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The Bermuda Sun reported this week that the PLP is preparing to run several white candidates in the next election.

This is great news.

If the PLP can pull this off - even with only three or four respected white Bermudians in their team - it could be a major turning point in Bermuda politics.

It's not that we need white people to govern well and wisely.

But Bermuda desperately needs two bi-racial parties to break apart the hurtful racial divisions that separate our community, socially, politically and economically.

You can imagine one or two UBP enthusiasts complaining: "This is the last thing we need now. First blacks start leaving the UBP, and now whites start joining the PLP!"

But if the PLP is able to field a few solid white candidates, it could be good news for the UBP as well.

First of all, it would help ease the perception that our political system is made up of a white party and a black party.

The UBP is remarkably integrated compared to most organizations in Bermuda. Part of the reason it seems so white is that the PLP seems so black by comparison. If the PLP manages to appear less black, the UBP is likely to appear less white.

The UBP would also be relieved of some if its burden of being the spokesman on just about every issue of particular concern to Bermuda's white community - a role that exacerbates the appearance of a black-white split in our political system. By contrast, a few prominent white members could erase the perception, very widely held among white people in Bermuda, that the PLP is only interested in representing blacks and is positively hostile towards whites.

White members would almost certainly reduce the frequency with which PLP MPs make stupid comments that whites find offensively racist.

Their presence would probably make whites less sensitive - or paranoid, perhaps - about such comments, and more willing to dismiss them as essentially harmless outbursts.

Just a few white members might quickly attract many more. They would demonstrate that the PLP is in fact a welcoming and comfortable place for whites to be.

New era

The endlessly repeated stories of whites like Alex Outerbridge being condemned and ostracized for supporting the PLP are mostly four decades old now, and hopelessly out of date. Despite the hurtful words and the severe racial split in party memberships and voting patterns, there is nothing inherently 'white' or 'black' in either the UBP or PLP.

There is no reason that whites and blacks shouldn't be members of both parties.

And there is every reason to believe both parties would do a better job understanding this country and its people, planning for its improvement, and governing it, if they better reflected the country's make-up.

The UBP has long preached the gospel of diversity.

It is easy to dismiss this UBP ideal as a desperate self-preservation effort on the part of the feeble and faded remnants of Bermuda's old white establishment.

But politics and government everywhere, and at all times, are a tense mixture of idealism and self-serving cynicism.

What's more, it's almost always impossible to be fair and accurate when judging other people's motives.

Motive is often irrelevant, anyway, when it comes to government.

Historians constantly debate Abraham Lincoln's motives for abolishing slavery in the U.S., for example, but whether his motives were pure or self-serving probably didn't matter much to the slaves being freed.

In the same way, it is almost impossible to judge the sincerity of either of our political parties as they seek to tackle our island's race problems, or their motives in trying to adjust the racial balance of their own membership.

But we know - or should know - that our bi-racial community should not be ruled exclusively by whites, or ruled exclusively by blacks.

We know - or should know - by what we have seen under a succession of UBP and PLP Governments, how damaging it is to have parties and policies supported or criticized simply because they are perceived as either black or white.

We need and deserve something far better than that.

If the PLP succeeds in running some serious white candidates in the next election, we will have moved an important step closer to creating a new political system in Bermuda - a system based on policies and programmes and leadership instead of the tension between two skin colours.[[In-content Ad]]

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