Because the lawyers are so brilliant, or the system is so weak, there is no justice in the courts, so there is retaliation in the streets. There is no justice in Belize, so the only response when violence overwhelms us is a state of emergency, which means the good suffer for the bad. What other choices do the police have? What a terrible state we live in, where the good must punish so that the law can catch up, temporarily, with those who commit violent acts in our country.
The lawyer fraternity will run off about their respect for human rights, while the murder rate climbs and climbs, to the point where we, once celebrated as a peaceful haven of democracy, are now among the five most murderous states in the world.
Our justice system depends on eyewitnesses, and it makes no sense to go to court if there aren’t any. That’s our story. No eyewitness, no justice. Maybe the lawyers can tell us what happened to the eyewitnesses. From Barrow and Sedi days lawyers di win murder cases, because Belizeans were intimidated, and so they stayed away from the courts. It’s just gotten worse and worse.
I think it was Judge Gale, an American judge from the USA who relocated to Placencia, who told us that one way they beat witness tampering and witness fear in Los Angeles was by going to quick trials.
Our justice system (criminal) is the most cruel thing the white slave/colonial masters gave to us black people. In their countries they have everything in place to ensure just trials. Like sheep we adore these people and their systems, but we are just pomp and circumstance, we jos going through the motions because we don’t have the full package. Our justice system for homicides is a disaster. What is it, 93% failure? And the 7% found guilty are not interested in being acquitted.
No expert am I, but I stand against teaching children wrong
An acclaimed intellectual heavyweight who is a friend of my dad engaged me in a short conversation recently in which he told me that a certain article I had written, one in which I discussed the racism situation in the USA, exposed me as ill-informed. It didn’t take me long to figure out which article he was referring to, and as I listened keenly to all that he was saying to me, I wondered where in the article I had tripped up to make him arrive at his conclusion, because I agreed with what he said about the reality of Black Americans.
The fact is that Black Americans know horrors much worse than any of us in Belize have been exposed to, and I have no doubt about that, because I am not too backwards with my reading. From as young as 11-years-old my godfather/brother, Nelson, had me reading serious books; from then I was no stranger to James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Nelson had introduced me to William (the Richmal Crompton series) when I was like seven or eight, so he had a lot of credibility with me. Nelson also made me read The Learning Tree, and when the movie came to Belize I went to see it, even though in my youth I was no matinee buff.
The piece which my mentor said exposed that I didn’t know that much about the reality of Black America (as experienced by Black Americans, not Black Caribbean/African-Americans) is titled “Hip Hop is a white racist’s game”, and it started out with the perspective of a Black American cop who was saying that persons involved in protests over the recent death of Mr. George Floyd had it all wrong, that their reactions were overblown and that the reality is that Black Americans were suppressing themselves, that they had a lot of opportunities to live full lives and get rich.
The cop pointed out that there were many hugely successful black people, to which I responded that that would be “about 9 in 44 million”, 9 being the number of black people (there are 44 million Black Americans in the USA) he said had died at the hands of white cops in 2019. I said that the moment the cop started discussing white privilege (which he was excusing) “he was in deep water…” Maybe I should have done more to say that much of what the cop was talking was craziness.
I did say that I’d go to bat for the cop when he spoke about some things Black Americans encourage in their culture that are hindering the progress of the group, and I singled out the music form, Hip Hop, as bad for black people, and I’ll stand my ground there, again. I’ve been disappointed with Hip Hop and all their moguls from the get go, and I would hazard that it has something to do with what the cop felt.
Last week a friend introduced me to a little piece from a Black American lady, the late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, and I did some research on her and found that she wouldn’t label me ill-informed about her world.
Dr. Welsing wrote things like: “We’re the only people on this entire planet who’ve been taught to sing and praise our demeanment (calling ourselves bithes, hos, dogs and nias)…If you can train people to demean and degrade themselves, you can oppress them forever. You can even program them to kill themselves and they won’t even understand what happened.”
Another thing she said is: “Most important, Black males must help one another to understand that they are being led by the dynamic of white supremacy to inflict extreme damage upon themselves, one another, and ultimately the Black race. Black males must understand that, contrary to what is said, the war being conducted in urban centers is not against drugs but against Black males – for the purpose of white genetic survival.”
On some counts Dr. Welsing couldn’t have been liked by some of the people at the forefront of the battle against racism in the US at this time. A Wikipedia page about her says that the lady was born in Chicago in 1935 (died 2016) to a father who was a physician and a mother who was a school teacher, and she earned her medical degree in psychology from Howard University in 1962. She self-published The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation in 1970, and 22 years later she released The Isis Papers, a compilation of essays she had written about global and local race relations.
In her book she discussed “the genocide of people of color globally, along with issues black people in the United States face.” She argued that injustice caused by racism will end when “non-white people worldwide recognize, analyze, understand and discuss openly the genocidal dynamic”, and she “tackled issues such as drug use, murder, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, incarceration, and unemployment, in the black community.”
Now, some more serious (some would say controversial) ideas from the lady: Dr. Welsing said that white people are “genetically defective descendants of albino mutants (who) may have been forcibly expelled from Africa, among other possibilities.” Welsing said that racism is a conspiracy “to ensure white genetic survival”, and that AIDS and crack cocaine are part of a program of “chemical and biological warfare” by white people.
The lady noh done. Welsing said that homosexuality among African-Americans is a ploy by white males to decrease the black population, and she rained on the “effeminization” of black males, which she described as a form of oppression.
Hmm, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. Aha, I had written down a couple months ago (in my scribblings) that white people came from albinos, in jest (hurray for Yellowman!), and when I read in her Wikipedia bio about comments that she had made in which she suggested something similar, I thought that she might be jesting too, with a little purpose.
Painting with a broad brush, my reading of Black America is that there is a small group called the Black Muslims, a bigger group called Black Evangelicals, and a large group that is not really religiously grounded. It is my perception that the group that is not grounded in any religion is weak, subject to supporting all kinds of agendas, and thus they diffuse the black cause. If I lived in the USA I would either join the Black Muslims or the Black Evangelicals. I don’t see them culturing their youth on destructive music.
I recognize that I’m no expert on Black America, but I know the story of the American South, and so I know much about their pain. The ungrounded are led by movie, sports, and music icons – who are they to lead anybody? You see the black person who is running to be their president? He is no relation to Miss Shirley Chisholm.
I see the LGBT making a lot of gains, and I see some women’s groups making a lot of gains, but I see black people in the USA, and Belize too, falling way da back.