The Tribune

IF it is the case that the Bahamas feels the influence of Donald Trump and that many Bahamians hold similar views to his, we need to speak to our boys.

In the United States, in black or African-American families one often hears mention of fathers having the talk with their sons.

The talk is usually not about sex, or girls or anything so pedestrian, but about how to survive being black in what bell hooks, the American author, feminist and activist, sees as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” because (she) wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and not to just have one thing be like, you know, gender is the important issue, race is the important issue. But for me the use of that particular jargonistic phrase was a way of saying all of these things actually are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives.

As a black woman, hooks (real name Gloria Jean Watkins) sees the polemics of power and domination as they are used against black males. What is interesting is that they are used against everyone who does not fit into the specific mould she describes. She writes that if I really want to understand what’s happening to me, right now at this moment in my life, as a black female of a certain age group, I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of race. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of gender. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking at how white people see me ...

It seems that hooks has captured so much of what we inhabit today, in a non-white country where black boys are usually seen as bad men, because so many of them are, and because they have been painted like this for generations and there is now no longer a discussion of how to liberate young, black males from this system that guarantees their failure. It is not coincidental that education has been so utterly devastated that if one does not have the wherewithal to buy a good education, one is left to a place of being lucky if one emerges being able to read and not hating oneself given the systemic and systematic message of uselessness and ‘nogoodness’ that one is bombarded by daily.

It is simply business as usual for governments, who see nothing wrong with the failure of over 50 per cent of the public school population, where family values are harped on about, but over 60 per cent of all children are born into single-parent households where there is absolutely no love for this creature that has issued from the encounter between the ‘noo good pa’ and the hardworking mother. The anger that is internalised along with the self-loathing can hardly lead to much other than either explosion in the neighbourhood or self implosion. The message deployed to many young people is that they cannot do anything because no matter what they do, they are worthless.

In a place where this kind of brainwashing exists, national devastation is not only surprising but expected. We need to rethink the mental trauma we create.

Moreover, when young males are interviewed in prisons, their response to what they did is that they did nothing. Perhaps they are not as innocent ‘as all that’, but much like in the US, if one is black or Latino, one can go to prison for walking and chewing gum on the wrong side of the street.

This is the conversation that must be had with young people. Laws are stacked against them. Notwithstanding the system being led by black leaders, it is still determined to destroy young, poor black males, especially. The police state will see to that. What the caustic home does not damage, the school, where young boys are not taught because they are too disruptive and unruly and so the girls are taught instead, stamps out, because we already know that they won’t amount to anything anyway. How many of us have been told this?

So, the home life of father-hating mother and child and the school life where he will amount to nothing because no one will take the time with him because he’s not worth it, to a legal system that offers no defence when a youth is picked up for being with the wrong people or in the wrong place except for the services he can afford to secure, which are, frankly, none, he will go to jail because without a good lawyer, he is doomed.

Who told him not to take weed from just anyone? Who told him how to avoid trouble? Who taught him how to speak politely to an officer so as not to be slapped down in the middle of the road and then arrested for ‘resisting arrest’? Listening to the stories of so many young people (and the tragedy is that we are destroying ourselves), they say, ‘ain’t no body got time for that’. While we talk about this being a problem in the US, Trumpism is alive and well in this small town.

We are ready to deprive anyone else of their rights, just don’t let it happen to me. We won’t say anything unless it hits home. Though, often, even when it hits home the response is usually, ‘oh he was bad anyhow’. What made him bad? Was it the fact that that was all he ever heard and that his mother never took a minute to communicate anything to him other than derision, disdain and anger at who he was or who he looked like? In this kind of society where the devastation begins with an internalised self-hatred and an anger that is so caustic it could kill generations from one drop, we are doomed to fail.

Too often the image of young people who stand up for themselves is that they are anti-nationalist and a danger to the state. It is a travesty when the body politic is willing to throw its young men under the bus, abuse its young women and ignore those who express their needs, because, apparently, they do not jive with their own or take away from their power. We must speak with our sons to warn them of the dangers that are all around them, not to instill fear in them, but to empower them to the realities that work against them.

• Dr Ian Bethell Bennett is Dean of the Faculty of Liberal and Fine Arts at the University of the Bahamas