On Elitism (12 February 2004)

Last week I wrote about populism, the thing that has made us believe as a nation that elitism (of certain sorts) is the worst sin that could ever be committed. This week, I'm going to talk about the awful sin itself.

Before I go on, let's define that term. It can be the best or superior members of a society or group, or it can be a small, privileged, and often powerful group, according to Webster's. On the web, it's defined in various ways, from a small group of people with a disproportionate amount of public decision-making power to selected as the best. I'm going to be elitist here, and select the best definition for my purposes from the above: the last one, selected as the best.

It would seem these days that we have a problem in selecting the best in our society. We demonstrate an aversion to claiming anyone is better than anyone else, or that people should receive different results based on what they do. Indeed, our reaction to that kind of thinking is becoming violent; from Junkanoo practitioners to the employees of large corporations to the parents of schoolchildren, we Bahamians appear to believe that we should be rewarded for who we are, not for what we do. A competitor threatens to sue to change a competition's results; individuals involved in a labour dispute sabotage the city power supply; a parent threatens to kill the administrators and blow up the school that has not permitted his child to move up to the next grade. The underlying thread in all of these issues is the belief that someone owes me something, not the concept that what I get is a reward for what I do.

In the post-Independence Bahamas, merit, ability, hard work and innovation have in practice been less important to one's reward than skin colour, place of origin, party politics, or family connections. The result: we have bred a generation of young people who believe that the way to get a job (or a house, or a Christmas dinner, or a washing machine) is to wait outside a powerful person's office, not to qualify for it the hard way.

For those people who don't have the patience or the pull to get as far as that office door, the option is simply to take what one wants or needs. The result: those of us who have connections use them. Those who don't end all too often by breaking the law. Ours is a society, it seems, that rewards sycophants and criminals.

I'm going to argue that this is because we have eschewed formal elitism. In doing so, we have created a supremely elitist society, one in which the marginal remain marginal unless they are willing to sell their souls to the powerbrokers — politicians, preachers, and crooks. You see, there's elitism and elitism. There's the elitism that excludes other people on the basis of their backgrounds, their bank accounts, their connections, their skin colour, their last names, their nationality, their language. And then there's the elitism that excludes other people on the basis of their ability to do things well.

I don't believe in the first kind. It's the kind that's predetermined and determining, and it oppresses people, traps them in little enclaves of education, class, colour, political party, and family. It's inflexible, and doesn't provide legitimate ways to get out.

But I do believe in the second kind. It's the kind that strives to develop the best in the society, the kind that rewards hard work and talent no matter where they're found, that enables people who want to get ahead to do so without their having to align themselves with a political cause or a politician or some other patron. It's the kind that I believe has to exist in any healthy society; if it doesn't, citizens will have nothing to strive for, and will live in a vacuum of mediocrity, borrowing indiscriminately from other societies because they don't have much of their own.

In almost every case, the elitism that we now practice in society is an elitism based on the shallowest of criteria: how much money one makes, what one looks like, who one knows. We invest in elite clothing by designers who have never set foot on our soil, and we wear elite shoes; we will even kill one another for the footwear or wristwear of the day. Each decade has its own elite cars. The promoters of elite events (so called because of the prohibitive prices of the tickets, or the social circles of the participants) flourish in the Bahamas; elitist restaurants and real estate are hot commodities, and our national identity and our religious beliefs are exclusionary and elitist. Even our Junkanoo parades are elitist. The A-groups hog the street, the prizes, and all of the press; B-groups and scrap are second-class, and the general public says whey-ya-put-muh. Ours is an elitism that can be bought, not earned. It is only natural that one of the biggest one goals for all of us is to get more money, by hook or by crook.

As for those of us who are born different, with gifts that set us apart from other people — the gift of words, perhaps, or the gift of vision, or the love of beauty, or the desire to dance, to act, to make music — there is no elitism for us. There is no library to free us to read, to learn about worlds beyond our own, or help us invent our own worlds. There is no school of art for those of us wish to create beauty or to express our anger or disappointment visually; there are no grants to enable the poorest of us to afford the very expensive materials that we need to be the best we can be. There is no theatre for those of us who need to go on stage; no film school to train Bahamians to share our vision with the world; no dance programme to allow us to express ourselves through our bodies. There is no school of music in this nation of innate musicians; there is no school, even, for the most gifted of our children, other than Fox Hill Prison. Public elitist education begins at the tertiary level, long after many of the brightest have been lost.

Ours is a society in dire need of the elitism that recognizes and rewards its best before its best all leave. We have the bad habit of waiting for the world to pour acclaim on our people before we join in the celebration; even our athletes have to be recognized on the world stage before we will honour them at home. It is time that we stopped waiting for other people, with other agendas, to recognize what is good about ourselves. It is time for us to become elitist in the right way. It is time we give Bahamians their full rewards for doing their best.