The Tribune

By IAN BETHEL BENNET

We often talk about our boys failing, yet we do nothing about it. We render lip service to a serious problem. The discourse has been around young black males failing in all aspects of life except bling culture. We know that school holds little for them, but we choose not to change the syllabus to keep them interested.

This piece is, however, not about that, it is about the structural ways black males are set up to fail. In a post-slavery society the inequalities of colonialism and slavery, of imperialism and colonial laws have remained unchallenged by the post-colony that the Bahamas has developed into.

Bahamians talk about how violent young men are. In London they talk about black on black violence. In Canada they usually blame Jamaicans for their violent crimes. This is also true of the US. The Caribbean is depicted as violent, deprived and depraved. Countless studies have shown that the Caribbean has been so framed for centuries.

Obviously, young black males are those most often targeted. There may be some truth to black youth violence. However, the blanket assumption is that because they are black they are violent, is flawed and bigoted. They are black so they are underachieving, and somehow these same assumptions operate the Bahamas, a black country.

At the same time, we blame the Haitians, the darker hued among us, for all the crime, though the statistics show otherwise. Perhaps we need to stop blaming and reconsider the structures that have created these “violent tendencies”. We talk about the Caribbean producing a culture of violence, yet we do not go into the history that has created us.

As an earlier article pointed out, the Caribbean is a part of the world system, based on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory. The system that was in place here was violent, as in Brazil, Cuba, Honduras a system of exploitation, control, and torture. Critics of crime often talk about a culture of extreme violence in the Brazilian favelas and show the need to sanitise them. Studies that link this violence to a history of violence, plantation, slavery, colonisation and exploitation, while numerous, have been overshadowed by the talk of a culture of violence.

The theory espoused is that we are simply hot blooded, in good and bad ways. These ideas are used to frame the region as being inhabited by inferior people. Tragically, we use the same language when we talk about our young men. Governments come in on their get tough on crime motto. We do not want to become like Jamaica or Haiti where violence has prevailed over communities. Do we stop to think that these are also postcolonial systems set up to be exploited? They are colonies used to produce. We are made to be consumed.

So, young black males are a part of a culture of inferiority and violence that even in a black country is used as the reason for their behaviour. We seem to be saying that we are inferior and therefore need to be punished. The cat o’ nine tails is a superb example of this idea of torture, a remnant of slavery and colonialism that needs to be used to control the population, especially the young black males. This kind of structure is beyond the day-to-day discussion of the mother berating her son for his dumbness, but harks back to a savage Africa. Imperialists brought Africans here to civilise them and to produce. Yet, we overlook the massive impact of such a discourse on the continued development of the country. When the Bahamas was born on July 10, 1973, all the vestiges of slavery and colonialism magically evaporated.

Ironically, very little has changed since the supposedly distant past. A past the country wishes to ignore: slavery never happened here; colonisation was not that bad. Yet, we still see Rastafarians as less than, black youths as criminals and the laws still operate thus.

We talk about gender inequalities, yet we never talk about systemic inequalities that have been bred into the psyche of a people. Politicians are paid to behave like bulldogs to intimidate their constituents, but when youths carry this behaviour on, they are imprisoned for disturbing the peace. Once imprisoned, we tell the youngsters that they will never amount to anything. We expose them to hard-core criminals from whom they will learn.

In Brazil, if we sit down and look at a film like Cidade de Deus, we see the culture of violence that needs to be challenged. It is not a culture that we are innately born into, however, but a system that we have been produced into that has never been changed, despite the calls for black empowerment.

Does that mean we can be empowered as long as we are not working-class or poor young black males? If one is a poor, black young man and acts in the systemically prescribed way one is quickly incarcerated and a small group rules. Ultimately, the system fails young black males.

• Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett, Associate Professor in the School of English Studies at the College of the Bahamas, has written extensively on race and migration in the Bahamas, cultural creolisation and gender issues. Direct questions and comments to iabethellbennett@yahoo.co.uk.