“As time went on, variations on the original theme of course occurred. Matings on top of matings resulted in children being born with different fractional percentages of white and black blood. So that eventually the prejudice in Belize became a matter more of color than of race because race in this hodge-podge was so difficult to identify.”
– from COLORISM: THE DEEPER PROBLEM, essay published in 1975 in Feelings, Evan X Hyde, reproduced on pg. 99, X Communication, Belize City, 1995
There were black families in Belize which climbed to a higher socio-economic level during slavery and colonialism because they became privileged. In most cases, the privileges derived from the fact that the family became lighter in skin color because of a black woman having had children for a white or light-skinned man. The matter of “raising yu color” was a real one during slavery/colonialism: the benefits were manifest. In a white supremacist society, to be brown meant life was less harsh than if you were black.
“Raising yu color” had been an accepted philosophy in Belize from time immemorial when the United Black Association for Development (UBAD) exploded on the scene in early 1969 and declared that “black is beautiful.” In retrospect, this was the most revolutionary concept in UBAD, because it went against core beliefs which had dominated life in this settlement for centuries.
While there were several prominent leaders in UBAD who were clearly brown, like myself, I don’t think the UBAD philosophy, generally speaking, worked for and on the brown element here. It didn’t appeal to them. I believe they continued to conceive of themselves as separate from, and better than, their black brethren/sistren; at least this is something of which I am conscious in the Creole society. Over the years, I have been very critical of my brown brethren, but I can appreciate that it is extremely difficult to give up accumulated privileges. The privileges are taken for granted after a while, as if they are in the natural order of things. And so, in Belize we have a brown buffer class, one which is friendly to people and things European.
Mr. George Price rose to power as a leader who was light-skinned in color but whose mass support was black in Belize City. Black people in Belize City are generally less educated and poorer than brown people. The People’s United Party (PUP) in its early decades was a poor people’s party, therefore black.
All that I have written so far is by way of preparing you to consider how very, very often it is the case, where crime and violence are now concerned in the population and financial center which is Belize City, that the perpetrators are described in the electronic headlines as “dark-complexioned” or “dark-skinned.” They come from the families which have not benefited from the privileges which come with lighter skin color.
Generalizations are condemned in academic research, but this is not an academic paper. If anyone had told me when I was a teenager and young man that I would end up working with Mr. Price’s PUP by the time I was 28 years old, I would have rejected such a notion. I was a supporter of the National Independence Party (NIP) from an early age, not because our NIP Leader, Philip Goldson, was black, but because he was fighting against the Guatemalan claim. The reality of those times, if you think about it, was that Goldson was black and leading a brown party, and Price was brown and leading a black party. That’s a generalization, for sure.
When I became “black conscious,” at the age of say 19 in the United States, it meant that, where Belize was concerned, I became more concerned about uplifting the black masses at the base of the pyramid than about protecting the privileges of the brown buffer class. Without my knowing it, I had become a PUP before I even returned to Belize in 1968. At least, from the way the power brokers of what would become the UDP, began treating me in early 1972, I was not suitable for brown privilege. My thinking was too black. In the eyes of the UDP’s brown royalty, I was a “real ragamuffin.”
Things have changed somewhat since those days in the 1970’s. The PUP is no longer black ragamuffin, and the UDP is more roots in the old capital. But one fundamental fact remains the same: the people who are taking the socio-economic lick are black, or “dark.”
For me, what this means is that the injustice which began with slavery and carried on through British colonialism essentially remains in place in Belize City. A serious change has gotta be made. That change has to be made in the system of education and school training. If that change is not made, then nothing is going to change in the Southside streets.
This is real. No justice, no peace.
Power to the people.