Alastair Crooke, a former British ambassador, stated in a recent interview in reference to European and American political and financial ruling elites that “they cannot imagine living in a world where Europe or America is not directing the world … a world where the West does not give the orders”.

Past tense

Black Jesus — yes, that was his (nick) name — was a legendary back-a’-town Court Street character of the 1970s and 1980s. He is long gone now but if he were still with us he would be in his early seventies, I would guess. He was one of many Black men from low-income households that colonial Bermuda made invisible by design — just like Clarence Hill, who thankfully is still with us.

Across two generations we have seen this movie before just as we are seeing it now. Scores of young Black men marginalised in their own country. One hundred and thirty-three murdered over the past two decades. They are mostly forgotten.

In an earlier time, there were 200 Black men more or less of Black Jesus’s generation who were also struck down in their prime. In the 1980s and early 1990s, as the virus of all viruses took hold of the colony, they were the victims of HIV/Aids. This group comprised intravenous drug users who contracted the virus through the practice of sharing the needles they used to medicate themselves.

Black Jesus and they are now together in the celestial court street of the sky. I considered him a friend. I strongly suspect that across those two generations many were related through the ties that bind.

Black Jesus, this one is for you.

Present tense: the good Dr Eva Hodgson

Dr Eva Hodgson consistently wrote — and this is not only directed at fellow op-ed writers Cheryl Pooley and Jonathan Starling — that in British colonies with significantly sized Anglo/English majorities or minorities, amid persons of African descent, race always trumped class (no pun intended).

This was the case in post-abolition Bermuda. Racism informed by notions of White supremacy and implicit racial bias — one of its derivatives — is built into the DNA of Bermuda just as it is in the US, our neighbour.

It is so bad that even the Black population here, perhaps a considerable minority, exhibit anti-Black bias, also known as crab-in-the-barrel syndrome. It is particularly embedded among a subset of Black Bermudian men, even some in Parliament. This implicit racial bias has affected everyone to one degree or another.

Notwithstanding the good intentions of Ms Pooley and Mr Starling, that has not changed. Even now they will still couch their views on this political or that socioeconomic analysis in European-derived social democratic and/or British Labour terms. All of it is relevant and necessary. They do though routinely leave out two things that are connected. The exploding growth of income and wealth inequality here and its intersection with race, and how both are tied at the hip in informing all of the adverse outcomes they are identifying.

Marvin Gaye asked what’s going on. I’m here to tell you

Remember, poverty is a political choice, and I have to thank the Editor for inserting that observation in my last op-ed by way of a photograph of a young protester holding a placard that said exactly that. Let’s not kid ourselves — those most mired in poverty are Black Bermudians, especially young Black men from low-income households.

In the wake of the murders late last year, my message to Bermuda is to please stop buying into the Mickey Mouse, Hallmark card “it’s trauma” nonsense that is used to explain away the madness we have been witnessing over the past two decades. That is the nonsense that successive Black national security ministers including Michael Weeks and the so-called anti-gang co-ordinator Pastor Leroy Bean have been peddling.

None of it relates to the actual causation behind this growing threat to Bermuda and its Black men. This is what happens when one lives in a country with high levels of income and wealth inequality. This is what it produces and replicates among those at the bottom of income distribution. In other words, in your Black community.

It’s the income and wealth inequality, stupid; and its intersection with race, stupid. It’s your financialised economy, stupid. Just to paraphrase American political consultant James Carville.

Remember, Bermuda, just keep asking the following question: proportionately speaking, why have we not seen these levels of adverse outcomes, including the most deadly, such as we experienced some weeks ago, in our White communities? It’s really not rocket science. It just takes the courage to face reality, no matter the consequences.

For that matter, why do we also listen to the false English gospel that the Black Bermudians mimic? The same bad habit that Bermudians such as David Burt, Michael Weeks, the Black Saltus crowd and the Black Anglos at Berkeley mimic. That this is moral failure at work and has nothing to do with one’s socioeconomic status and its intersection with race as the cause.

If only the parents of these young Black men exercised, for example, more accountability or responsibility, then like magic it would all disappear. Even that is a symptom at best and not causation at all. Without the proper causation, one cannot even arrive at the right sustainable solution(s).

Or the flip side of that false gospel is that which implicitly comes from your colonial Governor and your political leaders through omission. That the world starts with each new murder or attempted murder. And in a multiracial society that is 31 per cent White, all of those terrorists committing these acts just happen to be Black men between 17 and 40?

They will assert, however, that any conversation other than that is but an excuse? The thoroughly bogus trauma trend gets a pass increasingly because nobody any more takes that false narrative seriously. It also is a rhetorical way to avoid the realities of race and its unacknowledged centrality to the conversation. It was a joke and a dodge from the beginning. And you will then wonder why these cycles continue?

It's invisibility by design

Ask yourselves how did so many Anglos and Irish find themselves in Australia in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Stealing a loaf of bread could get you hanged then in England, and if you were lucky the sentence would be transportation to Australia. So many fit that profile, including political activists and assorted Irish rebels.

All of this was informed by a perverse English brand of Protestantism that benefited those at the top of that socioeconomic pyramid, politically and financially. The English way still exists today not only in England but also in Bermuda. When you have persons here evoking the responsibility and accountability mantra not as symptom but as causation, that is the only clue you need.

My point here is to sound the alarm. To the extent that we do in some distant future finally tackle the actual causation which is the rampant rise of income and wealth inequality emanating from the international business sector, we need to stop making Black Bermudians, especially our Black men, invisible.

Like I said, I’m here to tell you what’s going on

Did you not notice that Mr Weeks and the Governor, Andrew Murdoch, made Black Bermudians invisible at their town halls recently with the full complicity of the majority Black audience? Insofar as the topic of the night — not explicitly but quite clear to those with eyes to see and ears to hear — was about Black Bermudians, the stats confirm that.

However, the majority Black audience, by choice, as if they knew their role, played it perfectly. That which is taboo as in saying the words Black or race must never be uttered or acknowledged. It would be impolite in the presence of a fine upstanding colonial governor to do so. That conditioning persists.

It was the English way by design in a country and a world where whiteness was and still is normalised and privileged. Sadly, to the extent that it does still exist, it does so with the full complicity of many Black Bermudians as well on both sides of the political aisle. Sadly, Black Bermudians fail to acknowledge that the joke is on them.

The obvious question to Mr Weeks and Mr Murdoch that would never see the light of day at events like that: why — the greatest question ever devised — are virtually all of these adverse outcomes totally absent among a significantly sized White minority representing about 31 per cent of your Bermuda population?

Whites are just more virtuous

It must be because Whites are more virtuous, right, Mr Weeks and Mr Murdoch?

Answer? For what seems like for the 400th time, this is a country of extraordinary levels of income and wealth inequality, most of which is generated by successive cycles of expansion in the international business sector over nearly four decades that continues to displace Black Bermudians. That industry pays insultingly little in the way of taxes.

At ground zero you now have a financialised economy centred on the international business sector, like the US and Britain, which are also experiencing a massive rise in income and wealth inequality. This in turn is producing rising levels of poverty, an eroding middle class, stagnant wages except for those on the international business oasis, not to mention the really destructive, even deadly, stuff we have seen over the past three months. Literally, the deadly stuff.

Whites proportionately do, on average, have higher levels of income and multigenerational wealth to more fully insulate them from the most adverse and destructive impacts of living in a country with such high levels of inequality.

Mr Weeks and Pastor Bean, the gang co-ordinator, should know that. Do I give them too much credit? The Governor should know this because I told him so via a recent op-ed brought to his attention.

That fact, though, must remain invisible, especially in the “New British Empire” of which this Anglo-American offshore piggy bank called Bermuda exists at its heart.

As for Ms Pooley, and Mr Starling less so, judging by his most recent op-ed, they are not alone in making Black Bermudians, who carry disproportionately the burdens and ills they describe, invisible. Even worse, Black leaders in the Cabinet and the elected Black members on both sides of the aisle do so routinely.

• Rolfe Commissiong is the former MP for Pembroke South East