Dear Sir,

Before addressing some of the substantive points raised in response to my recent op-ed, I want to set the record straight on the most fundamental question of all: what Dame Lois Browne Evans actually said.

One commenter repeated the familiar distortion — that Dame Lois told PLP supporters to go and fornicate to increase the Black population. This version was false when it was first reported. It remains false.

The undisputed source is Dame Lois herself, interviewed by this newspaper in March 1999. She explained that she was addressing a meeting in Devonshire, incensed that the Government was preoccupied with Blacks having babies out of wedlock while drugs were creeping into the country unchecked. The remark about fornicating in the bushes, which she did make, was an afterthought, offered as a lighthearted observation about what bored young people might otherwise get up to. The Royal Gazette reporter corrected the original misreporting.

Support for Dame Lois came later in 1999 from an unlikely source — Sanders Frith Brown, a White Bermudian, critic of the PLP, and a man with no conceivable political motive to defend Dame Lois. His published correction stands alongside Dame Lois’s account as independent corroboration.

I will now address some of the responses. One commenter produced a table of census data stretching from 1629 to 2016, demonstrating that the Black proportion of Bermuda’s population has remained broadly consistent across nearly four centuries, and that the White proportion is currently at an historic low. The research is genuine, and the data is accurate. But it answers a question that I was not asking. The crux of my argument was who had been granted the right to belong here through Bermudian status. The stability of the Black proportion of the total population tells you nothing about who was granted permanent status, which is fundamentally different.

Several commenters interpreted the points system proposal as either an open-borders Caribbean immigration policy or as a mechanism to exclude people already contributing to Bermuda’s economy. Neither reading is accurate.

One commenter made a point consistent with the paper’s argument: people who have been here for many years, working and paying taxes, should have a pathway to status. And the emphasis is on “should”, since no one is entitled to discretionary grants of status. The points system provides a pathway that is transparently designed, independently administered, and calibrated so that its cumulative effect addresses the racial equity component missing in the OBA’s Pathways to Status proposal.

“George Patton’s” contribution provided a humanising element. His account of Dame Lois giving the most moving speech in the House of Assembly upon his father’s death, and then attending the funeral and visiting their home to tell him how his father had coached her on parliamentary procedure, despite their political differences, says much about both his father and Dame Lois.

The level of engagement with the op-ed achieved its goal: forcing a conversation that Bermuda has been avoiding into the public domain. I am grateful to The Royal Gazette for publishing it, and to every reader who took the time to engage, whether in agreement or in opposition. Engaged disagreement is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy.

CORDELL W RILEY

Warwick