Progressive Minds

Some whites will use Obama to mask their racism
But first my bona fides: I have white European heritage, on my father’s side

In a column last week I argued that those Bermudians like Dr. Grant Gibbons who attempt to appropriate Barack Obama's victory and translate that wholesale to the Bermudian context are off base at best and indulging in the worst form of racial politics at worst.

But first, there was an error in the column that I wanted to correct: Although, it was accurate to state that McCain defeated Obama by a margin of approximately 12 per cent in terms of non-hispanic white voters, Obama did not get 38 per cent of the aforementioned white vote as I stated, but rather approx 43 per cent of that voting bloc.

Back to my second effort for 2009, which I have decided to title: 'My New Year's Message to White Bermuda'.

Now, this message is not directed at every white Bermudian, although I would love for everyone to read it.

More particularly, this message is directed toward white Bermudians who seem to hold contempt for democracy based upon the fact that they also appear to hold dear, the spurious notion that black voters were hoodwinked into voting for the PLP by the racial rhetoric of its leaders. The destructive implication of that line of thinking therefore seeks to posit the notion that the duly elected government is illegitimate.

If that is not contempt for the democratic process and black Bermudians, then I do not know what is.

Economic boom

This is also for all of those in the white community who, while experiencing if not the largest economic expansion or boom in Bermuda's history over the last ten years, then certainly one which must be ranked in the top three, still fail to give this government credit for its economic management, notwithstanding the potential economic threats now potentially facing Bermuda.

Ironic, isn't it, considering that they have disproportionately benefited from this boom far more than black Bermudians, who voted overwhelmingly for this government.

A companion narrative to the above, is that, it is the white minority now, who are the new victims of racism, which they contend is now being perpetuated by the government and the black majority which elected them. Certainly, whether in opinion columns, blogs or even the House of Assembly or Senate, one can not help but recognize the outline of the same story, running like a malicious thread through the body politic.

This message is for them!

While 2008 gave us Barack Obama, who I believe has supplanted Martin Luther King Jr. as a symbol which many of those on the list will now appropriate to mask their racism, there is one thing that Barack and I have in common. No, not our moderate cigarette habit-like him I struggle with it everyday... and not our once youthful indulgence in recreational drug use; or the fact of our protruding ears and left handedness. No what Barack and I have in common is that we are both of mixed heritage. Yes my secret is finally out, I am part white too. I am a Bermudian of European descent.

'Signor Commissioni'

First my bona fides, if you will. My white European heritage is found, unlike Barack's - whose mother was white - on my father's side of the family. And while many of you call me Commissiong and my long time boyhood friends from Spanish Point and Ord Road, 'Commissh' after the commissioner of police on the Batman series from the 60s, more than 150 years ago you would have been calling me 'Signor Commissioni.'

You see my paternal ancestor in this hemisphere was a fellow name Domingo Commissioni, who left his home in Genoa, Italy in the mid 1700s and emigrated to Granada in the Caribbean. Signor Commissioni was a sail-maker, a skill that was in high demand during that period, after all historians do not call that period the Age of Sail for nothing.

And so it was one day when I received a call at home. The voice on the other end was a man named Paul Commissiong, a then 60-something vice president of an American bank in Michigan, who stated that he was on the island doing some business here and decided to take a look in the Bermuda phone directory for anyone bearing the same name as he.

Paul, who had a Caribbean accent, said that he was originally from the island of Grenada.

My family on my father's side hails from the twin island Republic of Trinidad & Tobago but we had been well aware of the Granada link and the tie to Domingo. Paul, on the other hand, would have been the first family member from there that we would have had the pleasure of meeting.

Well, the meeting was duly set up with my aunt and cousin in attendance and in walks Paul, a white man who looked like a cross between Haskin Davis and Shorty Trimingham (both now deceased). A man who by any of the twisted European derived standards by which these things are judged, was white.

We however, while related, lived in two different worlds; my father's more immediate family were, to use a somewhat outdated Caribbean phrase, Creole - or mixed - yet in the English dominated world in which we lived, we were black.

We were black or negro or coloured - just like Barack - because Europeans deemed us to be so and had the power to impose a system of racial categorization upon us.

And that system of racial categorization directly led to the sociological and economic divide that exists not only in the country at large, but also within my own extended family.