“Conventional economics cannot respond to the global ‘polycrisis’. This the overlap between climate change, biodiversity loss, energy and food insecurity and extreme inequality — all amplified by geopolitical instability … orthodox economic thinking has been a key reason for the polycrisis ….” — Yanis Varoufakis, economist

“We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.” — WEB du Bois, Black American Sociologist and Racial Justice advocate

The Amazon …

Darron Easton, a good friend and my research and intelligence chief – yup I do have one — some years ago alerted me to the emerging crises taking place in Cayman. He was prescient as you will see.

These days even native Caymanians as per a recent news story there no longer wish to remain invisible in order to please non-Caymanians at their expense. They had been, like us, experts at it for too long. Apparently the joke has not only been on us but them too.

Growing numbers of them have been marginalised socio-economically and displaced by the multinational oligarchs who control their government there. It’s called government capture. Yes … It’s a real thing. Government for, by and of the rich. It’s called an oligarchy.

Under oligarchy, your government becomes the gate keepers on behalf of the oligarchs.

It’s all the rage in the West now with their financialised economies like ours. Our parents and grandparents grew up under one in Bermuda. As to Cayman, gentrification there has resulted in the explosion of the expatriate population who now comprise 53.5 per cent of the total population. They outnumber the Creole, Black Caymanians who are now a minority with 46.5 per cent of the population.

In one year the expatriate numbers rose by 30 per cent while the Cayman population saw only a two per cent increase. That could be your Bermuda and soon if you keep listening to David Burt, Jason Hayward, most of the OBA House members and the Four Star Pizza guy Marico Thomas instead of me.

The biggest losers were and remain socio-economically marginalised Black labour. The new neo-liberals in the PLP government are all in for that apparently. Anything to please capital … anything.

And to do so of course, they act as if there are no losers in this regard and/or actually blame the victim; Chris Famous’ favourite sport. Any wonder voter participation numbers have dropped by just under 11,000 between 2017 and 2025?

The same has happened in Cayman in relation to wages. Returning to the Cayman population stats and both are related, over half of the total population of Cayman only arrived there over the last 15 years. Half … It reminds me of Bermuda during the 1980s.

The Immigration floodgates were opened in Bermuda from the 1950s onwards for mainly English Anglos for political purposes as Bermuda moved from the property vote to a flawed universal adult suffrage model.

This ensured that by the late 1980s, roughly half of Bermuda’s white population were foreign-born. The minting of these new voters was shameful by the UBP. Again, mostly English with a few Canadians, Portuguese, Italian restaurateurs and Austrian pastry chefs sprinkled in. It was designed to make Black Bermudian voters as invisible as possible was while ensuring that many of those migrants got first pick when it came to the labour market.

When speaking about the invisibility of Black Bermudians, particularly from low income households and those that perpetuate this, it must include: the non-governmental organisations (NGO’s) and a number of organisations in the charitable sectors including Home, the homeless charity, The Family Centre, Bermuda is Love and a host of others. They do so notwithstanding that in almost every economic and sociological category — racial disparities as I have written before have been widening considerably in Bermuda over the last quarter century. How wide? Well as wide as the Amazon river.

For example Home now acknowledges the fact that out of the total number of over 1,100 homeless people 92 per cent of them are Black Bermudian men. Now this data belatedly is on its website. Yet, they still refuse to cite that damming stat publicly. Why?

Should not CURB and the Government be making this call as well? Is everyone complicit here? Well not quite everyone which frankly is surprising.

The courage of a minor oligarch …

Home’s founder Arthur Wightman, head of the international accounting firm PwC while not giving those stats at least in the Gazette a few months ago, publicly acknowledged that marginalised Black men were at the heart of homelessness in Bermuda. That was a refreshing bout of honesty to be fair.

Let’s just call it the courage of a minor oligarch?

What does it say about Bermuda? What should we say about the Black Bermudian political class who studiously refuse to even acknowledge Black Bermudians except through some corny racial code as in terms like “fairness”, “grass roots” and “our people” in the House of Assembly and in other public forums. This is a malignant and insidious PLP and OBA habit.

This is an example of anti-Blackness in the context of implicit racial bias at the top of government, the charities and NGO’s. Is it somehow designed to make powerful white males at the executive level of most major businesses and the global companies that are the main sources of charitable funding comfortable? That is the impression I get. One wouldn’t want to make all of those dollars falling from that money tree dry up, would you?

Even the newer charities ones such as Bermuda is Love indulges in MBPI (Make Black People Invisible). Incidentally, that name is one that only a private school kid and his parents could love.

The reality is that at least three others charities like Home, and a couple of others excluding Bermuda is Love should quite rightly be government departments. Are we privatising or outsourcing what should be government services to wealthy philanthropists — whether high level executives of the multinational corporations or firms they lead? At a structural level both are part of the problem we are facing in as much as they are the source of the massive rise of income and wealth inequality and the ills that accompany it in Bermuda.

The reason they should pay more in taxes is so that your government can provide the services and investments in its people that Bermuda deserves and which are long overdue. IB itself now represents over 50 per cent of your economy, although in real terms I think it’s now higher than that.

Those executives in IB I referenced above in fact are doing so well that they can found and fund whole charities to address homelessness and others without blinking an eye.

And don’t think that all of the above is unconnected to the gang formation and so-called gang-related violence and murders centred around Black men we have witnessed over the last few decades. It is. It is at the heart of it. It is the dark heart of it for the reasons cited above and in previous op-eds.

The Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist is a German word that refers to the prevalent spirit of the time or spirit of the age.

Can anyone deny that what we are witnessing now is a resurgent and more assertive white supremacy in the west or global north, centred in Western Europe, particularly the UK and of course the US? Let’s call it white supremacy for the 21st Century. That is what it is.

Pushed to the margins …

Having said that, Black Bermudian political and financial elites seem determined to push Black identity and the present socio-economic crises that afflicts it to the margins of Bermudian life in this colony. For them, especially those who attended white- dominated private schools as I did, the great lie is that white supremacy as an ideology and its chief by-product, racism, is a thing of the past, solely because they go to school together. The current zeitgeist repudiates that assertion.

They will claim that we are in this together but the stats and the facts belie that and say otherwise. What is indisputable is that soon a distinct Black Bermudian identity will be a thing of the past. This Black crisis is confirming that.

All of this is occurring and globally at a time where Black identity and solidarity – once its inherited strength in an unforgiving world — is needed more than ever.

But the Black political elites of a younger generation seem determined to make Black identity; the communities where it resides and the deepening socio-economic crisis that currently afflicts it, even the words and terms that define who they are in Bermuda, invisible.

When you have Beverley Connell and Zane DeSilva acknowledging the widening growth of racial disparities in Bermuda, it tells you it’s that bad. In Bermuda, anti-Blackness is still in vogue even by some Black Bermudians. Yet those most impacted by it remain invisible …

∙ Rolfe Commissiong is the former MP for Pembroke South East