Dear Sir,

The World Series Challenge of the America’s Cup was a success. However, permit me to interrupt the national victory lap with some analysis that has been sorely lacking and which this past weekend’s event makes necessary.

This weekend exposed a pathology in this country that is disheartening. It revealed that Bermuda’s national order of things is a patchwork quilt of white privilege trotted out as national pride. Your series of editorials on the subject of the America’s Cup and our supposed communal responsibility to ensure its success are exhibit A in this indictment. In one such editorial, you admonished us to show “appreciation” for being selected as the host venue. This is offensive.

Bermuda, sir, won this bid; and did so on the backs of a commitment of $77 million of taxpayer funds. This investment was made instead of concurrent investments in social programmes, education funding and healthcare support. Bermuda surrendered itself to the ACEAA and in writing, committed to recouping no tax revenue whatsoever from this entire series of events. Your suggestion that we show appreciation to those who made a business decision based on our total surrender of charges which would ordinarily and rightly apply is disturbing.

Great sailing can be found anywhere, as 2016’s World Series being in Chicago on a lake proves. What we did is make the economics right for the man himself.

The bubbling narrative is of a return to our “heyday” in tourism and of things returning to what they once were. This sentiment is accurate. What we witnessed is exactly what things once were. We saw throngs of white people, local and tourists, front and centre in full flow, dominating every scene. they were in their element, squarely within their comfort zone. The proponents of the event and the chief cheerleaders were five white men: Dunkley, Gibbons, Durhager, Winfield and Hanbury. The role of blacks, made clear in every public statement and emphasised through your writings, was to smile and be welcoming for the friends of those represented by this group of proponents. This is the formula with which they are most familiar and find most comforting.

What is disheartening is the fact that so many blacks have been seduced by these obscene optics. We settled so quickly back into the norms of what tourists look like and what our role must be around events in which we have no part.

Imagine, after 14 years of obsession with large cars and who was driving them and why, we didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the specially imported automobiles and didn’t care who was in them. It just felt right. Imagine, not one question about how much anything connected with the weekend costs. Imagine, not one question about just where the homeless who frequent Front Street happened to disappear for those three days.

So, Mr. Editor, Bermuda at its core is unchanged. To secure your unquestioned support, to generate any semblance of national pride and to construct a veneer of unity, the essential ingredient is obviously an event with which our economic masters feel comfortable. Their construct is the only one that warrants the national call for unity. In one of your editorials last week you wrote: “At the very least, we should show our appreciation with a warm smile.”

Lest you and the bloggers cued up to deem this letter un-Bermudian (provided you see fit to publish it), let me end with what often lies behind smiles of black people. I leave you with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We wear the Mask”:

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hears we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

A.S. SIMONS

Paget