THANK you for Colin O'Connor's report on the 50th anniversary of the Brown v the Board of Education US Supreme Court ruling and the accompanying analyses by Dale Butler, Calvin Smith and Georgine Hill on the interrelationship between education and social and economic progress.

And thank you, too, for your piece "Strangers in a Strange Island" (, May 21) which will be ignored as have been similar warnings. The two articles are not unrelated.

If only the obvious were as easy to solve as it is to analyse! And yet I found it intellectually satisfying to have three very different people state it so clearly. "It" in this case being the failures and limitations of the hard-fought and much desired (and greatly resisted) "desegregation" movement.

When we look at what we have lost of value, what the black community has discarded and devalued in the process, we might all wonder if it was worth the price we paid.

There is a tragic irony in the fact that the process which was supposed to tell blacks that they were, after all, good enough (at least to sit next to whites in school) has, instead convinced many blacks of the idea that many whites continued to hold after integration began ? namely, that they are "not good enough", not even for tasks which they had performed so effectively before desegregation.

Hence blacks hire foreigners (preferably white but not necessarily) for every possible role from college president to hotel waiters. Increasingly Bermudian blacks have begun to behave as if we are "not good enough".

In the past when private institutions and Government told us, overtly, that we were not good enough we fought to prove them wrong. When we thought that we no longer had to fight that collective battle because a few of us had benefited, we began to accept with unbelievable haste what we had been told for centuries; that we really were "not good enough".

And many of the younger generation of blacks who were becoming the high-profile role models in the community decided to throw away all of the cultural values that had preserved us as a black community ? and especially to throw away, dismiss, demean all members of that older generation who represented those values.

Many of them behaved, and behave, as if they ? and they alone ? created the world in which they live.

We now see the disastrous results as one generation after another tries to prove that they are not good enough and that blacks have no value. We, as blacks, in fighting against the evils of racism, fought too hard for "integration" and not hard enough for simple justice for all.

The result is that having seen a measure of superficial "integration" we also tolerated many injustices towards blacks. The injustices which were tolerated against blacks have now begun to touch whites (like Sean O'Connell and John Barritt).

We too quickly placed our faith in politics and too few politicians while no longer feeling the responsibility for collective struggle. Too many politicians failed us because too many shared in the rewards without ever having shared in the struggle or the pain. Too many of them believed that the struggle had been for their personal enhancement and power rather than for the advancement of the entire community.

It was, in large part, because the majority of the population, who were black, was seen as not good enough for consideration from the outset that politicians and policy-makers permitted Bermudians to become "strangers in a strange island".

If, at the outset of the international insurance and re-insurance boom, it had been believed that all Bermudians, not just lawyers and bankers, must benefit from the new economic endeavours that were being established here in the mid-1980s, very different policies would have been implemented, particularly in education and immigration (for instance, the three- or six-year work permit policy would not now be an issue).

Probably, then, not so many companies would have come here so quickly. We might then have slowly created an economy for Bermudians rather than, as now, created one for people from every corner of the globe Bermudians.

Politics and politicians have failed us. Solutions need collective thought and action. If this new "Think Tank" Foundation for Bermuda Studios is in search of a challenge, it will not need to look far. Collective action is almost the only thing that has brought us positive change.

Elitist hierarchies have always been useless whether social or political. Black Bermudians cannot continue to be treated by both a black Government and white business as if we are not good enough ? and Bermudians, generally, cannot continue to be "strangers in a strange island". The well- intentioned and very wealthy power players in these corporate giants like ACE Ltd, XL Capital and others must use their tremendous wealth and creative minds for more realistic and imaginative ways to (a) bring Bermudians together and (b) to include Bermudians in their wealth rather than simply encourage them to pursue non-contentious "volunteerism".

Bermuda and Bermudians may need volunteers but there are other things which we need more desperately.