David Crichton had a passionate commitment to social justice.
The first comedian to earn a degree in social work, David, was active in the desegregation movement in the late 40s and early 50s,
playing a pivotal role in the clandestine printing of an analysis of the media, social problems, achiness arguing for the dismantling of segregation.
He left the island in 1953, believing race relations would never improve and not wanting to raise his children in a racist society,
but was urged to come back in the early 70s by the late William McPhee.
He spearheaded the establishment of the Child Development Project and the formation of the Royal Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse.
He also participated in many initiatives to improve race relations in Bermuda, including the anti-apartheid movement.
His eldest daughter, Wendy Davis Johnson, will be reading from his book Shackles of the Past.
I'm really honoured to be here today to represent my father, David Critchley.
And to join this distinguished panel, I hope you'll forgive me, I've just come from the funeral service of a really dear friend of mine.
And actually read Camp, some of you may know him and so much of what was said about Reed resonated in what I'm about to say about my dad.
So forgive me if I get a bit emotional here. Thank you, Alexa, for organising this event, and I am so honoured to join this distinguished panel.
I wish I wasn't standing in here for my dad and that he could be here reading from his book.
Last week, my family celebrated my mother's 90th birthday and all of us at a party rest.
My father was still with us. He would have turned 90 in July.
My brothers, my sister and I know that if my father was still alive, he'd be fighting the good fight.
That was the focus of his life. There's no reason that we can think of a data kitchen to care so passionately about race relations.
He came from a traditional white Bermudian family.
It wasn't a particularly wealthy one, but he had all the privileges of being white in Bermuda that he chose to buck the system.
He graduated in 1948 from the University of Toronto with a degree in social work and
spent the rest of his life trying to improve the way people relate to one another.
My father believed that while human interaction is complicated.
There were two specific areas that keep us divided in Bermuda.
The first is that we let our perceptions of each other get in the way of really listening to and hearing each other,
and that's what I heard and read suggests that he was a man who really listened and had such an impact because he didn't judge before he listened.
So there's a lot of judgement in the way we interact, and that puts us in a divided position before we even begin a conversation.
The second point that was a real focus of my dad's life is that our school system does not support children at
risk and generally because we live in a predominantly black community to many of these children were black.
He felt this had serious long term repercussions for Bermuda that needed to be addressed systemically.
That had some very specific recommendations about Bermuda school system.
But tonight I'm going to focus on some of his comments from his book Shackles of the Past, about what he felt divided Bermuda in 1989.
So these are this is just straight from one of his chapters.
There's no question in my mind that Black Americans have more than gone the second mile by accepting an outstretched hand when it was offered,
whether from service, clubs, churches or other areas where the doors were closed or open, according to skin colour.
It required trust, forgiveness and often putting up with paternalism.
Many black comedians have been criticised and even scorned for being so naive
as to trust honkies or to compromise themselves for a piece of the action.
I fervently hope that these same black brown unions, as well as others,
will recognise that the time for polarisation on the basis of colour has gone not too long ago.
The major challenges in Bermuda were unquestionably related to segregation and discrimination,
and it was a rare raping union who even questioned the way it was much less thought it should be otherwise.
This is no longer true. We are now threatened by problems that do not respect Jim Crow,
and that will swamp us if black and white comedians are not able to rise above division on the basis of colour.
It would make little difference if every white person ritually Bermuda tomorrow the same challenge would remain
the challenge of how best and most equitably to just distribute the economic pie and that challenge of crime,
mental illness, drugs and other evidences of personal and social breakdown.
We just can't afford to be divided and deterred by those who insist on getting intellects and for the sins of the past.
Of course, the challenge to the white residents of this island is massive.
So many of us don't seem to be able to get beyond throwing up our hands and raising our eyes to heaven and asking What do they want now?
I have no trouble in accepting that black comedians are right when they say
it has been a one way street and the impetus for change has come from them.
Raping it ends, with a few notable exceptions have gotten by on Sir Henry Tucker's coattails and have basked in his reflected glory.
They have gone along with integration reluctantly and with little conviction, and the extent of their commitment seldom has gone beyond being polite.
However, I should say here that when I expressed this opinion to a white Bermudian, it was very indignant with considerable feeling, he said.
If anything was, it was the other way around. White comedians, he said, have done more than their part in support of this.
It was his and others belief of many white people that in contrast to the old days,
people are being appointed positions to positions because they're black anyway, he concluded.
There's just too darn much talk of colour.
Of course, for the purpose of what I'm saying in this chapter, whether the greater effort is being made by black or white is not important.
It is just another example of one of the many honestly held but unproven and irrelevant beliefs that divide us.
It calls to mind the childhood argument I did more than you did.
The therapist, Dr. Albert Ellis, refers to it as ABC thinking with a being an event or situation B,
what we tell ourselves about it and see our feelings or our opinions.
Ellis suggests that much of what we tell ourselves be is negative or faulty and a cause of many of our difficulties.
Thus, when we're sitting hot and tired on a bus after a hard day's work, someone steps on our flight.
That's a we start mumbling to ourselves. What a clumsy idiot he is.
That's b what we tell ourselves. We look up to admonish him to watch where he's putting his feet.
C Then we see white cane. He's holding and we jump up to off our seat thinking, poor soul.
Why didn't someone help him? Anybody can see he's blind.
Same person and same situation, a different message to ourselves be with the result that anger see is replaced by sympathy and concern.
I know see, our one reaction brings out irritation, the other evoke sympathy and concern, but to continue with examples of us and them thinking.
And these are examples from 1989, the annual Berkeley Berkeley Square Fair is an event that makes many black
communities feel that integration is a one way event fewer white people attend,
thereby reducing its effectiveness as a fundraiser. Yet black families account for much of the success of the Mount St. Agnes Fair.
The virtual absence of labour unions at Cup Match is seen by many black from unions as another example of white flight.
Since Romanians were well-represented at cup match when I was young, I suspect other reasons may be responsible.
I found it had lost its attraction for me when I returned to Bermuda in 1972
because the sound of boomboxes prevented me from hearing the bat hitting the ball.
For Al B.W. advice, jokes and insults from spectators to players and the occasional profanity that was much enjoyed by all.
Of course, a less comforting explanation is that the absence of white people, except for tourists,
is a reflection of the underground of suspicion and ill feeling that exists between black and white.
However, black as well as white from the audience.
Have you had similar reasons as mine to explain the dropping of cup match in from their annual must see list?
But if this does at least partially explain the fall off and white attendance,
it has been another example of our tendency to polarise life in terms of black and white.
It is also an illustration of the lack of honest dialogue between black and white comedians.
We reach our conclusions about each other without first checking them out.
It's that ABC thinking of work again.