Of. All right, so good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Alisha Kirby, and I am a recent graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London.
And today I'm going to be presenting my paper entitled Memories Lost in the Triangle
and the Exploration of Bermuda's Social Conditioning through Racial Amnesia.
Now, firstly, I'd like to start by saying that this paper does not serve as a report on remuneration lesions,
but rather it should be understood as a distillation of analysis of the institutions that have facilitated the multi general racial
miseducation and unconscious unconsciousness in support of structural racism and benefit the white oligarchy of the island.
Now, racial amnesia refers to the diagnosis of societal of a collective societal condition,
whereby elements of racial trauma and distress have been forgotten by a population.
Now, in this sense, the people have been forced to forget their roots,
culture and connexion to the land through suppression and replacement of these memories,
with differential ideals displaced from their original context.
Now, racial amnesia supports the had democratic structure of whiteness and serves a just and serves a of mental repression,
which supersedes the collective memories that connect lineages of race and imperialism.
The question of racial amnesia is an essence, a question of racial class consciousness.
Its value is seen in the recognition that memories can be interpreted as a way of gaining knowledge and learning skills,
which over time become automatic and eye transcribed as a social norm, eliminating sources which challenge the values of the state.
Racialised oligarchies begin a process of social engineering the racial amnesia as
histories are trapped within living memory and are excluded from public forum.
For younger generations who did not experience these events,
the state wishes to forget and they erase an area of oblivion with a state that has delegitimized
their wrongdoings through removing them from public record as though they do not exist now.
One of the methods that facilitate racial amnesia are literature, language and authority, literature and media support.
This framework as power relations are inherent to language and the power struggle is inherent to the definition of identity.
The storyteller then ascertains power by creating versions of himself and setting the parameters of the
other racial discourse in Bermuda is most prevalent amongst the living memory of the older generations,
and as a successful means of replacing the dominant narrative that failed to describe the experience of
those disempowered and plays a central role and subconsciously sustaining a sense of identity and healing.
Now, since the early 1800s,
the island's white elite saw the importance of controlling the public knowledge and discourse through literature and the media,
and began to legalise the prohibition of particular race based text to systematically control the
education of blacks and inhibit them from consuming information which challenged the colonial goals.
Now, the creation of an integrationist black narrative black sorry,
the creation of an integrationist narrative of black progress intended to convey the notion that slavery in Bermuda was benign.
Blacks were treated relatively well by whites as opposed to blacks in the wider African diaspora.
Likewise, colonialism and white paternalism were responsible for the relative material affluence of black men in Europe,
as opposed to the black, as opposed to the black struggle against oppression.
Now, furthermore, desegregation in the 1960s, the blacks no longer had to struggle and integration had brought blacks into the promised land.
This was a lie. They also imposed that the equality of whites all right.
They also imposed that the races need to work together to craft from you into a tranquil paradise to stimulate further tourism,
as well as international business industries.
Now, this ensured that the intellectual resistance could be limited and the cross-generational spread of contextual narratives controlled.
Bermuda's oldest and now only daily newspaper The Royal Gazette has historically been used as a political weapon against black comedians.
The oppressive rhetoric and exclusion of positive blacks success in journalism from mainstream media allowed for the success of black meetings
to go unnoticed in just as the whites to be ignored and further supported the race based class structure through its diminutive language.
Also supporting racial amnesia is the construction of conflictual postmodernist diasporic identity.
Now, the Bermuda government during the 1960s and 70s understood that the official dissolution of the formerly imposed
segregation had deep implications for the maintenance of social identity and the creation of a new sense of community.
The government's attempt to maintain social cohesion during this period were heavily challenged by the Black Power movement.
The government's aim to limit the mobility of the Black Power movement through military force
had failed to regenerate its ability to power and educate the black community henceforth.
Creating a population who are constantly aware. Area of the forest and excessive surveillance, you can control them.
And they were unfaithful to the justice system to protect them.
Now a long lasting impact of this historical invasion nausea is a creation of new generations,
which constantly struggle with an identity continuously under construction and in odds with himself.
Now, the state of double consciousness then creates identities that are constructed with intangible histories and inferiority complexes.
And on the other hand, those deficiencies are used as self-motivation for enhanced agency.
Now, there is often much contention on the island as to what constitutes a true Bermudian.
Although the island was found uninhabited, an ancestor of the ancestral roots have linkages to many parts of the globe.
It's become more fashionable to pretend to an indigenous identity than a settler slave status.
Pushing the identity of a colonial slave to the margins of the allowed experience.
In this way, the black Bermudian population also created their own imposed catalyst for self segregation and racial
amnesia as a coping mechanism for the displacement and empowerment forced onto them by the colonial tally.
Now this means of self segregation and alienation.
From the past, it was an attempt to protect the black Bermuda community from its new oppressive narratives.
It further reinforced and legitimised the sense of otherness that was a religion created by the white men.
Now, this rejection of forced identity works to forget the racial disparities and allows the disadvantaged to live in a euphoric state
by which the racial realm and the criteria for social status is so constructed and conflated as a means of self-preservation.
But the dichotomy between the appreciation of black excellence and white appropriate behaviour often plays an internal struggle.
Now, Fanon in 1967 claims that after having being a slave to the white man, he enslaved himself.
Today, however, there's a strong push with the younger generation to redefine their social narrative and reclaim a higher
place within society as they refuse to be fixed or defined by an official version of their identity,
and deeply accept the idea that self narration achieves self-empowerment unintentionally.
The efforts asserted by the white oligarchy creative future generations constructed through the
resulting hybrid nature of identities and consciousness of the communities of the Diaspora.
Despite being contained to a small island landmass of 21 square miles,
the British oligarchies successfully employed geographies of exclusion as a means of oppression, an early phase of racial amnesia.
The policy that supported the dislocation of the black families from Tucker's town in the 1920s to construct
a tourist resort supports the theory of imaginaries linking the social and the psychic which aims,
which allows racism to operate as a disciplinary mode.
And the fact of being seen provides optimum conditions for surveillance and identification as an alien and threatening presence.
The displacement and relocation of black Bermudian to areas known as the devil's hole
and the back of town not only created a site for manifestation of poverty and crime,
but it also created notion that black comedians are naturally devoid of high value property ownership.
Displacement,
relocation and monitored movements allowed the white oligarchy to successfully build the foundation for the cumulative disadvantage of disparity,
leaving black comedians disenfranchised systematically polarised within a society that deemed them to be insignificant.
Cultural competency also plays as a role in racism than amnesia, the discourse serves as a means of social conditioning,
so you are post racist political strategy, which calls for the population to embrace and live with a mental habit, a free Rachel consciousness.
Now, it can be argued that the aims of the United Bermuda party,
which are majority white during the 34 year tenure or attempts to remedy the racial tensions throughout the island through means of imaginative
construction of histories and memories that may not be strictly truthful but
forge a reality that is bearable to all members of the divergent community.
The EVP employed many techniques throughout the 1960s and 1970s to prove their level of cultural competency,
including the introduction of a black party and Senate members, the naming of Black Premier,
the appeasement of the majority black parliamentary reformist group and the gradual
acceptance of the demands made by the internal Black Caucus as a means of social control.
The EVP presented their partnership between white and black from unions as a partnership which served as a guarantee of Social Security,
as well as an opportunity for gain only through the visible demonstration of racial integration.
It is claimed that Bermuda can attract tourists and internal companies through sources of prosperity.
The only issue with the invitation implementation of this fallacy was that it
greatly ignored the past and present agency of Bermuda's black population.
Now, platforms which are said to acknowledge and alleviate plights of the black Bermuda community,
their methods can be said to resemble new racism by other rising non-whites and
deploying modernist and absolutist views of culture while not using racist language.
Whilst efforts stimulate racial Lesia are not as overt in modern times.
It is argued that this concept can be sustained by flying under the flag of colourblindness multiculturalism or racial tolerance,
contemporary rhetoric, intentional or otherwise to mask the cloak of reality of racism today,
diminishing or downplaying its significance even as concerning instances of racism.
So why then would you say Bermuda has forgotten significantly the majority of the causes have little to do with the education system,
but rather with the nature of the Bermuda culture and the kind of civilisation that Bermuda has involved into wide level of
societal acceptance of disparity and deviating realism of black communities are heavily linked to organisational practises,
institutional frameworks and public sentiment.
Attempts to contrive a new national identity can be interpreted as neo colonial substitution of one oppressive ideology for the other,
ignoring past atrocities and creating a new breath remedy in ignorance of past communal sufferings.
However, it is important that all members of our immediate society are privy to the notion
that pure social cohesion can only be achieved through creating social orders,
which are aimed towards remembering,
acknowledging and transforming its racial memory rather than denial and forgetting the islands of race politics and do not exist.
It's ready to our whole performance and do not hold sacrosanct value.
Rather, it should be understood that they are pervasive and have been neutralised across social economic environments,
making them amenable to change, critique and articulation.
Now, whilst acknowledging and correcting racial amnesia attempts to understand and alleviate adverse social conditions,
it once again traps us within the black body with the pain of our ancestors.
Thank you.