*Photo credit: vibe.com

‘’What are these black kids doing in the pool?’’ ‘’Fill that pool with dirt: it is better for dirt to be in this swimming pool than a black child.’’ ‘’ Get out of here: this is a whites only facility.’’ Yes folk, these acts of racism, against the most vulnerable in society are still taking place in that ‘’bastion of freedom’’ the United States.

Minorities may have taken significant strides since the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, culminating in the appointment of minorities in Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court and now the Presidency. However, racism, prejudice, hatred, even against children, are still alive and well in this hemisphere of the Americas.

Circa 2005: in a town in Texas, black children were told that they were not allowed to swim in a public swimming pool. When the black community protested against this injustice, the pool was filled with dirt by a section of the white community in an act of race hatred toward these ‘’minority children.’’ A local white millionaire was so moved that he purchased the property and made it available for the ‘’kiddies’’ to swim in. The lesson here: not all are racist; it is usually the loud, fractious, insecure, and nasty minority.

Fast forward to Wednesday July 8, 2009: more than 60 minority campers, blacks and Latinos, who visited a private swim club in a Philadelphia suburb lawfully and with full permission were prevented from their lawful use of the facility. This is what happened. When the minority children got in the pool, all the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool, obviously instructed to do so by the authorities. Then the pool attendants informed the black children that they did not allow minorities into the club and needed the children to leave immediately. ‘’That black kids’’, parents were informed ‘’changed the atmosphere and complexion of the club.’’

The sight of children crying in dissappointment and despair, as a result of these ‘’racists,’’ plunges a dagger of sorrow into the heart of every parent: black or white. That this took place in 2009, the age of Obama, is an epiphany!

Adding insult to injury, the next day, the club management informed the minority camp director that the camp’s membership was being suspended and that their money would be refunded. This whole affair hearkens back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the US was in the thrall of racism and segregation at all levels of society: a story from the days of Jim Crow and Southern Confederacy, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts.

The profound hypocrisy of these ‘’racists’’ is that they do not mind racial equality on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when the black kid gets killed, or on the violent streets of Los Angeles, when the poor Latino is gunned down by a drive by shooter: as long as racial equality does not appear in or make an entrance into their own ‘’lily white neighbourhoods.’’
       
Racism and ethnic prejudice is not peculiar to the United States however! And ethnic hatred is an unfortunate phenomenon in all cultures, ethnicities, nationalities and geographies: Rwanda, Nazi Germany, Biafra, the Balkans, Apartheid South Africa, it’s a long list. The US is a model in that it is the main power in this hemisphere. The objective of this polemic is to drive a nail of truth into the mosaic of race and segregation that is still very much a feature of life in these Americas, despite the stride forward towards racial equality made in the past four decades.

There is a vault in the subterranean recesses of human personality that contains a tendency to prejudice of one type or another. To state otherwise is simply being apathetic or worse, hypocritical. Human beings are capable of nobility and virtue, meanness and petty mindedness, excellence and mediocrity, good and evil. Acts of prejudice against fellow human beings based on skin colour, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and so on and so forth have led to the greatest evils humanity has had to face: mass murder, war, genocide, and holocaust.

And the Church is not innocent of prejudice. In the ‘’Age of Obama’’ this 2009, Sunday is the most highly segregated day in the United States. And despite US posturing as the greatest democracy, race relations in Britain, France, Holland, and even Germany have taken greater and more significant strides in recent decades and these countries are far more cosmopolitan than most of the United States..

The election of a black leader in Europe is still decades ahead however, owing to structural political and socio-economic impediments, and an entrenched and ‘’subtle’’ racism: an antonym to the more ‘’in your face’’ racism of much of the American South.

In these West Indies, there is a better colour montage while relations between the races in the industrialized North remain a fractured mosaic. There are historic reasons for this cohesiveness of the races in the Caribbean, and these include the existence of majority African American populations, Spanish speaking white majorities that have shared the ‘’heritage of poverty and suffering’’ with their black counterparts, the propinquity brought on by mixed marriages or mixed relationships over the decades, and the West Indian way of life: laid back, rhythmic, fatalist, maritime, deferential and old world. 

West Indians possess a unique enlightenment and sophistication that has evolved over the decades and even centuries: a mélange of cultures and ethnicities that tell the story of the turbulent Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea of European intrigue, North American defiance and African subjugation and forced import. The Caribbean is the product of a tragic but colourful history with an exposure to maritime influences, the cross pollination of cultures and an internationalism that most nations simply do not share. All West Indian peoples have been transplants from the Old World: Europe, Asia, and Africa.

And the history of Caribbean independence from the 1950s highlights leaders such as Alexander Bustamante, Norman Manley, Eric Williams, Luiz Munoz, Grantley Adams and a host of others who not only adopted a progressive and non-racialist democratic politics, but were themselves the progeny of a unique West Indian ethnic mix.

The West Indies can be applauded as the world’s most truly ethnically integrated region: a model for racial harmony. And a class photograph of West Indian leaders, unlike any other global region where a uniform racial mosaic usually prevails, reveals a true rainbow coalition, a blanket of cream, brown, black, white, red, silver and gold. The nearest ethnically mixed region, but certainly not as diverse, is Latin and South America, with a similar historic trajectory to the West Indian type. 

All people feel more comfortable with others who look like them, share similar values, similar professional and economic status, religion, culture, even down to life’s seeming trivialities such as golf and backgammon.

The great cosmopolitan cultures: London, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Port of Spain, are a mélange of ethnicities and races that have merged into a new and eclectic cornucopia that has enriched western civilization in all of its varied exertions and forms.

And it can be argued that owing to its unique history and geography, the West Indies is the quintessential cosmopolis: a motley mix of peoples, cultures and histories that have merged into a unique West Indian way. Journalists, writers and observers of society speak of a new paradigm of a post racial world. This is an interesting avant-garde concept. Is the world becoming one giant cosmopolis? Are digitization, globalism, and the advent of a mass media removing the divide between the races?

These are not easy questions. Racism and separatism are evils that are only too easy to gloss over. And when tolerated eventually lead to the type of ugliness observed in Texas and Pennsylvania. The West Indies is not averse to the evil that is racism, therefore racist behavior is something we will all have to check at root and discard like a toxic weed before it grows into the poison that is its end product.
 
Dickson Igwe is a Christian thinker and writer

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of the management and staff of BVI News Online and its parent company

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