1 00:00:01,460 --> 00:00:15,670 Of. All right, so good afternoon, everyone. 2 00:00:15,670 --> 00:00:21,250 My name is Alisha Kirby, and I am a recent graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London. 3 00:00:21,250 --> 00:00:26,410 And today I'm going to be presenting my paper entitled Memories Lost in the Triangle 4 00:00:26,410 --> 00:00:30,190 and the Exploration of Bermuda's Social Conditioning through Racial Amnesia. 5 00:00:30,190 --> 00:00:35,890 Now, firstly, I'd like to start by saying that this paper does not serve as a report on remuneration lesions, 6 00:00:35,890 --> 00:00:44,380 but rather it should be understood as a distillation of analysis of the institutions that have facilitated the multi general racial 7 00:00:44,380 --> 00:00:53,140 miseducation and unconscious unconsciousness in support of structural racism and benefit the white oligarchy of the island. 8 00:00:53,140 --> 00:00:59,440 Now, racial amnesia refers to the diagnosis of societal of a collective societal condition, 9 00:00:59,440 --> 00:01:04,300 whereby elements of racial trauma and distress have been forgotten by a population. 10 00:01:04,300 --> 00:01:07,660 Now, in this sense, the people have been forced to forget their roots, 11 00:01:07,660 --> 00:01:11,860 culture and connexion to the land through suppression and replacement of these memories, 12 00:01:11,860 --> 00:01:16,660 with differential ideals displaced from their original context. 13 00:01:16,660 --> 00:01:24,070 Now, racial amnesia supports the had democratic structure of whiteness and serves a just and serves a of mental repression, 14 00:01:24,070 --> 00:01:28,990 which supersedes the collective memories that connect lineages of race and imperialism. 15 00:01:28,990 --> 00:01:33,940 The question of racial amnesia is an essence, a question of racial class consciousness. 16 00:01:33,940 --> 00:01:39,790 Its value is seen in the recognition that memories can be interpreted as a way of gaining knowledge and learning skills, 17 00:01:39,790 --> 00:01:47,410 which over time become automatic and eye transcribed as a social norm, eliminating sources which challenge the values of the state. 18 00:01:47,410 --> 00:01:52,510 Racialised oligarchies begin a process of social engineering the racial amnesia as 19 00:01:52,510 --> 00:01:56,530 histories are trapped within living memory and are excluded from public forum. 20 00:01:56,530 --> 00:01:59,530 For younger generations who did not experience these events, 21 00:01:59,530 --> 00:02:05,920 the state wishes to forget and they erase an area of oblivion with a state that has delegitimized 22 00:02:05,920 --> 00:02:11,880 their wrongdoings through removing them from public record as though they do not exist now. 23 00:02:11,880 --> 00:02:17,770 One of the methods that facilitate racial amnesia are literature, language and authority, literature and media support. 24 00:02:17,770 --> 00:02:24,160 This framework as power relations are inherent to language and the power struggle is inherent to the definition of identity. 25 00:02:24,160 --> 00:02:29,140 The storyteller then ascertains power by creating versions of himself and setting the parameters of the 26 00:02:29,140 --> 00:02:35,260 other racial discourse in Bermuda is most prevalent amongst the living memory of the older generations, 27 00:02:35,260 --> 00:02:40,630 and as a successful means of replacing the dominant narrative that failed to describe the experience of 28 00:02:40,630 --> 00:02:47,020 those disempowered and plays a central role and subconsciously sustaining a sense of identity and healing. 29 00:02:47,020 --> 00:02:49,090 Now, since the early 1800s, 30 00:02:49,090 --> 00:02:55,090 the island's white elite saw the importance of controlling the public knowledge and discourse through literature and the media, 31 00:02:55,090 --> 00:03:00,970 and began to legalise the prohibition of particular race based text to systematically control the 32 00:03:00,970 --> 00:03:06,740 education of blacks and inhibit them from consuming information which challenged the colonial goals. 33 00:03:06,740 --> 00:03:10,720 Now, the creation of an integrationist black narrative black sorry, 34 00:03:10,720 --> 00:03:17,860 the creation of an integrationist narrative of black progress intended to convey the notion that slavery in Bermuda was benign. 35 00:03:17,860 --> 00:03:23,260 Blacks were treated relatively well by whites as opposed to blacks in the wider African diaspora. 36 00:03:23,260 --> 00:03:29,500 Likewise, colonialism and white paternalism were responsible for the relative material affluence of black men in Europe, 37 00:03:29,500 --> 00:03:35,710 as opposed to the black, as opposed to the black struggle against oppression. 38 00:03:35,710 --> 00:03:45,010 Now, furthermore, desegregation in the 1960s, the blacks no longer had to struggle and integration had brought blacks into the promised land. 39 00:03:45,010 --> 00:03:52,300 This was a lie. They also imposed that the equality of whites all right. 40 00:03:52,300 --> 00:04:00,940 They also imposed that the races need to work together to craft from you into a tranquil paradise to stimulate further tourism, 41 00:04:00,940 --> 00:04:03,520 as well as international business industries. 42 00:04:03,520 --> 00:04:11,880 Now, this ensured that the intellectual resistance could be limited and the cross-generational spread of contextual narratives controlled. 43 00:04:11,880 --> 00:04:18,910 Bermuda's oldest and now only daily newspaper The Royal Gazette has historically been used as a political weapon against black comedians. 44 00:04:18,910 --> 00:04:27,100 The oppressive rhetoric and exclusion of positive blacks success in journalism from mainstream media allowed for the success of black meetings 45 00:04:27,100 --> 00:04:35,350 to go unnoticed in just as the whites to be ignored and further supported the race based class structure through its diminutive language. 46 00:04:35,350 --> 00:04:42,280 Also supporting racial amnesia is the construction of conflictual postmodernist diasporic identity. 47 00:04:42,280 --> 00:04:48,700 Now, the Bermuda government during the 1960s and 70s understood that the official dissolution of the formerly imposed 48 00:04:48,700 --> 00:04:55,300 segregation had deep implications for the maintenance of social identity and the creation of a new sense of community. 49 00:04:55,300 --> 00:05:01,570 The government's attempt to maintain social cohesion during this period were heavily challenged by the Black Power movement. 50 00:05:01,570 --> 00:05:06,100 The government's aim to limit the mobility of the Black Power movement through military force 51 00:05:06,100 --> 00:05:11,230 had failed to regenerate its ability to power and educate the black community henceforth. 52 00:05:11,230 --> 00:05:17,910 Creating a population who are constantly aware. Area of the forest and excessive surveillance, you can control them. 53 00:05:17,910 --> 00:05:21,510 And they were unfaithful to the justice system to protect them. 54 00:05:21,510 --> 00:05:26,640 Now a long lasting impact of this historical invasion nausea is a creation of new generations, 55 00:05:26,640 --> 00:05:32,220 which constantly struggle with an identity continuously under construction and in odds with himself. 56 00:05:32,220 --> 00:05:40,350 Now, the state of double consciousness then creates identities that are constructed with intangible histories and inferiority complexes. 57 00:05:40,350 --> 00:05:45,870 And on the other hand, those deficiencies are used as self-motivation for enhanced agency. 58 00:05:45,870 --> 00:05:52,290 Now, there is often much contention on the island as to what constitutes a true Bermudian. 59 00:05:52,290 --> 00:05:59,820 Although the island was found uninhabited, an ancestor of the ancestral roots have linkages to many parts of the globe. 60 00:05:59,820 --> 00:06:05,820 It's become more fashionable to pretend to an indigenous identity than a settler slave status. 61 00:06:05,820 --> 00:06:10,650 Pushing the identity of a colonial slave to the margins of the allowed experience. 62 00:06:10,650 --> 00:06:17,310 In this way, the black Bermudian population also created their own imposed catalyst for self segregation and racial 63 00:06:17,310 --> 00:06:24,390 amnesia as a coping mechanism for the displacement and empowerment forced onto them by the colonial tally. 64 00:06:24,390 --> 00:06:27,600 Now this means of self segregation and alienation. 65 00:06:27,600 --> 00:06:33,060 From the past, it was an attempt to protect the black Bermuda community from its new oppressive narratives. 66 00:06:33,060 --> 00:06:39,600 It further reinforced and legitimised the sense of otherness that was a religion created by the white men. 67 00:06:39,600 --> 00:06:46,860 Now, this rejection of forced identity works to forget the racial disparities and allows the disadvantaged to live in a euphoric state 68 00:06:46,860 --> 00:06:54,150 by which the racial realm and the criteria for social status is so constructed and conflated as a means of self-preservation. 69 00:06:54,150 --> 00:07:02,890 But the dichotomy between the appreciation of black excellence and white appropriate behaviour often plays an internal struggle. 70 00:07:02,890 --> 00:07:09,270 Now, Fanon in 1967 claims that after having being a slave to the white man, he enslaved himself. 71 00:07:09,270 --> 00:07:16,950 Today, however, there's a strong push with the younger generation to redefine their social narrative and reclaim a higher 72 00:07:16,950 --> 00:07:23,070 place within society as they refuse to be fixed or defined by an official version of their identity, 73 00:07:23,070 --> 00:07:28,680 and deeply accept the idea that self narration achieves self-empowerment unintentionally. 74 00:07:28,680 --> 00:07:33,690 The efforts asserted by the white oligarchy creative future generations constructed through the 75 00:07:33,690 --> 00:07:47,040 resulting hybrid nature of identities and consciousness of the communities of the Diaspora. 76 00:07:47,040 --> 00:07:52,170 Despite being contained to a small island landmass of 21 square miles, 77 00:07:52,170 --> 00:08:00,930 the British oligarchies successfully employed geographies of exclusion as a means of oppression, an early phase of racial amnesia. 78 00:08:00,930 --> 00:08:07,290 The policy that supported the dislocation of the black families from Tucker's town in the 1920s to construct 79 00:08:07,290 --> 00:08:13,320 a tourist resort supports the theory of imaginaries linking the social and the psychic which aims, 80 00:08:13,320 --> 00:08:16,590 which allows racism to operate as a disciplinary mode. 81 00:08:16,590 --> 00:08:24,540 And the fact of being seen provides optimum conditions for surveillance and identification as an alien and threatening presence. 82 00:08:24,540 --> 00:08:29,190 The displacement and relocation of black Bermudian to areas known as the devil's hole 83 00:08:29,190 --> 00:08:34,920 and the back of town not only created a site for manifestation of poverty and crime, 84 00:08:34,920 --> 00:08:42,000 but it also created notion that black comedians are naturally devoid of high value property ownership. 85 00:08:42,000 --> 00:08:42,870 Displacement, 86 00:08:42,870 --> 00:08:51,510 relocation and monitored movements allowed the white oligarchy to successfully build the foundation for the cumulative disadvantage of disparity, 87 00:08:51,510 --> 00:09:01,710 leaving black comedians disenfranchised systematically polarised within a society that deemed them to be insignificant. 88 00:09:01,710 --> 00:09:09,690 Cultural competency also plays as a role in racism than amnesia, the discourse serves as a means of social conditioning, 89 00:09:09,690 --> 00:09:18,690 so you are post racist political strategy, which calls for the population to embrace and live with a mental habit, a free Rachel consciousness. 90 00:09:18,690 --> 00:09:22,170 Now, it can be argued that the aims of the United Bermuda party, 91 00:09:22,170 --> 00:09:29,430 which are majority white during the 34 year tenure or attempts to remedy the racial tensions throughout the island through means of imaginative 92 00:09:29,430 --> 00:09:33,750 construction of histories and memories that may not be strictly truthful but 93 00:09:33,750 --> 00:09:38,160 forge a reality that is bearable to all members of the divergent community. 94 00:09:38,160 --> 00:09:45,630 The EVP employed many techniques throughout the 1960s and 1970s to prove their level of cultural competency, 95 00:09:45,630 --> 00:09:50,580 including the introduction of a black party and Senate members, the naming of Black Premier, 96 00:09:50,580 --> 00:09:54,180 the appeasement of the majority black parliamentary reformist group and the gradual 97 00:09:54,180 --> 00:09:59,670 acceptance of the demands made by the internal Black Caucus as a means of social control. 98 00:09:59,670 --> 00:10:06,900 The EVP presented their partnership between white and black from unions as a partnership which served as a guarantee of Social Security, 99 00:10:06,900 --> 00:10:12,570 as well as an opportunity for gain only through the visible demonstration of racial integration. 100 00:10:12,570 --> 00:10:18,480 It is claimed that Bermuda can attract tourists and internal companies through sources of prosperity. 101 00:10:18,480 --> 00:10:22,500 The only issue with the invitation implementation of this fallacy was that it 102 00:10:22,500 --> 00:10:28,380 greatly ignored the past and present agency of Bermuda's black population. 103 00:10:28,380 --> 00:10:34,200 Now, platforms which are said to acknowledge and alleviate plights of the black Bermuda community, 104 00:10:34,200 --> 00:10:39,780 their methods can be said to resemble new racism by other rising non-whites and 105 00:10:39,780 --> 00:10:45,120 deploying modernist and absolutist views of culture while not using racist language. 106 00:10:45,120 --> 00:10:49,380 Whilst efforts stimulate racial Lesia are not as overt in modern times. 107 00:10:49,380 --> 00:10:57,840 It is argued that this concept can be sustained by flying under the flag of colourblindness multiculturalism or racial tolerance, 108 00:10:57,840 --> 00:11:03,930 contemporary rhetoric, intentional or otherwise to mask the cloak of reality of racism today, 109 00:11:03,930 --> 00:11:16,690 diminishing or downplaying its significance even as concerning instances of racism. 110 00:11:16,690 --> 00:11:23,620 So why then would you say Bermuda has forgotten significantly the majority of the causes have little to do with the education system, 111 00:11:23,620 --> 00:11:29,680 but rather with the nature of the Bermuda culture and the kind of civilisation that Bermuda has involved into wide level of 112 00:11:29,680 --> 00:11:36,730 societal acceptance of disparity and deviating realism of black communities are heavily linked to organisational practises, 113 00:11:36,730 --> 00:11:39,640 institutional frameworks and public sentiment. 114 00:11:39,640 --> 00:11:47,500 Attempts to contrive a new national identity can be interpreted as neo colonial substitution of one oppressive ideology for the other, 115 00:11:47,500 --> 00:11:53,440 ignoring past atrocities and creating a new breath remedy in ignorance of past communal sufferings. 116 00:11:53,440 --> 00:11:59,170 However, it is important that all members of our immediate society are privy to the notion 117 00:11:59,170 --> 00:12:03,400 that pure social cohesion can only be achieved through creating social orders, 118 00:12:03,400 --> 00:12:05,260 which are aimed towards remembering, 119 00:12:05,260 --> 00:12:13,120 acknowledging and transforming its racial memory rather than denial and forgetting the islands of race politics and do not exist. 120 00:12:13,120 --> 00:12:17,470 It's ready to our whole performance and do not hold sacrosanct value. 121 00:12:17,470 --> 00:12:23,350 Rather, it should be understood that they are pervasive and have been neutralised across social economic environments, 122 00:12:23,350 --> 00:12:27,550 making them amenable to change, critique and articulation. 123 00:12:27,550 --> 00:12:34,360 Now, whilst acknowledging and correcting racial amnesia attempts to understand and alleviate adverse social conditions, 124 00:12:34,360 --> 00:12:39,160 it once again traps us within the black body with the pain of our ancestors. 125 00:12:39,160 --> 00:12:49,811 Thank you.