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Click here to read the complete article at www.thenassauguardian.com
The shallow idiocy that pervades this attempt to extort “reparations” from our colonizers knows no end.
That the Caribbean (a collection of stable, democratic and mostly either upper middle income or – as in the case of The Bahamas – high income countries) sees itself as deserving of special “victim” status in a world that also contains Afghanistan, Iraq and Sub Saharan Africa is both laughable and pitiable.
It is amazing that nobody seems to question why the United States and Canada are not invited to join the campaign and get their “payback” from Britain too.
More Americans are descended from slaves than the entire population of the Anglophone Caribbean – millions more, in fact.
And black Americans surely still suffer the lingering legacies of their history. Black Americans have a lower household income than Black Bahamians, a far higher poverty rate, a higher long-term unemployment rate and an incarceration rate (3,000 per 100,000) that is about 10 times their Bahamian counterparts (270 per 100,000).
As in the U.S., the descendants of Bahamian slaveholders are still in The Bahamas, not in Britain. While many of these are indeed white Bahamians, many more of them are probably “black” Bahamians. So, as in the U.S., Bahamian slavery was basically local, rather than being operated from the faraway metropole in London.
Yet nobody suggests that the U.S. go after Britain for its historic wrong in allowing slavery during the colonial period.
Why? The answer is simple. Because this campaign is animated entirely by skin color resentments and the victimhood syndrome. It has nothing to do with historic justice or legitimate compensation. The proponents of this nonsense just look at the U.S.A.’s racial profile and push it into the “oppressor” camp and reserve their victimhood impulse for people and countries with dark skin. I suspect they do this without even thinking.
Fred Mitchell, I am hoping you are both too intelligent and too committed to real rights issues to allow this country to be dragged into the embarrassing company of the Caribbean beggars’ brigade on this non-issue. What has distinguished us since independence is that, while others have been subsumed with a largely imaginary past, we have concentrated admirably on moving forward, with results that speak for themselves. Let’s keep it that way.
By: Andrew Allen
