The Tribune

by SIMON

Egalitarianism: the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

A dear friend tells the story of her trip overseas representing The Bahamas at a conference where she was the most senior official and was accorded considerable status by her hosts.

In gratitude to the four young protocol officers who accompanied her and the group of officials at the small conference, she gave each of them a small gift as a token of appreciation and affection.

The protocol officers were at first surprised, and then effusive in their gratitude. The surprise and effusiveness were born from the curious fact that in four years of hosting international visitors, this was the first time that anyone thought to give them gifts.

One of the protocol officers explained with her hands, one raised high and the other lowered: “You are up here and we are down here.” She continued, bringing her hands level approximating the equality sign symbolising various civil rights movements, “And you made us feel like this”, meaning she made them feel equal.

The Bahamian official’s gift-giving flowed naturally from her own dutiful and lifelong expression of the virtuous and intimate companions: generosity and gratitude.

It flowed also from something often second-nature in Bahamian culture: a general sense of equality and egalitarianism, that we are all one, made in the image and likeness of God, sharing an innate human dignity.

The wife of a Bahamian diplomat overseas recalls her Filipino housekeeper talking about throwing a party for a group of friends. When the wife of the diplomat offered the use of the diplomatic residence’s dining room, the housekeeper was bowled over. The diplomat’s wife thought it a relatively minor gesture.

Here again was this sense on the part of a Bahamian, of a spirit of egalitarianism. While certain status and respect for authority are necessary, most Bahamians innately believe that we are first fellow human beings, with the same basic desires, needs, struggles and innate equality.

Daily interactions constitute a collage which when assembled reveal a portrait of Bahamian egalitarianism. The interaction between Bahamians of various economic groups is fluid and generally easy.

Most of us tend to view and treat each other as equals and treat also with equal respect and camaraderie others such as the service providers who may pump our gas, who pack our grocery bags, who serve us in restaurants. If one wants to understand this sense that we share a common dignity, get on the wrong side of a waiter or waitress at a restaurant.

A Filipino housekeeper notes that she and other Filipino service providers in The Bahamas tend be treated with greater dignity and mutual respect by Bahamian employers than by foreign employers including many who live in exclusive gated communities in the country.

To be sure, there are those puffed up and preening Bahamians who asininely deem themselves somehow superior because they are accented with cheap pretentiousness and expensive perfumes and colognes.

Sadly, even the most luxurious scents are unable to mask the stench of those who think that they do not share a common humanity at the most basic level.

Contrast our greater egalitarian spirit with the racial, social and economic stratification and divide in Haiti and Jamaica. A former associate cites two examples.

He tells the story of a housekeeper who offers that Bahamians have always treated her with greater respect than her Jamaican employers and their Jamaican social friends in Jamaica. Whereas she is often invisible to this circle, Bahamian guests invariably engage her in conservation.

This former acquaintance also tells the story of travelling to Haiti to visit a friend serving as the head of an office of an international organisation. The host sent a driver to pick him up. But the driver seemed to be nowhere in sight and hours passed by with the acquaintance getting increasingly worried as the airport emptied.

He kept calling his host who assured him that the driver was at the airport. It was then that he glimpsed a sign under the arm of another man milling around the airport. When he snatched the sign from the man, he found his name on the placard.

The resulting revelation was stunning: the driver though that he was looking for a white man because his employer, the head of the office of a prestigious international organization, could not possibly have as his friend a black man.

The well-known song proclaims: “All a we is one family, all a we is one.” It goes on to speak of he’s my brother and she’s my sister.

The song is a sort of Bahamian anthem expressing the best of the Bahamian spirit of egalitarianism, which, though incomplete, continues to be perfected in each generation. This spirit animated the struggle for majority rule and racial and economic equality.

In the campaign for racial equality some of the leaders expressly envisioned a multiracial society and saw majority rule as a means of liberating many white Bahamians from their prejudices and an unsustainable racial and economic order.

Correspondingly, never in the history of The Bahamas has there been any major organization of black Bahamians, whether church, civic group or otherwise, that has sought the explicit exclusion of white Bahamians.

In a relatively short period, The Bahamas has made enormous strides in terms of social and economic mobility. A number of our prime ministers came from poorer Bahamian families, rising to lead the country.

For the most part, class lines are fluid in The Bahamas and we are not as stratified along such lines as are many other countries.

While racial prejudice is still deeply ingrained in some we have made enormous progress since the attainment of majority rule. There is xenophobia among many Bahamians toward Haitians and Jamaicans but it is often less virulent than the xenophobia found in other countries toward foreigners, which does not make it any more tolerable.

Still, we generally tend to treat Jamaican and Haitian colleagues and employees with respect, even as we express concern about the level of illegal immigration, and can be viscerally intolerant.

The Bahamian spirit of egalitarianism lags in terms of gender equality and equality for gays and lesbians, but we have made extraordinary progress in a relatively short period of time, though there is still much ethical ground to cover.

Amidst entrenched misogyny, mostly fuelled by religious fundamentalism, Bahamian women have made tremendous progress. They have shattered many glass ceilings with more shattering of sexism still on the horizon.

Amidst homophobia and bigotry, gays and lesbians in The Bahamas are less stigmatized than the majority of Caribbean states, which is not to deny the depth of intolerance still resident in the country. To its credit the PLP decriminalized certain sexual acts between homosexuals in 1992.

A champion of the spirit of Bahamian egalitarianism is Hubert Ingraham who, through legislative, executive and other action upheld the dignity and equality of women and gays and lesbians.

Ingraham’s ground breaking and expansive statement in the aftermath of the vitriol and hatred directed at a cruise of gay and lesbian visitors, is iconic of the spirit of Bahamian egalitarianism.

The tone and language of the statement is one of the most profound, classic and well-argued declarations of equality ever penned in The Bahamas. It was a significant moment in the greater flowering of the best of the Bahamian spirit.

The spirit of Bahamian egalitarianism can be retarded at times, stymied, held back, even for long and seemingly unbearable periods.

But it will not be destroyed nor will it be intimidated by the hobgoblins of little minds and stony hearts who cannot fully imagine how our one Bahamian family fully includes myriad skin tones, male and female, LGBT brothers and sisters and a kaleidoscope of individuals of various ethnic and national backgrounds.

For all our challenges, prejudices, xenophobia, misogyny, bigotry and fundamentalist shibboleths, we continue to make progress.

Such progress is in part inspired too by those advocates of equality who throughout our history have beseeched our individual consciences and national consciousness to love and to treat our neighbours as ourselves, no matter their circumstances, including that of birth.

• This column was first published in 2015. It is reprinted with some changes.