The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

Dean of the Faculty of Liberal and Fine Arts at the College of Bahamas

WE OFTEN talk about violence, but rarely do we mention bullying. Rarely, too, do we talk about intimidation, power and control.

Intimidation through power and control is especially huge in this society. This is not exclusively the domain of men, but we see these as male characteristics. We admire men who show these traits. It is more masculine, according to society, to be intimidating and controlling than to be unassuming and peaceful. Yet, when we look back, we see incredible world leaders and change brokers, such as Ghandi, who was the epitome of non-violent confrontation. To whence did that idea of power through peace disappear?

It has certainly vaporised and vanished in a country that is increasingly built on a system of braggadocio and bigging up through external things rather than the internal riches.

This is all terribly dull and boring, and perhaps this dullness is why we are where we are today. We do not teach how to avoid conflict through reason nor through discussion.

We teach, instead, that the way to get through conflict is to flex one’s muscles. Beat them down! “Limb by limb,” as the old Buju song states. The lyrics of countless songs are now about dominating through physical strength, muscle and brawn; there is no space for education or reason, there is certainly no space for statesmanship.

When the young man on Eleuthera got beaten to death a few weeks ago his death spoke to an inability at a national level to diffuse conflict.

Worse, it showed the desire for conflict because so little brain matter is required.

Men, for centuries, have been judged by their muscle, their size and their stature; they have been famed for their warrior skills in the wild; they can kill lions and tigers. In a society where there are no lions and tigers, no bears to get the better of or die trying, then what is there? We also forget that men were also honoured for their mental ability and intellectual fortitude. They were the statesmen.

Sadly, this 21st century commodified beautifully constructed musculature, because as the song goes, “I work out”; it is the sole and exclusive focus of the mainstream imaginary.

Boys are defined and define us through adds for clothes, workout apparel, muscle-enhancing drugs cars and women. ‘Mr Muscular’ is the envy of all the men in the bar.

The back story and/or subtext has been lost. Hollywood and New York advertising and popular culture mills have won control over the masses of impressionable minority males.

They have less access to ‘things’ so the more they have the more valuable they are. The more muscle they have, the more fabulous they are. The more violent they are the better, the more they demonstrate all of these traits as the adds in Ebony, Hip Hop Weekly, Magnum show, the more masculine. As bell hooks underscores, these images only make black youth more likely to fail by falling into the traps of ‘minority’ masculinity. They do not have to think, they only have to act.

So when the young man was beaten to death the other day, it showed that this is a serious problem in the country, not just in Nassau—as so many are want to insist.

The problem is spread as far and wide as cable and satellite TV reach, as widespread as music lyrics play and as deep and wide as advertising images hold currency.

These images now define masculinity, and coupled with important men behaving badly and setting the tone for the country on the local level, tell young men how to behave.

Masculinity is now defined as not being academic. You must not be able to speak properly. The people who had a problem with the victim, they had a problem because they thought that he thought he was better than them. In reality they had a complex about being less than him, less than other men, but they projected their feelings on to him and he became ‘the problem’.

People have talked around the problem of a poor education system and many poor family structures, always claiming that the education is not that bad; family is only a problem when it is a single mother with no beating. Sadly, these are all problems. Family structures where parents pay no attention to their children are worse than the scapegoated, single-mother-headed families that have been with us since time immemorial. We create young men who cannot think their way out of a problem.

They see a boy who may seem to think better of himself, is educated—so soft; his parents take time with him, so he is soft; his appearance is considered, so he is soft, he cares about being a good student and citizen, so he is soft. And in order to remove their own sense of inferiority, they beat him. They are really beating their own demons and demons that have been created through years of abusive familial relations: mothers and grandmothers who berate fathers to their sons and grandsons, mothers who beat the Jesus out of everyone because they are beaten, the number of domestic incidents reported annually in this country shows how serious the problem is.

These young bullies have problems because they are never taught to value anything or anyone, not even themselves. So often the boys are whom the biggest bullies, and there are far too many of them, are the human beings who need the most love, who have never experienced anything other than abuse. These are the guys that popular culture, commodified black masculinity, gangster culture have fed their diet of masculinity, and meets its local counterpart in men in the local echelons of power who beat, berate and degrade other men because of their superior education and their better manners.

When that young man was beaten to death the other day, each one of us lost a part of our humanity. We are as guilty of aiding and abetting in the creation of damaged role models and power control ideas as those young men who beat him to death. How sad it is when we can all stand up and talk, but never really address the serious problems that promote control through bullying. They stem from the home where the only form of love seen is slaps and the only form of masculinity valued is bullying.

He really has a complex but never talks about it because ain’t no body got time for that.

Ultimately, we have created a country of rage-filled young men who see themselves as gods, entitled to everything without work, who are unable to reason through difference because they were not taught to read, write or think.

They have witnessed a lifetime of familial violence that finds a partner in popular culturally condoned toughness and politically-motivated belittling and gender-based violence and inequality. Bullies are made, not born; they have to feel in control because there is so much that is beyond their control yet they cannot deal with because they were never given the skills to foster understanding, reason or dispute resolution. The man is the one who inflicts harm on those around.

Bullying is about post-traumatic stress disorder from having lived on a diet of violence, and hate in their young lives, multiple studies back this up.