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On January 20, 2009, President Barack Hussein Obama will take over the Oval Office.

     With that, President Barack Obama starts a whole new age. The Ice Age began when Earth's temperatures began falling. Then came a day when temperatures stopped falling and began rising. With that almost imperceptible change, a new Earth Age began. Today, we live in that warmer geological age.

     It's the same with race. Before November 4, 2008, black Americans could rightly claim that racial prejudices and barriers kept them in what Dr Martin Luther King Jr called the basement of America. Around midnight Bermuda time, on Tuesday 4th November, Barack Obama stepped out of that basement and - figuratively - stepped into the White House. Obama's step, was one small step for one black man and a giant step for all black people.

     From now on, no black American can rightly claim that his race means that he or she faces insurmountable barriers. Exactly the same applies here at 32N64W.

      I have long argued that the situation for black Americans and black Bermudians was different. Now black Americans have a demonstrably clear path to success in any endeavour in America. However, like Barack Obama, any black American striving for success must be disciplined, focused, educated, and prepared to put in the hard work necessary to achieve the success that he or she desires.

Princess Angela of Liechtenstein; Oprah Winfrey the self-made billionairess; Lewis Hamilton the best Formula One race car driver; Barack Obama will be the leader of the world's only superpower. Globally, black people have moved on.

    Though some may disagree and some may come roaring back with angry emotion, neither their anger nor their emotion changes those facts.

    So here, at 32N64W, some home truths.

     For black Bermudians, it's poor education, inadequate preparation, lack of personal discipline, and lack of individual application, that are the real barriers to personal and individual black advancement in Bermuda. It is not history. It is not race. It is not any form of systemic white supremacy. It is not lingering 'white privilege'.

     There are, however, some black Bermudians who don't want to accept that a new age has dawned in America - and that a similar new age dawned ten years ago in Bermuda. These black Bermudians who can not, who do not, and who will not accept the fact of a new age are behaving like troglodytes who choose, and choose deliberately, to dig themselves into deep intellectual foxholes in which they are determined to stay.

Striding forward

These black trogs hunker down in their deep intellectual foxholes. There they sit, screaming, shouting, and ranting about discrimination, prejudice, and insurmountable barriers. But all around their trog-holes, scores of others - Obama-like - are moving on. Striding forward. Meeting and overcoming challenges. Fighting and winning. All the while, the black trogs hunker down in their intellectual foxholes and shout and cry and moan - but don't move.

    Trogs may even say that the solid phalanx of white men who stood behind Obama at his first press conference proves that Obama is a mere puppet. But behind those white men I see Colin Powell, Bill Cosby, Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, A Philip Randolph, W. E. B. Dubois, Nat Turner... and all those other un-named millions of black American men and women who fought for progress.

    As the geological Ice Age ended, melted water flowed. This meltwater carved new contours into the Earth and created new lands, new islands, new oceans. The humans who ranged into these newly created spaces helped create the world that we now inhabit. Those humans were movers. They didn't hide in their caves crying about the melting ice. They didn't sit fearing the return of new ice. Obama-like, they got up and moved on.

     Bermuda is what Bermuda is. Bermuda's past, like America's past, is past. President Barack Obama is America and Americans moving forward. President Barack Obama will sit in a White House that was part-built with slave labour.  

     Black Bermudians, especially Bermuda's fox-holed trogs, need to look around them, see that changes have occurred, and then muster the personal courage and good sense to climb out of their intellectual holes and move forward with the rest of the world's movers.

     South Africa opened up twenty years ago. Bermuda has had its new world for ten years. America, late, is only just now entering this new world.

     Let's all unshackle from the past, climb out of any intellectual foxhole, and move forward on this far more even battleground.[[In-content Ad]]

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