On Being Bahamian (26 May 2003)

Just recently, during the lead-up to the FNM convention, the question was raised about whether race was still an issue for the Bahamian electorate. Of course it is. Race is the only marker of identity that is consistently invoked by Bahamians when we imagine ourselves.

Note: I say consistently. When describing oneself as a Bahamian, one either flashes one’s skin colour as a badge of identity, or else one defends oneself for not having that badge; for in the popular imagination, to be Bahamian is to be black. People who are not obviously black tend to spend a lot of time explaining why they are Bahamian even though their skin isn’t. One’s race is usually the very first thing that is considered when assessing whether one is a “true true” Bahamian or not.

Let me show you what I mean. Last summer, a friend of mine (I’ll call him John) was returning home from a trip abroad. In the airport, he took out his passport (Bahamian), and went to stand in the “Returning Residents” line. The immigration officer looked up and saw him there.

“You can’t come through here,” she told him.

“I’m a Bahamian,” he said.

“You can’t come through here,” she repeated.

“But this is for residents,” he replied. “I’m a resident.”

“No,” she said, “you have to go through there.” And she directed him to another line, for Visitors. Obediently, he joined it. When he got to the immigration counter, the officer looked at his passport.

“You can’t come through here,” she said. “You’re a Bahamian.”

I imagine that his reaction to her that day confirmed it.

I’m reminded of something that happens to me, either overtly or covertly, every time I teach a class at COB. At some point in the semester, someone, confused by my light skin and my straight hair, will ask me the inevitable question:

“Where are you from?”

Now sometimes I can be very slow. Normally I see the question coming a mile away, and am ready to answer. But the last time this happened to me, I was on a completely different wavelength. I’d been musing on the composition of Nassau’s population, and was marvelling that my brother and I were really quite unusual as Nassauvians our age go, as both sides of our family come from New Providence. So my answer, quite predictably, was:

“Nassau.”

This seemed to perplex the student who asked. But not to be outdone, he followed it up with another question.

“Where were your parents born?”

When I informed him that my parents and grandparents were all born and raised in Nassau, it perplexed him still more. I didn’t quite understand why until sometime later in the semester, when the same class had occasion to discuss race and Bahamian identity. At some point in the conversation I realized that the people this student was referring to as “white Bahamians” and “Conchy Joes” were not the same people that I would label “white” or “Conchy Joe”.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “When I think of white Bahamians, I think of people who are one hundred percent descended from Europeans.”

“That’s not Bahamian,” he informed me.

“That’s not?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “that’s paper Bahamian.” He went on to explain the following: Bahamians are descended from Africans. Some of the people who are descended from Africans don’t like that fact, and because they are also descended in part from Europeans, they identify with their European heritage, and call themselves “white”. Real Bahamians are not white. Real white people are not Bahamians.

“I see,” I said. This was beginning to explain a lot to me: like why John had had his experience in the “Returning Residents” line in the airport. Now John is a bona fide member of an unimpeachably Bahamian family, one with at least two hundred years of residence in this archipelago, if not more; and yet he is not recognized by his fellow citizens as being one of them. He is, you see, white.

The ironic thing about this idea that the “true true” Bahamian is black is that if we measure one’s “Bahamianness” by the depths of one’s roots, it is white Bahamians who have the deepest ones. The Eleutherian Adventurers, the people who settled the issue once and for all of who lived on these islands and what language they spoke, were predominantly white; and they arrived 135 years before the Loyalists brought the slaves who changed Bahamian demographics forever.

So where do we get the idea that “Bahamian” means “black”, and why?

The answer my inquisitive student gave me was this. The Bahamas became independent in 1973, and it was a black government, the PLP, that brought Independence about. Because Bahamian nationhood is a black invention, the real Bahamian is black.

It was a good answer. But I wasn’t convinced. By that reasoning, American must mean white, because the Declaration of Independence was the creation of a group of white men, several of them slaveholders. By that reasoning, black and Hispanic and Asian Americans are not American because they have a different heritage from the founding fathers. Or, to bring it closer to home, since many of the founding fathers of the Bahamian nation were the children of West Indian immigrants, the real Bahamian should be similarly descended from West Indians.

No; as an answer, it doesn’t quite cut it. It may help provide an idea of where the popular conception of “Bahamian” comes from, but it doesn’t justify that conception. I suspect that the explanation goes a lot deeper than that.

You see, the identity of a nation is a funny thing. We may think it creates itself, but in the absence of a concerted, centralized effort, individual citizens get their own ideas about what is and what isn’t “national”, and in the end we surprise ourselves with the vastly varying ideas of what defines us as a group.

And for a long time now we have been letting our nation create itself.

The result is a bit of a muddle. While those of us who were around to watch the old flag fall (and to cheer the raising of the new one) may have no confusion about what “Bahamian” may or may not be, we cannot assume the same is true for our children, or for theirs. If we don’t discuss who and what we are, and actively teach the history of the nation comprehensively to every schoolchild, the youth who are coming up will fill in the blanks with their own realities. And if those “realities” are not shaped in some way by the reality of the Bahamas’ multicultural population, if the only common thread in those realities is the blackness of the Bahamian public, we will create a Bahamas where one citizen will not recognize her fellow Bahamian when he is staring her in the face, and will tell him that he can’t come through here.