The Tribune

By DR IAN BETHELL-BENNETT

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,

None but ourselves can free our mind...” (Redemption Song, Bob Marley)

We live in fear of not being white enough, not being pretty enough, not being rich enough, not being skinny enough. We are now perhaps the most bleached, mentally colonised, self-hating country in the region.

We are re-instilling in the youth of an already deeply dysfunctional country that they are not good enough. This is especially true for women who we treat as if they were inferior to men, and this is especially true from other women. We often choose to ignore when women speak, except when they are educators. Educators are also easily dismissed because the officials, in this progressive country, dismiss them and education as feminine, inferior. They are willing to pay educators close to nothing. (Much like they pay police next to nothing and expect the country to be safe.)

However, as long as your lips ain’t too ‘sudgy’, your nose ain’t too broad, your hair ain’t too ‘hard’ or too bad, you a’right’! Why, oh progressive government of the people for the people by the people (just not the same people), are we destroying black women’s self-images in this century?

Apparently, if you are too black, then bleach, baby bleach. The fact that I am bringing it up again so soon and that young women are being actively beaten down because of their blackness condemns the country and its progressive system; it tells us that we have a serious socio-cultural problem.

We seem to be heading into Trump era of regressive speak where we talk about people who are or were a part of the black empowerment movement being communists. We are, like him, saying that any black woman too black, too at home in her blackness, must be destroyed by a system that has been decolonised, proudly, since 1973. Yet we are more deeply damaged now than we were 40 odd years ago. The progressive governments of this post-colony have driven us into the abyss of self-hatred, disempowerment, heightened inequality, and racist-anti-black sentiment, notwithstanding this being a black country, run by black politicians. The majority of the country may be black, they may also be women, but the anti-black, misogynistic, anti-female, paternalist public attitudes highlight social ills.

When women abuse younger women, encourage the abuse of these women, especially when they are children, it speaks volumes about where we are in our national development. The fact is that young men overwhelmingly subscribe to the belief that they own women because this is the behaviour they see in their home. They believe that their girlfriends deserve to be beaten if they do not do as they say, as research has shown; this is problematic. To couple this with authority’s contempt for blackness is an awful indictment on this nation and people.

The latest episode of condemning blackness shows us that the country has descended into a deeply scarred self-hating, woman-hating, devastating chasm. We are teaching children to hate themselves, especially poor, girl children. We are also teaching them that they cannot be managers, they cannot be business owners, they cannot be bankers, high-level lawyers, because they are too black, too ugly, too female, too unkept. They must be ashamed of their nature or they will be shamed into failure.

Is progress pegged to whitening and misogyny? Is it linked to destroying the nation of black people and rebuilding it as a country of foreign-controlled menial, black workers who are subject to mental slavery, materialism and sexual violence? The statistics tell us that rape, attempted rape and unlawful sexual relations are increasing. Yet, we focus almost exclusively on murder. Women are subject to serious social pressure to be men’s play things. We teach young, poor, black girls that they are worthless, and worth less than others around them. When we deploy messages of black beauty being unacceptable, as the recent situation at CR Walker has demonstrated, it makes this violence against young black youth worse. They are born black and will die black. Are they to carry this self-hatred and self-contempt to the grave with them?

Our education is antiquated, that is obvious, but it is also as colonial as it was before decolonisation occurred. In fact, the public system has declined, deteriorated and is so utterly rotten so much so that 50 per cent of the youth cannot read and write up to the standards necessary to succeed in the global community.

Taking that as a given, we are also destroying the youth by telling them that their natural beauty, their natural skin colour, hair texture, physical features need changing. There may have been more European teachers in the school system before, and some may have been gently hostile towards many students, but they seem less damning of black femininity than the progressive, post-independence, under-educated, functionally-literate, self-hating, deeply-colonised agents who cannot read beyond their students’ levels.

When in the 1950s blacks were treated like animals and called things like jigaboo, apes, gorillas and monkeys, they knew the battles they faced. Today, the war against blacks is worse than ever, especially if you are a young black woman in a black woman-demeaning country. We have become so destructive of ourselves that we are failing.

Why are we teaching our youth that everything about them is inferior and worthless? Why is the system so destructive and anti-black that girls cannot ware natural hair? Why is some of society defending the destruction of black youth? Why are we claiming that natural black hair is unkempt and that this impedes learning? The fact that the ministry of education allows this kind of behaviour in its schools is not new nor is it surprising, but the fact that the government has furthered this kind of thinking condemns it as much as it condemns society. Society is as guilty of hating itself as is the government of teaching that blackness is not acceptable. Blackness must be hidden, covered, eradicated.

This problem may manifest itself through hair, but is far deeper than that. We are teaching our children, especially the young, working-class black girls and boys, that they are not good enough to succeed in their own country. We only accept white looks here. When Bell Hooks wrote “Black Looks”, did she know the kind of mental anguish and emotional torture a self-proclaimed black country would put its non-weaving, non-bleaching black folks through? Do we understand that the self-hatred we are teaching spills over into our murder rate and our violent attitudes?

Why does black femininity in the Bahamas have to be bleached out and permed into submission? Why can we not live with our black kinky tresses, hardened by sunshine and life, and our brown skins? Why must we chemicalise these into acceptable softness?

On Facebook, Joe Gaskins talked about being proud of his locks, his dreads, his self. We have been taught that to be locks-wearing is to be law-breaking for a man, and exotic if worn in a particular way for a woman. We cannot simply accept locks, though we are somewhat better than in the 1970s and 1980s. However, it is acceptable mostly if one’s skin is lighter, one’s locks ‘softer’.

Succinctly put, black beauty is unacceptable unless it is bought from a shop and/or sculpted and conditioned by the white-world view. We are telling our young girls that they are worth nothing because they are black, female and working-class. As much as I would like to understand the point of view of the ministry of miseducation, and this administrator, I can see nothing other than self-hating, colonial subjects who have never emancipated themselves, and who wish to impose the same prison on all others.

We live in paradise, though it be not for dark-skinned bodies nor kinky-haired folks, but for all who are encouraged to invest in its blue waters, bleached-sandy beaches and hotel-lined coasts. Mental imprisonment is really no excuse for further violence against our youth. It is a tragedy and a travesty that almost 50 years after independence most consultants are white, most successful business owners are white and many entrepreneurs are foreign and white, but most criminals are black and most poor, black youth cannot read, write or count at their age/grade level. While education should not depend on one’s looks, it is often determined by one’s skin tone and hair texture. This is not just about race and gender discrimination, it is also about class.

• bethellbennett@gmail.com