If you are a mulatto, and you prize your European ancestry, perhaps you even detest that blood in you which is African, the first thing I would say to you is that just a thousand years ago, the British, Germans and French were all barbarian tribes. What civilization there was on planet earth, was to the east, in Asia; to the south, in Africa; and to the west, in America.
You have to understand this about the school system in Belize. It was designed by European Christian missionaries, and its primary, specific purpose was to ensure that the children of those Europeans and Americans who had to, or chose to, spend time in Belize for whatever reason, would not skip much of a beat when they returned to the United Kingdom or the United States.
Take Michael Ashcroft. His father, a British civil servant, was sent to British Honduras on assignment in the late 1950’s. Young Michael was sent to school at what we used to call “Convent” in those days. Today, this is a separate entity known as “Belize Elementary School.” It is Roman Catholic, private, and high quality. But back then, “Convent” was just a small, elitist and low-profile section of St. Catherine Academy (SCA).
When young Michael, who was a total nobody in Belize, returned to England, he would not have missed that much educationally. “Convent” like the other Catholic schools in Belize, was a white supremacist institution. I say “white supremacist,” because they were still extolling Christopher Columbus; they ignored Egypt and the other African civilizations; they disrespected the Incas, the Olmecs, the Mayas, the Aztecs, etc; they emphasized the five hundred years since Europe had conquered Africa and America, as if history had begun in 1492; they taught nothing about Europe’s barbaric origins.
I will say more. Four hundred years ago, the Anglo-Saxon elite of the United States were desperate religious exiles from Europe. Two hundred years ago, the Australians were convicts deported from Europe in chains.
Europe did not surge to world supremacy by any process of paternalistic benevolence or intellectual superiority. The Europeans used brute force to conquer our ancestors, then subjugated, enslaved and brainwashed them. Respect to that. Military conquest is a historically legitimate feature of the relationship between peoples and states. Winners rule: losers die.
The education given to Michael Ashcroft at “Convent”, even as the education being given to my generation at Holy Redeemer Boys School, implicitly and explicitly glorified the Europeans while demeaning Africans and indigenous Americans. Because he has been mis-educated, Michael Ashcroft believes that it is in the natural order of things for him to exploit us, refuse to pay our taxes, and use his wealth to ricidule us and to undermine our national dignity. He is, you see, from the Nordic, Aryan, “superior” races of Europe.
If I did not completely reject my white supremacist education by the time I was 21, then I would have been one of the educated mulattos here who line up to receive Michael Ashcroft’s handouts. The “educated” mulattos don’t know any better. Because of their ignorance, I suppose they are to be pitied. But these same ignorant Belizean mulattoes are the most arrogant of men, because the white supremacist system has allowed them to accumulate riches and to enjoy exaggerated prestige in Belize.
It is natural in most organisms, I guess, to seek the easy road. That is one reason why history is the way it is. Organisms seek the easy road, then they or their progeny become soft, decadent, and, in the case of human beings, corrupt. History teaches that such soft, decadent, and corrupt organisms are inevitably gobbled up by a rough invasion of predators.
This was always my lesson for Belize’s mulattos. Get hard. Get real. 1798 was only “previews of coming attractions.” If you can’t see this, then the fire in the streets will consume you. Feel me.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.