“Black Power leader Evan X Hyde, son of a civil service family, articulated and defined the feeling of those Belizeans in their teens and twenties most evocatively in his own poetry and fiction. His movement, the United Black Association for Development (UBAD), created an explicitly sexualized but also antifeminist politics, casting the nation’s redemption as depending on the recuperation of black masculinity from the womanish leaders of female-dominated political parties.”
– pg. 244, FROM COLONY TO NATION: Women Activists and the Gendering of Politics in Belize, 1912-1982, Anne S. Macpherson, University of Nebraska Press, 2007
The Belizean system is a system of disguised white supremacy. Disguised or no, it is still white supremacy. You cannot teach the healthy black male to submit to a system where he is considered inferior because of his melanin. The healthy black male’s every instinct is to rebel, and that rebellion, when the black male is young and healthy, will have some element of violence. Jump high, jump low, that’s the way it is.
In the not-so-disguised white supremacist system of British colonialism, oppressed black people developed programs to “socialize” their young black males, which is to say, channel their natural and healthy aggression into positive, constructive exercises. These socialization programs featured different kinds of sports, but there were also music groups, youth clubs, church activities, and the like.
The most important socialization program for young black males was, of course, schools. But then, as now, a huge proportion of our young black males did not go on to high school. In the old days, many of these non-high school males were apprenticed to learn trades under the tutelage of master mechanics, machinists, blacksmiths, contractors, carpenters, cabinet makers, tailors, and so on and so forth. Today, many of these non-high school young males join gangs. In some areas of the old capital, this is not a choice our youth make: it is a reality forced upon them. If you are a male, then you must be brave. And the place for daily bravery is in the gangs.
Over the millennia, men all over the world have done horrible things to each other in various kinds of conflict and war. It is in man’s nature, it appears, to fight each other. Man’s fundamental intent is to protect his women and his children. In the modern world, populations are organized in nation-states. Sometimes the males of these nation-states wage wars against each other because of territorial disputes, religious disagreements, perceived insults, and the like. We can see today in our region that Venezuela and Colombia are moving closer and closer to a war, because of ideological differences and neighbour rivalry, not to mention the superpower’s involvement.
Belize, which became a nation-state in 1981, has a small military, the military being considered an ideal socialization program for young males. We also have a small police department, the police being another good socialization program. But there are no programs, apart from the gangs, for many of our young black males.
You don’t want your young males to behave other than as men. You don’t want them to be wimps or “wussies”. But that is how the rulers of white supremacist societies, disguised or no, wish for the young black males to behave. And they are willing to use various means, any means, to discipline rebellious black males. In Belize, the most effective discipline, if you think about it, is the gang system, wherein young black males routinely beat, stab and shoot each other.
The pressure on black people in a society like Belize’s derives originally from the historical phenomena of conquest, enslavement, and colonialism. At the end of the day, these three were the same thing. They involved white males subjugating black ones. In our part of the world, that process was never reversed, except in the case of the Haitian Revolution in 1791. Black males have rebelled, but white men rule.
Where rearing our young black males is concerned, our communities have had to be creative. It appears, for example, that the Garifuna people, relying on culture, religion and group solidarity, have protected the vast majority of their young black males. In the modern era in Belize City, that has not been the case in the black community. And all the money that comes into Belize for social welfare, for lack of a better word, is stamped “for women only.” The international agencies, founded by the rulers of the world, do not care about the fate of young black makes. That is because the rulers of the world do not wish to preserve and protect their natural enemies, those whom they have oppressed – black males. You blame them?
Now you can understand why the UBAD program was attacked from Day One. It was primarily about young black males. And Belize’s disguised white supremacy picked up on that from the start. That was not a terminal problem for UBAD. We knew how it would be before we began, and we were seeing the punches before they hit us. The worst enemies came from ourselves, our own people. Some of our people had been colonized, castrated. They were afraid of making the rulers angry. Belizeans were afraid of UBAD in 1969. In 2009, we have gangs which are not even sure where their ultimate loyalty lies. In 1969, UBAD was just talking. In 2009, the gangs are shooting automatic weapons and throwing hand grenades. If you had a choice now, black people, which would you prefer? Silly question. But, on second thought, perhaps not so silly.
There is a school of thought amongst “liberated” women in Belize, and they are pushing this amongst younger women and girls, that you (they) don’t need a man. We suppose that, theoretically, this is true. The importance of that school of thought is the mindset from whence it originated. If the young black male is the most endangered species in Belize, and the young black females are being taught that they don’t need him, now where the hell are we headed with that?
We don’t have all the answers to the problems of Belize’s young black males. But we sure do have a lot of questions. And the most burning one is this – why does all the money come for the young women and almost none for the young men? We think we know the answer to that question, but we want you to figure it out for yourselves. We have always believed that osmosis, rather than injection, is the best form of education.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.