Guest commentary by Bruce G. Raine
The PLP, or at least certain shaky candidates of that party, who are promoting a fear of white people, should also realise the folly and significant damage that was done to our tourism based economy in the seventies and eighties with such inane stupidity.
When you teach our people to hate white people you cannot make a distinction between the, perhaps fifteen thousand, white citizens of this country and the several million white tourists who provide the very bread and butter that our people eat.
When the immigration and customs staff, hotel workers, taxi drivers, shop staff and just about any other employee in this country start to treat our visitors with the hate and contempt that people like Fred Mitchel and others want to teach them, they are actually strangling our struggling goose.
Fortunately, I agree, that the vast majority of our 300,000 populace don’t really see the 15,000 of us white or conchy joe people as any kind of threat, so politically it is a non issue. But if Mitchel and Co. enrage, even a small percentage, of our people who interact with and serve white tourists and white foreign investors, it will undoubtedly have a significantly negative impact on all of our people both black and white.
And while I am on the subject of race, it is absolutely amazing that these same nitwits can denigrate someone like R.T. Symonette, who I understand came to the Capital as a poor boy from Current Eleuthera, without even a pair of shoes. He worked hard all of his life, long before there was any UBP, and he was successful and yes, obviously made some money. Is his story not one which we should be preaching to our people. White, Black or any colour in between. Wherever you come from, whatever your colour, slave or free, work hard and diligently and honestly and you too can be successful. I remember personally a situation at Symonette Shipyard, some years ago, when one of the trolley rollers had come off the ways and Sir Roland, probably in his seventies then, put on swim trunks and goggles and got into the sea to fix this problem himself. A wealthy man by then but still not afraid to do the dirty work.
Note: This Letter to the Editor was printed in The Tribune on Saturday, March 17, 2007 and is reprinted here with the authors kind permission.
