SE A·CA·BÓ

Big up to the Central American Black Organization (CABO). The organization has relapsed in Belize with the opening ceremonies that were nothing short of a spiritual experience.  It was hard not to be seduced by the Panamanian drum rhythms into a metaphysical flashback of a people strengthened and divided by struggle.
As I settled into my seat, after wading through the focused layers of head wrapped women, I smiled sheepishly as they addressed me confidently in a mixture of Garifuna and Spanish. Our sole connection was our destination for the next three hours and the tint of our skins.
The isles were thick with the scent of well travelled bodies only comparable to the musk of a packed James Bus on a Friday evening. I managed the annoyed chastisement of the attendees behind me as they mumbled at the middle aged woman sitting beside me who was unable to take any control of the gases determined to seep from her body. It was then I realized that this ceremony would leave me with much more than an evening of entertainment. There was a bigger awakening, and there it was: culturally, we are weathering the might of the middle passage syndrome.
What? Call it the shell shock of cramming for A-Level History but the thought that this must have been what a well polished version of the middle passage experience felt like did run through my head. I imagined the belly of a slave ship stuffed with brave warriors, weary from being shelved in dungeons of slave factories, only to become disposable tools on Caribbean plantations. I mean slaves were crammed on ships in droves just to feed the oceans of the infamous Middle Passage and only to ensure that the “brata” slaves were sufficient in number to serve the commercial slave labor needs. Their importance extended only in as much as they served the whims of first world consumerism.
The African slave boarding the ship had no idea what lay ahead. Each was distracted and self absorbed in the singularity of his own plight. Africans who had made the Middle Passage to the plantations of the New World did not return to their homeland to tell what happened to those people who suddenly disappeared. In this cultural middle passage what is our strategy for resistance and what institutions and resources are dedicated to our survival?
The truth is that the whole world is in transition.  The tremor of that passing over of the superpower mantle has permeated every aspect of human affairs. Economically, the cracks from the quakes are unmistakable and intimidating, but the cultural sacrifices to this global transitioning are harder to recognize. In fact, the politics of identity is sure to be lost between those cracks. In terms of relevance, black identity, as it has been scourged over the past two hundred years, retains the least immunity to obliteration.
Belize has been injected with many economic agents designed to dilute our cultural integrity. Ironically, tourism never helps. All that first world pimp does is to turn countries into caricatures of themselves. Blackness for consumption purposes has to be compartmentalized and tamed.
We are in this middle passage of a global transition, a search to redefine purpose and to be comforted by the new drivers of superpower economics. Some of us will not make it and the irreversible effects of a homogeneous and washed-out cultural awareness are the single most threatening waves to continued progress. Our changes must be our own and the responses from our natural voices.  Organizations, in the spirit of CABO, should be a megaphone for meaningful social change and rebalancing.
At first I felt slighted that blackness was squandered in the intellectual gibberish of Bert Tucker’s vicarious experience of Belizean blackness as the guest speaker, and my finger pointing to effective inaction by black “babblers” in strategic positions, but I was tempered to respect the ‘overwhelmingness’ of our plight when blackness is synonymous with nolle prosequi hurdlers on the evening news.
Conversely, I am provoked to “bun out” all the “black” professionals who were no shows. Not one doctor in the crowd. There was ONE token politician, a handful of officials from the local host organizations. Now imagine having only five per cent of total attendees being local at an event hosted in downtown Belize City, the so-called black capital. NO lawyer, NO Judge, NO Magistrate, ONE Rastafarian, NO Senator, NO Union President. The absence of a notable businessman nagged at me the most because we all know that black progressiveness without black economic empowerment is a farce.

Now, blackness is not the metronome of the choir’s rendition of “Kumbaya” nor the clanging of the conductor’s baton for harmony. Color is so fluid that to look at the color of a man’s skin as a measure of his blackness is a sure formula for disappointment. In fact, the old wives tale being packaged and fabled as true is that the UDP was somehow the representation of the colored elements in British Honduras. A most inexcusable error is to equate royal creoles with blackness. Nope. Big mistake, Kimosabe. Look at them. Finnegan only talks black. Boots is supposed to be black.  Patrick Faber was once black. Saldivar eats black.  Castro might be black and Hutchy can spell black, I think. Now, I know what you are thinking and we will not be mean and put Dean and blackness in the same sentence – that would just be cruel. At least to his credit, Mr. Tommy Hilfiger has never tried to be black. As for Sedi who took Ashcroft’s money and named the building after Samuel Haynes???
Politicians in Belize are terrified of talking color unless it is the school yard phrase throwing of red and blue. Blackness is definitely not a guarantee to unity or commonality but it is a call to self awareness, self appreciation and progress. Redemption for our black people is in the scheduled CABO workshops which are to come this week but if previous trends of apathy stay true, this opportunity to stop and reflect will blow past us like a lee breeze……. Blacks are a non-prioritized – sometimes undeserving – endangered species who continually assault our own vulnerable status and give justification for the current prejudices of being treated with social borderline tolerance in Belize.

Wonder why our black males are in crisis bringing shame and death to our likeness? Well don’t look to what we are doing….look at what we not doing….. but who cares, right? Lip service is taxing enough to satisfy any noise about what wasted melanin stuck in the epidermis should mean.

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