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It is perhaps understandable that there are still many whites in Bermuda who become very defensive when the question of race comes up.
The human race seems to have made the collective assumption that the only way to advance one-self is to denigrate others.
Whites have been at the forefront of this 'denigration by mass destruction' and people of colour have been at the receiving end.
If we go back in history, we have such luminaries as Charles Linnaeus publishing in 1735 his classification of race.  In it, he describes Europeaus (Europeans) as: "The males of this subset were supposedly changeable, clever, and inventive."  
When it came to blacks (Africanus), Linnaeus had this to say: "This kind was apparently cunning, passive, and inattentive, and ruled by impulse." The modern translation - blacks are lazy.
In Bermuda of 2009, the cry is that Bermudians are lazy, with 'Bermudians' used as a code word for black. Apparently the language has changed little in nearly two centuries. The astute among you will note that Linnaeus's work had no basis in science whatsoever.
Soon after Linnaeus's publication, a number of authors began to publish books that set out to 'prove' that Europeans were at the top of the racial hierarchy, alluding to some evolutionary theory or the other. Around this time, the British selected one of its leading lights, a naturalist by the name of Charles Darwin, to study different species around the world. He went on to publish Origin of Species (1859), heavily influenced by Reverend Thomas Malthus, an economist and quite an accomplished mathematician.
Malthus believed that as the population of the world was expanding, food production would not be able to keep up with it. He advanced the theory of the survival of the fittest - let those who were fit and able go on to accomplish great things and those who were sickly or who did not have much to offer society well, they could perish. Can you imagine what his sermons were like?
While Darwin's work did not set out to prove white superiority, many Europeans believed that they were the fittest and that people of colour were those who could justifiably perish. In 1869, Sir Francis Galton, father of eugenics, noted statistician and Darwin's cousin no less, added his two gold coins worth to the movement by publishing a chapter in his book Hereditary Genius entitled The Comparative Worth of Different Races, in which he stated that Africans were "two grades below the British."  
Galton's work was deemed so important that later, the U.S. went on to restrict immigration for non-Europeans - what would be the point of letting in the intellectually-challenged?

Asinine assertion
Getting back to the latest cause of white irritation in Bermuda, the release of the August 2009 Employment Survey. Throw in 400 years of unfettered access to education for whites compared to fewer than 50 years for blacks; the enslavement of blacks by whites; racial discrimination against blacks by whites; white enclaves and black ghettos and so on... it is completely asinine to assert, as was done in another publication by an employment chief, that the reason blacks have lower pay is because they are less educated.
Yes, it is true that 11 per cent of black Bermudians have a college degree compared to 23 per cent of white Bermudians (2000 Census data), something that the Government revealed when it rolled out its rationale for the Workforce Equity Bill in November, 2007.  
The real question is 'why do only 23 per cent of whites have college degrees?' Were they dummies in school? Did they waste their time? Perhaps they were just lazy, imitating their black brothers and sisters in the inferior schools across town. Or is the real answer to that question the fact that in a racially segregated Bermuda, where whites still control the lion's share of the economy, white Bermudians know that they can get by without a degree.
There is evidence to support that latter view.  If you look closer at the Census data, you will find that numerically, because there are more black Bermudians than whites, blacks actually hold more degrees.  
But look even further, when it comes to four-year degrees, black female Bermudians hold far more than any other group, with black males coming a distant second. At the Masters' level, the picture is pretty much the same. At the doctorate level , it's black males that are at the top of the heap. So why are black salaries at the bottom of the heap when educated black Bermudians outnumber whites by wide margins?  Nuevo Linnaeus thinkers would argue (and have argued) that blacks have 'different kinds' of degrees because they didn't go to the more reputable schools, and that 'sounds' reasonable. But there is just one problem. The same Census data revealed that whites in managerial positions without any formal qualifications, meaning that they did not even graduate from high school, could earn almost as much as a black person in a similar position with a four-year college degree.
While some may wish to (foolishly) attempt to explain this away, the question that I would ask is, 'which schools do blacks have to graduate from in order to compete with their uneducated white colleagues?'  
When it comes to differences in pay by race, there is only one explanation.
Cordell Riley is owner of Profiles in Bermuda and a former Government statistician.
Click here for Tom Vesey's take.[[In-content Ad]]

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