The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

As a nation we seem to be determined to deny ourselves the best of what we offer others. We have established a set of stereotypes that are controlling the culture of the country and we continue to build on these, as much as they do us a disservice. In fact, stereotypes that the state relies on to sell our destination destroy the very culture they claim to be supporting.

Since the 19th century, if not earlier, particular stereotypes of black people have been circulated by the mainstream press and then by the media that imprison us in a place that is not nice, as people here say.

They tell us that black folk will never become anything, that all black women are loose and steal their mistress’s husband and that black men are dangerous, irresponsible and overly sexualised.

Moving into the late 20th century, as this column has explored on numerous occasions, we begin to see the rise of a different form of violence and irresponsibility, not mention the hyper-sexualised identity being blazed all over the screens, pages and airwaves. Black boys are thugs and gangsters and certainly not any good at anything other than basketball, if they are good at that. Author and social activist bell hooks explores these stereotypes. What is ironic, though, is that we use these same stereotypes to destroy the people we claim to be helping. As a reputed black nation, it is significant that we deploy images of young men as no good and only being walking beer holders and violent slum dwellers.

Our steadfast description of young men from Bain and Grants Towns, for example, as violent and no good, has only reinforced the very notion that this is all they can do. Cleveland Eneas’ book ‘Bain Town’ shows a different side to them, but this side has apparently been ignored.

We also tell them that all they need do is make babies and enjoy women’s bodies. They need do no more and they are considered daddies, and this is what masculinity is. It’s a tragic misunderstanding that holds way too much sway in this country. This is an image that has stayed with us from the time when Mrs Carmichael (who published ‘Five Years in Trinidad’) observed the English West Indies slave society in the early 19th century.

To go with that image, we see women who are no good, loose and skillfully manipulative.

We often hear about women who use men and dry them up. These cutters, as we are happy to call them, have no moral compass and apparently function without any encouragement. We forget that many young women have been encouraged in the art of transactional sex by mothers who ‘encourage or welcome’ the dollars they bring into the home. We see them out at a parent’s behest selling what singer Mighty Sparrow says one can get for free when the ‘Yankees Gone’. Sadly, this image, too, finds resonance in old images of enslaved women during and immediately after slavery.

What is funny is the full acceptance that has been given to these cultural stereotypes in the country. Even though once these stereotypes were used to belittle blacks by a plantocracy who liked laying down with ‘loose black women’ and getting up with many more babies they could call slaves and use indiscriminately.

The masters and mistresses who had these children often referred to them as mulattoes, and like the mules, they were thought to be unable of breeding, and they would be exploited even more. The cruelty of the gentle form of local slavery played on in Bahamian letters is not surprising, but its long-lasting images in the local arsenal of development parlance is.

As much as we claim to be empowering people, we view them as nothing more than stereotypical renderings of dysfunctional social outcasts.

In popular culture, as discussed last week, women are hoes and men are thugs. This differs little from earlier images where women were wanton and men were cattle used to do hard labour, including keeping the slave stock up.

The talk of breeding and the man’s role to breed women and the women’s role to be passive receptacle is utterly distasteful in the 21st century. However, as the culture and country becomes poorer and so less able to survive, people are increasingly forced into ‘immodest’ proposals and behaviour. We educate them not to think critically, yet we expect them to be exemplary citizens, while telling them that they are nothing more than dumb, violent beasts.

Today, we have a larger, less-educated, more media aware and informed population who see what popular culture expects from them. We have a nation that is sold as a paradise where one can live out one’s fantasies, except that is reserved for tourists, not residents or citizens.

We tell them that they breed too much and are irresponsible, and we really expect them to do or be anything other than the bottom of the barrel when what is left for them is just that? We so often talk about saving our youth, but in the next instance we condemn them for being pawns of transnational patterning and historical renderings of the dumb, dangerous, deceitful, loose Negro.

We see these images all over Hollywood and New York, and we expect the Bahamian stage to be different. But how, when most young people live lives determined by media and the pressure of a disintegrating society around them, and when they become consumed by materialism and the word that women are inferior to men, and that all men must dominate through violent control because such is ordained. Why are we surprised that the local stage is filled with these very players we claim not to understand where they came from?

• bethellbennett@gmail.com