Belize is truly fortunate that some of the racial hostility that exists between ethnic groups in other countries does not exist here, despite our ethnic diversity. However, we would be naive to pretend that no tension or prejudice exists between groups, but despite this, we should all do our part to keep Belize free of racial hostility.
While race as a basis for prejudice and discrimination is not prevalent in Belize, classism and the varied assumptions that go along with it is here. A friend told me recently that he witnessed an interesting incident where a Mestizo mother was telling her son to stop acting like “den Southside boy”; obviously her son’s mannerism and demeanor reminded her of a behavior that she didn’t approve of and one she associated with certain youths from a certain section of Belize City. While this is not directly racism, it’s easy to see how it can get that interpretation if we don’t understand the context in which that mother spoke. This can even be more disconcerting, especially when we hear of government’s intention to “normalize” as much as 60,000 migrants, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, already living in the country illegally.
It’s becoming acceptable to see many young black males, and to a certain extent older black men, depend too much on the ‘victim card’ when trying to get a job, a loan, a scholarship, or just sympathy for their situation; in other words, “help me because I am a victim”. My point here is we have to get off this welfare card because many people who come from more disadvantaged backgrounds take life as they find it and do what they have to do, legally, to survive; in other words, they refuse to play the ‘victim card’.
The use of the ‘victim card’ is nothing exclusive to young black males in Belize; in fact, it has become an established strategy for correcting perceived injustices within a system. A perfect example of this is the ‘Affirmative Action’ (AA) approach used in the US to correct years of unequal treatment of African Americans in that country. The rationale for AA was that African Americans should be given special consideration over whites in jobs, education, housing, etc., in order to correct the years that African Americans had been deprived of equal justice in every aspect of civil rights in that country. So the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a federal attempt to correct this systemic discrimination. As a result of the AA policy many African Americans have received a jumpstart, a kind of ‘skip to the front of the line’ support, to correct the built-in historical injustice.
Women in the US have also used the ‘victim card’ to highlight the fact that some kind of AA should also exist to address the injustices built into the system that deprives women of equal rights. So the Women’s Movement used the same Civil Rights Act to advance their agenda even more effectively than the African Americans for which the Act was originally enacted for. There are many other examples of where the ‘victim card’ was an appropriate strategy to correct systemic injustices.
The problem with using the ‘victim card’ comes when the victim perceives that he/she has a right over others by virtue of the fact that they have gone through what others have not. Clearly the statistics are revealing that many of our black male youths are falling through the cracks and need special interventions to address their peculiar socio-economic, psycho-spiritual traumas, but resorting to the ‘victim card’ as the basis for our intervention is not the correct approach.
There are many beggars in the city today. Some are clearly victims and need a helping hand to pull them through their temporary hard times till things get better. Some, however, have decided to turn begging into a daily profession while others have turned their misfortune into an opportunity to work their way out of their dilemma. Who do you think will get the most support — the perpetual victim, or one who is asking for help to help themselves?
It is almost becoming an accepted fact now that black men in Belize City are lazy and want everything for free. Despite its derogatory nature, this is a growing opinion, even among many black Belizeans who cite all kinds of examples to verify their viewpoint. They say, look how the Chinese, Indians and Arabs own all the stores that black Belizeans once owned on Albert Street. Look how the new Belizeans, from Central America, have established themselves over the last twenty-five years. They say, unlike these new Belizeans, if you offer a black man in the city a job he is more concerned about how much you will pay him, and if the price is not right, he would prefer to be without a job than to work for what he considers below his value.
This may sound like generalization, but you make your own anecdotal observations of these matters and see what we are dealing with. We have developed a culture of dependency is Belize City where to be a perpetual ‘victim’ is becoming commonplace for many young men.
We all know that working hard and working smart is the key for survival, especially in this depressed pandemic-infected economy that we face in Belize today, but how many people are waiting for the “right” job before they will accept any job? How many are satisfied to stand on the sidelines and complain instead of getting out there and finding a job and, failing that, making a job? And yes, in regard to those who use their entrepreneurial skills to do illegal trade rather than sitting around and begging, Respect, for their effort to use their survival skills, especially when they have hungry mouths at home to feed; but we must equally warn them that that is a dead-end street with glitter in the front but death or jail at the back-end. Just look at those who went before you, bro. Crime, really don’t pay in the long run.
The fact is there are many legal ways to generate an income, albeit small, but such jobs have no glitter attached to them; they may be dirty and backbreaking and pay below the minimum wage, but they can sustain you till you find something better. They say that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and that there are lights at the end of every dark tunnel, but if you don’t live in a culture that encourages you to work with what you got and to not become dependent on someone to do for you what you can do for yourself, you will miss many opportunities to improve your situation.
Constantly crying about the half-empty glass and failing to acknowledge what assets you have to work with eventually kills creativity and renders you forever dependent. We’ve all heard the story of the man who prayed vehemently to God to bless him with shoes because he had none….he became vexed in spirit because his prayers went unanswered until one day he met a man who had no feet but was yet cheerful and productive; clearly he met a man who had learned to work with what he had.
It is the responsibility of government to stimulate an enabling environment where jobs are created both in the public as well as the private sector. A good government would have targeted the employment of its citizens as a top priority. But be that as it may, the individual citizen has no excuse to rely on the ‘victim card’ permanently; if jobs are not readily available, then one has to find his own way to avoid dependency. So, in response to the mother mentioned in the early part of this essay, being a ‘southside boy’ should be no more derogatory than being a ‘northside boy’; to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King: judge a boy not from what side of town he comes from but from the content of his character. (Comments welcomed at [email protected]).