White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (43 page)

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Authors: Tim Wise

Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race

BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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That neither Rolfe nor Newport died in the wreck has proven to be among the lynchpin moments in history. Had they done so—rather than remaining alive, repairing their ship, and sailing on to Jamestown—the colonists would likely have perished, and with them the hopes for permanent colonization of the Americas. Having failed to plant adequate crops, and without the arrival of the supplies expected from England thanks to the shipwreck in Bermuda, the colonists in Jamestown were starving and dying in droves. Only Newport’s arrival in 1610, almost a year after he was anticipated, had allowed for colonization to be sustained. And had that initial experiment failed, as it would have without Newport, the Tsenacommacah confederacy, led by Chief Powhatan, would have likely had time to organize against future attempts to penetrate into indigenous lands. Although I suppose I must be grateful for Newport’s having survived, since, as a direct contributor to the genetic line from which I derive, I would literally not exist without him, the fact remains that his survival has been a decidedly mixed bag so far as persons of color are concerned.
As for Bermuda, it is not only divided by race, demographically—about 55 percent of the sixty five thousand persons there are black, roughly a third are white, and the rest are a mix of other groups of color, including a growing number of Asians—it is also divided by a vast gulf of perceptions. Blacks there believe race to be among the island’s most vexing issues, while whites generally do not; and as with the United States, it is blacks who have a firmer grasp on reality, to say nothing of the history that has brought them to the place where they find themselves today.
As with the United States, Bermuda was a nation whose early economy was built largely on the backs of slave labor. And although slavery there was abolished in 1834, immediately upon emancipation, blacks were confronted with laws restricting voting to those who didn’t own sufficient property. As a result, less than five percent of votes for a century after the end of slavery would be cast by blacks, despite blacks being a majority on the island for this entire period. Among the methods employed to dilute the black vote and reinforce white racist rule was plural voting, whereby rich whites could buy up property in each precinct of the island and then vote in each place where they owned land, as well as syndicate voting, whereby groups of rich whites could buy up property and then get however many votes in a precinct as there were owners on the piece of property. If fifty whites went in together on a piece of land (which none of them alone could have afforded), they would suddenly find themselves possessing fifty votes in the given precinct, whether or not they lived there. So although blacks were the majority of eligible voters in Bermuda, even by the early 1900s these various schemes intended to allow multiple votes by whites meant that the clear majority of votes being cast on the island would remain white votes, well into the late-twentieth century.
As in the United States, hospitals, schools, churches, the civil service, the military officer corps, theatres, restaurants, neighborhoods, hotels, and even graveyards were segregated by race for most of the nation’s history. For most of these forms of formal institutional racism, legal change came only in the 1960s. As in the U.S., it was common practice throughout the twentieth century for land to be confiscated from black owners and communities to make way for commercial development benefiting whites, or even so as to develop a country club, or private community, which would then practice racial exclusivity in terms of membership or residency.
Electorally, universal suffrage has only existed in Bermuda since the late ’60s, with white Bermuda long having viewed blacks as incapable of self-government. Indeed, the founder of the United Bermuda Party (which ruled the island from the ’60s until 1998, when it was defeated by the majority-black Progressive Labour Party) famously argued against universal suffrage by claiming that it would be disastrous for the island until black Bermudians had become sufficiently educated and “disciplined.”
Equally troubling for black opportunity in Bermuda has been a longstanding preference for foreign guest workers (who are overwhelmingly white), in housing and employment. Guest workers are given housing subsidies unavailable to locals, and often procure jobs that are all but off-limits to local blacks as well. These preferences not only push black Bermudians out of job opportunities, but also drive up the price of housing and other goods and services by distorting market rates for land, making Bermuda an extremely expensive place to live. Black Bermudians are especially resentful of guest worker preferences, since their purpose has always been seen as a way to whiten the island. Though white elites insist guest workers are needed to fill certain professional positions for which locals are unqualified, the claim fails to withstand even a moment’s scrutiny. Most foreigners working on the island do not work in professional positions requiring a particularly intense level of education or skills, and less than two in ten have management level positions. That most foreign workers are found in medium- and semiskilled jobs calls into question the extent to which worker importation is really about filling skills gaps and economic necessity, as opposed to being for the purpose of achieving a whiter Bermuda.
Interestingly, the largest opportunity gaps on the island appear between natives, either black or white, and not between black natives and white foreigners. Although black Bermudians with college degrees are roughly as likely to have management-level jobs as white foreigners in the country, relative to white Bermudians, blacks are not doing nearly as well. Forty-three percent of white Bermudians with college degrees have management level jobs, as opposed to only 28 percent of similarly educated black Bermudians. Black Bermudians are 54 percent of all natives with college degrees, while whites are only 38 percent of similarly educated natives. Yet, 60 percent of natives with top-level management jobs are white, and slightly less than a third are black. While 38 percent of white Bermudians with college-level educations have positions in senior or executive management, only 22 percent of similarly educated black Bermudians do.
But despite the solid evidence of ongoing white hegemony in Bermuda, many whites there seem mightily anxious about the way that political power—having been assumed by a black-dominated party—may tilt the balance against them. Despite the advantages they have obtained and continue to enjoy, many whites in Bermuda seem convinced that they are the targets of reverse discrimination and that their victimization, if not in evidence yet, is never too far around the corner.
While I was in Bermuda, a prime example of perceived white victimhood emerged. In the days leading up to my arrival, a controversy had exploded when the premier at that time, Alex Scott, fired off an angry e-mail regarding something said to him by a white conservative on the island, Tony Brannon. Brannon, who has a reputation for berating politicians (especially in the mostly black PLP) for what he perceives as their incompetence and corruption, had sent an e-mail to the premier, in effect blaming him for Bermuda’s sorry economic state and a decline in tourism. The premier, thinking he was sending a reply only to his close associates, apparently hit “reply all” to the message, letting loose with the impolitic and offensive remark that he was tired of getting flak from “people who look like Tony Brannon.”
Brannon, naturally, went to the press about the premier’s remarks, and it had become something of a scandal by the time I arrived on the island that October. The premier, chastened by significant public backlash to his remarks, backpedaled, insisting that he hadn’t meant the comment as a racial remark against Brannon or whites generally. Virtually no one believed him, because frankly, the claim of innocence was wholly unbelievable. The remark had obviously been about color.
Since I was there at the time, talking about race, the local press sought my opinion on the matter, as did individuals, black and white, during my stay. To me there seemed to be a couple of key issues, both of which spoke to the larger subject of institutional white privilege. On the one hand, I made clear that I thought the premier’s comments had been inappropriate and offensive. But that was the easy part. In a larger sense, whites in Bermuda desperately needed to imagine themselves in the position of the premier, and especially as the head of a majority-black party. After all, there has been a long history in Bermuda of whites verbalizing their doubts that blacks were capable of self-government.
So against that background noise, for a white man like Brannon to criticize the premier by calling into question his
competence
would naturally cause alarm bells to go off in the ears of virtually any black person hearing it. Though Brannon may well have meant nothing racial by his critique, for a black premier to have his competence questioned (which is different than a simple disagreement over a particular policy) is to trigger a litany of negative stereotypes and call into question the extent to which the white person issuing the challenge may be offering it from behind the veil of those prejudiced beliefs about blacks as a group.
That whites wouldn’t understand this (and largely didn’t when I explained it) was due almost entirely to privilege. If a white politician is criticized for being incompetent, or not intelligent enough to run a country, for example (and certainly one heard barbs regularly about George W. Bush’s intellect during his presidency), no white person would have to have worried that the critique might have been intended as a group slam against whites. We wouldn’t have to wonder whether the individual white politician had somehow triggered, by virtue of his or her actions, a larger group stereotype about white intelligence as a whole, because there is no such negative stereotype when it comes to white intelligence. But stereotypes about black intelligence are common. So when a comment is made that could be perceived as stemming from that stereotypical view, it is understandable that a black person on the receiving end of the critique might react in a way that seems hypersensitive. The larger social context didn’t make Scott’s comment acceptable, I explained, but it did allow us—provided we as whites are willing to consider it—to understand the way privilege and its opposite work.
But even more significant than putting the comment in historical context, the most important aspect of the incident, to me at least, was Scott’s apology and the fact that he had felt compelled to issue it. The very fact that the premier had felt compelled to backpedal after his remarks were made public is testimony to how little power he had, in effective terms. After all, if power truly resided in his hands, or the hands of other blacks such as himself, he (and they) would be able to regularly insult whites, say terrible things about them, and never have to apologize at all. Premier Scott would then have been in a position to say, in effect, “screw Tony Brannon” and everyone like him. But he couldn’t, and that was the point. A black man was forced to apologize to white people for a simple comment, while whites have still never had to apologize for the centuries-long crimes of slavery, segregation, and white institutional racism.
Alex Scott, despite holding political power in Bermuda, had essentially no power to effectuate his biases against whites. Even were we to grant that he was a vicious antiwhite bigot (and frankly, as unfortunate and inappropriate as his remarks were, this charge seems extreme), the fact would remain that he would have been utterly impotent to do anything with those biases. He couldn’t have expelled whites from Bermuda, taken away their right to vote, or imposed discriminatory laws against them in terms of hiring and education. He couldn’t have done any of the things that had been done to blacks in Bermuda over the years, political power notwithstanding. Totally dependent on tourist dollars—most of them spent by white tourists—and white-dominated corporate investments, to say nothing of ultimate British control of the island, black politicians in Bermuda could be as racist as they like, but to no effect, except insofar as they might be able to hurt white feelings. That’s about it.
It is also worth noting that the very same whites who were so incensed by Premier Scott’s remarks had said nothing when the black premier of the more conservative (and white-dominated) party told blacks in 1989 to “lower their voices” regarding the issue of racism. In other words, telling black people to shut up is fine; telling white folks to do so makes you a racist. And so whites in Bermuda, as with the United States, insist that racism is no longer a barrier for blacks—despite the evidence of widespread disparities that have virtually no alternative explanation but racial discrimination—but has become one for them: a charge that takes white denial to a pinnacle unrivaled in the annals of human irrationality. To avoid dealing with the legacy of white supremacy, we will change the subject, blame the victims,
play
the victim, and generally do anything to avoid confronting the truth that rests just in front of our eyes.

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