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The following letter has been slightly cut for reasons of length.

Dear Sir,

I have attended all Bermuda Race Relations Initiative sessions and while it is true that the number of white people attending has declined I would not attribute the cause to Rolfe Commissiong.

His participation in the sessions is limited to introductions only. On one or two occasions he forgot his role and made a contribution, which was quickly cut short by the facilitators. His reputation no doubt has had an effect on both black and white attendance right from the start.

It is unfortunate that people have deprived themselves of this opportunity because they don't like Mr Commissiong, Dr. Brown and the thought that the initiative is politically motivated. To my mind it does not matter who brings the topic forth and what the motivation is, none of us are compelled to like the messenger nor do we have to accept the politics by attending. It is curious to me that criticisms of the BBRI seem often to come from persons who have not once attended. I attribute the decline in attendance to the BBRI to the facilitating style of Dr. Bernestine Singley and Dr. Robert Jensen, job demands of working people, and the shift away from promoting the day sessions (now held on Fridays and Saturdays) to the evening lecture sessions when more working people are able to attend. I have seen consistently full halls for the lectures with a high proportion of white people in attendance.

Dr. Singley's company, under whose name the contract with government was made, is called "Straight Talk" and these facilitators do just that - they deal in straight talk and do no hand-holding of participants regardless of race unless it is during break time. Some people, including myself, have preferred a softer approach in order to keep whites, in particular, engaged in the "big conversation" but I now understand better why it is necessary to get uncomfortable in the process of changing.

If you think about it, when you move from your comfort zone into scary territory you cannot avoid being uncomfortable, agitated and confused until the new becomes familiar and makes sense. It's normal. No one likes to be made uncomfortable so there is a tendency to complain, resist, defend, blame, avoid, criticize, conveniently forget, deny, delay, and so on, rather than move courageously forward to a not-before-experienced place.

Some believe this is old stuff and they don't need it because they already have the answers, and talking about it makes it worse - so let's move on. We thought we had dealt with racism so we stopped talking about "it". We moved on and now we are finding the job was not quite done. Shucks, now we have to get uncomfortable again in order to address the fairly sizable chunk that is still in place. Trust me, "it" will continue to return until we get to where we are honest enough about it to change.

Frances Eddy

Warwick[[In-content Ad]]

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