The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

As times change, people get frightened and provoke fear in others. When the slave master saw a threat of change, he reacted violently by beating it down, so he survived to rule another day.

No one ever wants to surrender dominance: it becomes a drug and fills them with superior power. They forget that change is inevitable and essential to keep pace with the world around them.

In fact, change is essential to survival. When masters and mistresses took their whips and beat their enslaved subjects and their children publicly, they damaged themselves as well as those around them. They may have dressed in suits of white and walked with noses high, but they were still thugs and bullies, often terrified of what could happen if anyone saw their secrets. We have now created a generation of people who no longer believe in the trappings of leadership as being well respected for one’s composure, class and tact.

Rather, they bully people, boast and belittle. We can boast about beating women, beating men, beating children and then tell everyone who listens how much we hate anyone who does not look like us. Yet those around us do not seem to recognise the bigoted and violent thuggery that we espouse.

These days, it matters little on which side of the political divide one resides (there’s little difference anyway), thuggery and threatening behaviour are commonplace. It seems like we as a people have internalised the violence and the role of the slave master and are now behaving in that way. We are good at pointing out how thuggish others are, but refuse to see how bullish, controlling, demeaning and violent we are. We rule with iron fists, little mercy and cold hearts, as long as people respect us because we see ourselves as more important than they are; we are happy-ish. However, we are consumed by insecurities that propel us into more thuggery.

As the world changes, I must hold on to what I know and I know that I am in control. I can beat people into submission, and that’s fine. Just don’t come roun’ me with your “sissy” ways.

Ironically, the same sentiment is held towards women: they are either mothers who are celebrated for being mothers, or they are jezebels who can be slapped around.

In the world of Bahamian patriarchy, women are inferior. Men who are darker skinned than those in power are also inferior. In fact, anyone who does not believe the same thing I do should be treated with violence, must refer to me as “Sir” and know that I am far superior to them; know that I am overlord. And so the violence starts. The slave master now lives in us and he along with the attitude of the overseer is visited on the lesser mortals, as I see them, each day.

When this behaviour finds its spirit level in the community Over-the-Hill, it is condemned because it usually results in rape, assault and murder. Other than that, when leaders behave in ways that set the stage for the same behaviour in their followers, they must not be criticised, their hands must not be tied; they have the right to disregard any laws they feel are beneath them. And we wonder about the disappearance of the community?

In regional and international studies, we see that patriarchal systems are internalised and repeated even in the absence of male role models. These systems can also be repeated when they are racist and misogynist and disempower the people who develop under them.

Ironically, given their exposure to these harmful patterns, even when they hated them, many people become as abusive and thuggish as the system they grew up under. When they take on leadership roles, they use the same behaviour learned in an abusive household where mother and children were threatened, beaten and silenced and told, for example, “If you a sissy boy, I will kill you or expel you from my land.”

They leave the home and perform this same behaviour in the public sphere. They beat women they claim to love, break arms, cheeks and legs, sometimes they kill them, but they can afford to because they are above the law. If they choose to lay down with men, they are not gay, and they will often arise more homophobic and abusive of all “sissy” behaviour than they were before. Of course, studies underline these facts, but they are dismissed as poppycock by the people who perform these behaviours. Anything that threatens their “control”, their “power” will receive their wrath.

Dangerous is the man who loves his wife or girlfriend, goes out drinking with his boys one night and then comes home and beats the crap out of her when she asks him who he was with or what he was doing. He is man ‘and don’ need no woman ‘questionin’ him’; he is the head of his house. To question is to undermine his masculinity, as he sees it. In his father’s house, no woman would venture to question his father. The same things must be lived out in his house. The next day, he apologises for what happened, makes up with his battered wife/girlfriend and they move on. She believes him when he says it will never happen again.

Yet, as soon as he is out with his boys the next time, it repeats itself. The behaviour escalates and the beatings become more frequent and more violent. She either stays and fears for her life, or she leaves and fears for her safety. Many stay. Some die staying. This behaviour does not remain locked behind closed doors, as we can see, and once it begins to surface it usually continues to show itself unless some behaviour modification is sought usually through intervention.

We have come to a juncture in this country where we live in these environments privately as well as publicly. The same racist, sexist, misogynist, violent behaviour the community feared and hid from under slavery is now being visited on them everyday by their leaders, yet no one says anything. International, regional and local studies show that when one grows up in a violent, abusive, caustic home, one carries that behaviour with one forever.

Yet we continue to beat people into submission and tell them not to question. Both men and women can inflict the same master-like behaviour on their children and communities, it does not discriminate based on sex. Women and men can and do impose their personal feelings on their communities, a bully will continue to inflict suffering on his/her entire community until one day the people in that community give him a taste of his own medicine.

Sadly, that usually leads to revealing a tragically, deeply insecure and wounded person, who as long as s/he can call someone else sissy and send them out of his/her road, is good, but once someone shows his/her human frailties s/he is destroyed. Thuggery and bullying reside among and within us everyday, it is our choice whether we allow them to dominate and so destroy or we seek intervention and choose to change our behaviour. Sadly, seeking help is not masculine, or so we are taught, and when we come from abusive homes we carry that abuse with us forever: slavery is that home, and the violence lived therein was as harmful to the master and his household as it was on his enslaved subjects. As we develop as a country, we must understand that Audre Lorde’s words, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, will always stay with us as long as we choose to reside in the same house the master built.

• bethellbennett@gmail.com