The Tribune

LAST week, The University of The Bahamas, in partnership with Equality Bahamas, the Bahamas National Reparations Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, hosted a landmark national dialogue marking the Launch of the Second United Nations Decade for People of African Descent. On Friday, March 6, there was a closed discussion on Haiti.

The symposium, which consisted of a closed session and a public forum on Haitian Restitution and Reparatory Justice in The Bahamas and the Region, featured international and regional leaders, scholars, and human rights advocates. In both sessions, participants explored concepts and practices of justice, equity, accountability, and the path forward for The Bahamas and the Caribbean.

The keynote address was delivered by Dr. June Soomer, former Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. She put the movement for reparations in the historical context of the kidnapping, repeated and varied violation, trafficking, and enslavement of African people.

“Reparatory justice is something that started on the African coast when we were enslaved and put into dungeons before we were shipped across and trafficked to the Americas,” Dr. Soomer said.

What does gender have to do with it?

There were numerous questions and comments from those in attendance, some of which could not receive full responses given the limited time available. Many of them raised even more questions as they made connections to multiple issues in various thematic areas. One of the comments seemed make the attempt to separate the struggle for reparations for Afro-descendants from the struggle for gender equality. While conversations about racism and misogyny often happen separately, the issues, the struggles, and the necessary actions for equality and justice do intersect, as do the identities of Afro-descendants and women.

I am, for example, both black and woman. I never entered a space without my womanhood or my blackness being known and felt by me and visible--whether or not verbally acknowledged--to others. I can never be one without the other.

Black women have always had specific experiences that were and are not shared by black men, nor were, or are, they shared by white women. As Dr. Soomer said at the public forum, women who were enslaved—African women—menstruated, went into labour and gave birth, and saw their babies die while en route from their homes to strange lands, crammed into boats, struggling to breathe. No black man and no white woman can relate.

Women who were enslaved—African women—were raped, forced to give birth, and had their babies stolen from them. Black women have always been producers of capital for the capitalist system and the people who benefit from it.

Niambi Hall Campbell Dean, Chair of the Bahamas National Reparations Committee and moderator of the panel, noted that the launch, in The Bahamas, of the Second Decade for People of African Descent coincided with International Women’s Day. The United Nations theme for 2026 was “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls.” The emphasis on “all” is not without meaning. It is there to acknowledge that women and girls are not homogenous, and have different identities and backgrounds.

We have different experiences and difference needs.

Racism and misogyny today

There can be no talk about reparatory justice without talking about the gender dimensions of slavery. Gender, much like race, has been used to separate, to limit, and to control particular groups of people.

Who is allowed to make decisions about their own bodies? How might this be dependent on resources, and who is most likely to have the necessary resources? Who is at the highest risk of noncommunicable diseases? Why might that be? Which women are most likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer? What proportion of them have a BRCA gene mutation, and why might that be? Whose hair is considered “appropriate” for the workplace, and which hair types have been deemed “unprofessional?”

With this year’s theme, the United Nations called for action to “dismantle all barriers to equal justice: discriminatory laws, weak legal protections, and harmful practices and social norms that erode the rights of women and girls.” These include the stereotypes and practices that affect black women and black girls in particular.

Black people are diverse. Women are diverse. Black women are diverse.

There are many combinations of gender, race, class, sexuality, political positioning, education level, nationality, and religion. Each of these factors affects our daily lives, from the ways we experience the world to the ways people perceive and regard us.

While we work toward the days when gender and race do not matter, today we contend with the harmful ideology that has permeated many generations. Our work is to unlearn, to redefine, and to liberate ourselves and one another from all that has been used to separate and oppress.

Our work is to see the environment within which we are operating, envision the world we need, and build the peaceful, equitable future we know is possible.

Recommendations

All We Want is Everything: How to Dismantle Male Supremacy, by Soraya Chemaly. Join Feminist Book Club, hosted by Equality Bahamas and Poinciana Paper Press, in reading All We Want is Everything this month. The publisher said, “All We Wantis Everything offers both unflinching analysis and genuine hope, informed by the Bold and revolutionary potential of feminist imagination. From private relationships to global politics, Chemaly shows how naming and refusing male supremacy is essential to resisting the force tearing democracy apart. This fresh, timely, clear-eyed, and necessary manifesto is a call to refuse supremacist identities, relationships, and values in order to build more just, healthy, and sustainable worlds for everyone.” The discussion will take place at Poinciana Paper Press on Wednesday, March 18 at 6pm. To join the club and receive email updates, go to tiny.cc/fbc2026.

Read the CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, available at caricom.org and caricomereparations.org, is a set of demands of European governments that enslaved people, enacted genocides, and continue to profit from the violence against and labour of African people. The CARICOM Reparations Commission clearly states that it “sees the persistent racial victimisation of the descendants of slavery and genocide as the root cause of their suffering today” and “recognises that the persistent harm and suffering experienced today by these victims as the primary cause of development failure in the Caribbean.” The ten-point plan begins with the demand for a full formal apology. It notes that “statements of regret” are not replacements for formal apologies. Instead, a statement of regret is “a reprehensible response to the call for apology in that they suggest that victims and their descendants are not worthy of an apology.”