated or marginalised during the Majority Rule holiday, as many of their forefathers also suffered under minority rule.

The PLP’s January 10, 1967, general election victory was made possible when Labour Leader Sir Randol Fawkes and the White Independent MP Alvin Braynen decided to throw their weight behind Pindling. Deadlocked at 18 apiece, both the UBP and the PLP worked feverishly behind the scenes to woo over Fawkes and Braynen.

The untimely death of PLP MP Uriah McPhee afforded Pindling the opportunity to call a snap election the following year on April 10, 1968, with the aim of increasing the PLP’s slim majority. The PLP would win 29 of the 38 seats in the House of Assembly.

Maybe historian Michael Craton was engaging in sensationalism when he wrote in his A History of the Bahamas regarding the 1968 general election, that the PLP had “purged itself of its white or near-white candidates - would now claim to be unequivocally the party of the black majority”.

Perhaps this anti-white sentiment, which was pervasive among Black Bahamians, is why my Black educators purposely indoctrinated us with a nascent form of Woke ideology, which is really reverse racism. Majority Rule should not imply that the largest Bahamian racial demographic controls the reins of political power instead of White Bahamians.

I view marginalised White Bahamians as also being a part of the majority. We must bear in mind the tens of thousands of Black Bahamians supported the UBP and that only a small clique of privileged White and Black Bahamians enjoyed the spoils of victory while the overwhelming majority of the population, inclusive of underprivileged White Bahamians, suffered.

KEVIN EVANS

Freeport, Grand Bahama,

January 10, 2023.