On Class (1 September 2003)

I once taught a student who wanted to write a research essay on poverty. As she developed her ideas, it became clear to me that she was choosing to do so because she thought of the average Bahamian as poor, and of herself as an average Bahamian. I asked her a couple of questions, such as how she defined "poor", and how she justified the idea that Bahamians (in general) were poor people; her answer was that most people she knew did not have enough money to pay all their bills. When I asked her whether there was a more basic standard of poverty (Michael Jackson, after all, apparently has trouble paying his bills, but is by no stretch of the imagination poor), she disagreed. Poverty for her was the state in which the majority of black Bahamians found themselves. The fact that she had attended a private school, was employed in a very respectable position, and attended a church whose wealth was patently visible, seemed to make no difference to her belief that she was poor.

She is not alone. Again and again, I run into students who believe that the majority of people in the Bahamas, themselves included, are poor. Now when I consider that there are 500,000 trips from the Bahamas to South Florida a year, (there are only 310,000 Bahamian men, women and children, according to the 2000 census); that Bahamians spend hundreds of millions of dollars in South Florida and still seem to have enough money left over to keep the malls and Palmdale in business; and that the number of registered vehicles in New Providence alone appears to be over 150,000 (this in a total urban population of roughly 200,000) I have to wonder just what size this "majority" is.

I have come to the conclusion that the biggest reason behind my students' belief that they are poor is that most of them consider themselves "grassroots". According to received wisdom, Bahamian society is structured fairly simply, with "white people" at the top, "grassroots Bahamians" at the bottom, and a handful of "connected" black people in the middle. These groups are separate from one another, and they generally oppose each other's interests.

Now this three-class structure, and the principle of the conflict of the classes, is a fundamentally Marxist view of the world. According to Marx, society is divided into classes who are defined by their economic positions. At the top of society are the people who control all the economic and political resources. At the bottom are a group of people who control nothing except their own labour. These people sell their labour to the upper classes, and are in turn exploited by them. Between them, acting as a sort of buffer, is a group of people who are neither employed directly by the upper classes nor directly exploit the working classes.

I believe that this perspective is outdated in its application to twenty-first century Bahamian society. On the one hand, while the majority of Bahamians in 1967 and even 1973 might fairly have been categorized as the proletariat ("grassroots" or "poor"), today I suspect that that number has been reduced; in the Bahamas of the twenty-first century, many Bahamians have become employers themselves. If nothing else, we employ immigrants to do the labour that we prefer not to do, hiring ourselves Haitians and Dominicans and Jamaicans and Filipinos to do the "dirty" work that our parents and grandparents would have done. In addition, large numbers of Bahamians are attaining the college educations that enable them to move out of the working classes; most people aspire to white-collar jobs in which they have some control over their labour; and many of us choose to be self-employed. At the same time, a number of Black Bahamians have entered the upper strata of society, and control some of the means of production; it is a mistake these days to assume that one's ultimate boss is going to have a white face. Indeed, given the fact that, for over thirty years the presence of white Bahamians in Cabinet, the national decision-making body, has been a rare occurrence, it is time we recognized that Bahamian class structure cannot easily be defined along racial or economic lines.

The fact that we still use these outdated perspectives, however, I believe blinds us to the real distribution of power that exists. While the Marxist view of social classes may not work very well when applied to Bahamian society, it certainly makes sense on a global scale, where a handful of multinational corporations control a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth, and where the vast majority of the world's population lives in what is a very real poverty that goes far beyond a simple inability to pay all one's bills. In Haiti, for example, when vendors sell tourists oranges they offer to peel the oranges for them — not simply to be nice (or in the hopes of getting a tip) but so that they can keep the orange peel, which they use for making jam, or tea, or countless other things. In some parts of Latin America, the numbers of people who live on the city dumps are large enough for those settlements to be cities unto themselves, and it is not uncommon for beggars and street people to outnumber the white-collar workers. Given the fact that the Bahamas is the 39th richest country in the world, and 51st in terms of the purchasing power of the Bahamian dollar, the idea of "poverty", when applied to the average Bahamian, takes on an absurdity that verges on insult.

In the Bahamas, I suspect that far fewer of us are "poor" than we imagine. According to Marxist theory, as soon as one becomes an employer, one is no longer a member of the proleteriat; therefore all of us who hire Haitians to do our yards or Jamaicans to watch our children cannot legitimately consider ourselves poor. We may not all be upper class, but many, many of us must find ourselves comfortably in the middle. And along with our middle-class status come some of the more constricting middle-class values: a creeping conservatism, a growing selfishness, a judgmentalism of others that we use to protect what we already have.

And this preoccupation with ourselves means that those people among us who are really poor are falling through the cracks. For where large numbers of us are concerned not only with finding clothes to put on our backs, but also with which designer made those clothes, with not only ensuring that our children have tennis to play PE in, but with the maker and design of those tennis, the idea of "poverty" takes on a more sinister meaning. By crying "poor-mouth" when in fact we are overfed, overdressed and overindulged, by assuming that our skin colour or our neighbourhood or our church affiliation define us as "poor people", we grow selfish, and become blind to the very real poverty that exists in our society. For instance, I met a woman, a single mother who is struggling, whose eldest child is gravely ill. She can get no help from Social Services because she is "white", and we are conditioned to believe that people whose skins are pale are incapable of being in need of financial help. Similarly, we know that there are homeless Bahamians among us, but we lay the blame on them. Many elderly people are destitute; the mentally ill are imperfectly provided for, and young single mothers often live below the poverty line. Yet the rest of us, so convinced of our "poverty", or lulled into thinking that God blesses his faithful with material wealth and punishes the sinner with destitution, all too often ignore those who live among us in real need.

There is an email going around. It gives a link to a website, which carries a message that might help us put our positions into perspective. This is the link:

http://www.thesustainablevillage.com/miniature_earth/miniature_earth.htm

This is part of the message:

Imagine that we have turned the population of the earth into a small community of 100 people, keeping the same proportions we have today.

If you keep your food in a refrigerator
And your clothes in a closet
If you have a roof over your head
And have a bed to sleep in
You are richer than 75% of the entire world population.

If you have a bank account
You're one of the 30 wealthiest people in the world.

25 of that hundred struggle to live on US$ 1.00 per day or less...
47 of that hundred struggle to live on US$ 2.00 per day or less.

Given these statistics to contemplate, how many of us are really poor?