On Culture Shock

Well, the first thing I should say on this topic is that I lived out of the country for eight years.

Not that my absence was planned. In 1992, I took advantage of a scholarship that was being offered in honour of the Quincentennial and went to England to pursue graduate studies; in 1995, the scholarship ran out. I moved to Canada to take up a job that would help me finish my dissertation while being fed and kept warm.

Then came the millennium. Not wishing to allow a new century to see me living away from home, I applied for a job at the College of The Bahamas, got it, ended my exile, and came home.

Returning to the Bahamas was something of a culture shock.

Not on the surface: on the face of things, Nassau, at least, was buffed and shining and spiffy. New schools and clinics were everywhere, government buildings looked crisp and clean, Bay Street had reversed itself and was otherwise charming. People’s cars were spanking new, and the extensive construction activities and the general beautification of the environment suggested that there was money in the country.

And then I began to teach. And this culture — my culture — began to shock.

The students in my classes were teacher trainees. They were overwhelmingly female; I think I had three males across the three classes, and those three were enrolled in the same section. Two of the classes were advanced-level courses. These were not the classes that created the shock I want to tell you about, though they had their own peculiarities. One of the classes was a second-year course in Bahamian literature, and the students enrolled in that one were people who had come up through the education system in the eight years that I had been away. It was these people who created my shock.

Here is why. These students appeared to believe — because more than one of them wrote — that white people are superior to black people. This they wrote, to their surprise and mine. (I read the words out to the class after I’d recovered from my horror, and they were similarly horrified at themselves). When I asked them why they thought this, they denied it at first, and then, confronted with their own words on paper, became bewildered as I was.

These students were schooled in an independent Bahamas, thirty years after the attainment of majority rule. They have never known a white government; rather, they have been raised in a country whose first black government often made skin colour a prerequisite for reward. How is it, then, that a generation born and raised in what is arguably the most economically successful black nation in the independent world can still believe that to be black is to be inferior?

They had answers, of course. They said that they believed it because in their experience, white people received better treatment than black people; they received better jobs, better loans, better schooling, and better salaries. I had no idea whether this was true or not; after all, I’d been away for eight years. So I just kept asking questions.

I asked them, for example, how many white people they had actually seen get the better treatment. It turned out that they were talking about tourists or fair-skinned black Bahamians, people who had “a little colour”. In their minds white Bahamians — Bahamians descended from European stock — don’t exist.

I asked them who was giving these people better treatment. It turned out that the people responsible for the discrimination were black Bahamians very much like them.

And then I asked them this, to which I have not yet received an answer. Why is it that they, the young citizens produced solely by the Bahamian nation, are so unsure about their own worth that they still expect people who look like they do to be treated worse than people with different citizenship and lighter complexions? I thought majority rule and Independence were supposed to get rid of all that.

What is particularly sobering about that experience is that these young women are going to become teachers of the next generation of Bahamians. Now if they believe, as they seem to do, somewhere in their consciousness, that the skin colour they were born with makes them somehow second-class in the world, what will they be teaching the children in their care? And how then do we break the pattern of self-denigration?

I have some ideas. Some of them are complex, and deserve a column of their own; some of them are pretty simple. I’ll try and deal with a couple of the simple ones briefly.

The first thing that comes to mind is that people learn more by example than by direction. We have paid plenty of lip-service to Bahamianization over the past thirty years, so much so that it has become a mantra to many of us, who believe that the ultimate qualification one can have for any position is having the correct passport; but we have not put our money where our mouths are. All too often, Bahamians are not hired to do difficult or specialized work, work that really matters. All too often, when we are presenting ourselves to the world, we invite or hire people from beyond the Bahamas to help us do it. The message that sends to the public is that Bahamian workers are not good enough to meet international standards.

The second thing is that we tend to place our emphasis on things that make a profit in purely numerical terms; we measure the worth of too many things by how much money or public attention they generate. This is ironic, because many of the best things that Bahamians create are expensive, largely because they are labour- or time-intensive.

Bahamian straw work is a case in point. The 1994 visit to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival confirmed that it is some of the best, if not the best, straw work in the region. It is one of the few indigenous crafts we have, handed down to us by our African and Amerindian ancestors. It is a concrete example that can demonstrate to our teachers-to-be that black people are not inferior. Yet about 80% of the straw sold in the straw market is foreign. The reason? According to the president of the Straw Vendors Association, cruise ship passengers do not buy expensive Bahamian straw. Now this is probably true; but there is more than one way to respond to that fact. For people don’t buy things, they buy ideas; and if we begin to sell the quality of our product as well as the product itself, we may just surprise ourselves. And for now? While it’s true that the monetary turnaround that bulk straw work generates is far higher than that gained by selling native straw, how many of us consider the intangible losses that come from choosing not to promote our own?

My point is this. We cannot continue to do this without paying a psychological or social cost. As my experience with my student teachers showed me, nations aren’t built solely with money, and self-confident citizens are not made on dollar-profits alone. If we can cash in our earnings at the end of the day and yet raise children who, thirty-six years after majority rule, still believe that white people are superior to black people, then we have lost far more than we have gained.