January 24, 2009

INDULGE me once again. I could not agree more with your recent Opinion pieces. I saw how destructive party politics would be in the 1960s and said so when the Progressive Labour Party was formed as a Labour Party while refusing to address the racial divide. Party Politics will continue because it suits the politicians. ALL of them.

They enjoy the concentration of power in the hands of few who make up their political hierarchy.

We accomplished much more as a black community before the formation of a political party because we saw all of us as having a responsibility to boycott the theatres and all of us were responsible to attend the meetings of the Committee for Universal Adult Suffrage with their changing and flexible leadership. For me there is more than one irony.

The current irony is that Barak Obama did not talk about race before white Americans voted for him and when he was sworn in black and white Americans united.

In Bermuda Sir John Swan refused to talk about race therefore white Bermudians felt justified and retained their distance and when Sir John resigned our racial divide was even more entrenched and reinforced. America and Bermuda are not the same, neither are our leaders.

Historically, our irony is that they were a group of relatively young black men who hated the racist white oligarchy that governed them yet who were so indoctrinated by the concept of white/European superiority that they did not look for an approach suitable to our racially divided society.

They simply copied the European system of political parties, even to the extent of indulging in Labour versus Capitalism rhetoric, which in Bermuda context was absurd, when our primary problem was racism and segregation, which they would not touch.

The further irony is that all of the white politicians disagreed with political parties but when the PLP elected six candidates, they were so committed to white supremacy that they rejected their own political "principles' and formed the United Bermuda Party.

If they had not and had formed alliances based on specific issues, we might today have a governance where they would be different issues that created different alliances rather than a permanent division according to race based political Parties.

As a result, because whites refuse to acknowledge that it was the white community that imposed segregation and continued to blame the current Premier for our racial divide, blacks are forced to defend the PLP no matter what happens.

So your correspondent "Honest Abe" (Mid-Ocean News, January 23) can do two very specific things:

(1) Acknowledge that it was the white community that divided us by segregation from the moment that black slaves were emancipated

(2) Join in honest conversation with blacks unless he/she thinks that we are too inferior. If enough black and white Bermudians talked to each other they might even force the politicians to govern us in another fashion.

EVA N. HODGSON

Crawl