A STATEMENT that came out of the recently held race relations workshop that stated “whites need to be made uncomfortable” — presumably to sensitise them to the issue of race — has left me wondering how exactly such a process will ever take place on a widespread level?For instance, some of the speeches recently made by United Bermuda Party officials at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute before a predominately white audience of political supporters did not leave me with the impression that making whites uncomfortable is in any way an Opposition strategy.

And without any firm mechanisms in place on the part of organisations like the UBP, what is going to make Bermuda’s white population any further attuned to the question of race in this country?

I will elaborate on what I mean by this later. But in commenting on Bermuda’s latest foray into what I call racial encounter groupings between blacks and whites, even though I did not attend this latest seminar, one of its workshop, where whites and blacks were required to meet in separate rooms, brought back memories of another such meeting that I did participate in some years ago.

That too took place in a large setting, namely with a hotel being the host venue. I remember clearly the exercise we were required to undergo: blacks and whites were asked to gather in separate rooms and organise around a single racial issue and present their findings to the whole group.

As I recall this was an easy enough task for the black grouping, which I was a part of. But the whites, on the other hand, were at a loss to select a particular racial issue they had with blacks. In fact, they admitted they did not even see themselves as a white grouping with a common agenda, at least when it came to a racial situation.

I still remember that revelation since so many blacks still believe the white community harbours a united racial agenda aimed, for the most part, at bringing harm to black people.

This is a reality in part because we have not solved the racial issue in terms of people to people relationships across racial lines. Of course, I am not talking about the marriages and multi-racial relationships that exist in this country, nor the genuine friendships that exist across racial lines. We have made strides in these areas. But still there is a racial separation in Bermuda that is a reality and it’s at the core of why we have not solved the racial divide on a national level.

One big factor is that the world as a whole has not solved the racial divide and that is reflected in who is the most powerful in terms of world affairs. The white world is the most developed economically. It is the most advanced in terms of military power, its cultural influence still has a great sway over the world and for the most part any challenges to its military/economic/cultural hegemony are being mounted by non-white peoples.

Bermuda, of course, is a microscopic example of this international struggle for dominance. And no matter what we like to think of ourselves and our independent-thinking and geographical detachment from the rest of the world and its issues, these great and ongoing influences will continue to make an impact here in our very small island.

In Bermuda, as was recognised by the two people brought in to conduct the race relations meetings — Dr. Bernestine Singley and Professor Robert Jensen— we are very nice to each other on a superficial level. But as was pointed out by the two visiting academics, being pleasant and polite with one ather is not going to address the issues at the core of Bermuda’s racial divide.

As I mentioned in the racial encounter meetings I attended a few years back, the white participants, once they were called upon to act in a conscious racial way, were at a loss. That, however, does not mean they had no racial consciousnesses. On the other hand, the black participants had no trouble demonstrating a collective racial consciousness.

I am reminded of the profound statement written by the Martinique-born psychiatrist and anti-colonial social thinker Frantz Fanon, who once stated: “To be racist in a racist society is to be normal.”

Often this amounts to a lack of awareness among whites that racism is being practiced in an unconscious manner. How this can happen was made clear to me by an article sent in from one of my white readers. The article concerned a 40-year-old divorced mother of two who was black and had come out of a failed marriage to a white man. While she stated that race had not been the overall reason why the marriage broke up, it had its influence and her white husband had been unaware of how much racism had impacted on his wife’s life. This was further compounded when she had dated another white man; who she admits was nice, with two grown children and being a social worker he had dedicated his professional life to working with troubled children he was perhaps more aware than most whites about the powerful racial undertows that exist in any multi-cultural society.

But here, too, the budding relationship encountered questions to do with race and racial feelings that he was not consciously aware of. In the end that relationship floundered on race, as she could not make him understand her world from a racial perspective.

Do some black people contribute to the continued white unawareness of the question of race? Well, let me return to the UBP meeting held at the BUEI and focus on the comments of the new UBP chairman, Shawn Crockwell (pictured<$>), who in my view presented a decidedly revisionist historical opinion on how Bermuda advanced from an officially racist society to one that does not practice open racism (or at least that is what is stated).

While he heaped praise on, for instance, the late Sir Henry Tucker as a main mover to get Bermuda to be a genuinely non-racial society, he failed to mention and give credit to the main factor that moved Bermuda away from its open racial past — and that is the black Bermudian Civil Rights movement that was the real force behind the collapse of officially sanctioned racial segregation in this country.

In fact far from making his predominantly white audience uncomfortable, his remarks probably made them feel most comfortable.

However, as a black Bermudian I do not see United Bermuda Party founding father Sir Henry Tucker as the great racial reformer as he is popularly credited with being.

I do see him as a pragmatic white political leader who realised that if he did not attract some black political support, then he and the white political and economic Establishment were in danger of being swept away by a united black political force.

In the 1960s Sir Henry was reputed to have said that, yes, he was prepared to accept blacks in the UBP but “they would look just like me” — meaning they would be black but, more importantly, conservative-minded and likely to continue to support most of his policies and outlooks on how Bermuda was to be governed.

I do think that was, in fact, how Bermuda was governed up to the time the United Bermuda Party lost power in 1998.

One of these days Bermuda will have the courage to tell the truth about its racial past and when that day finally comes, we as a country will have taken one more step in closing the racial divide.