Privilege: Inherited, bestowed and abused

Webster’s defines privilege as “A right or benefit given to some but not to others”, and “the advantage that wealthy and powerful people have over other people in a society”.

Whether one acquires privilege by birth, or later through wealth, politics or stardom, privilege is generally abused, and often abusive. Those born to privilege will usually spend their lives in denial, pretending there are no chasms between themselves and the rest of the population.

However, those who acquire their privilege—and there is nothing wrong with this!—do know where they are. A few handle it with dignity, fairness and compassion. Many do not. All that they resented on their way up, they now embrace and lord it over the unprivileged. The old English Pub ditty sums it up: “The working class can kiss my ... / I’ve got the foreman’s job at last”. And this is particularly true of politicians.

But let me state where I fit before I compare status. I was born privileged, not wealthy, but supported by the systems of the time. A white son to a well known family, I was born in one of the early gated communities in the country: an “Oilfield Camp”. These were self-contained communities cut out of the forests and equipped with schools, clubs, sports facilities and the “commissary”, a general store for basic foodstuffs and household things.

These camps were one hundred percent white, and mostly foreign. Black people and Indians came into the camps to work as domestic servants and gardeners. All senior jobs—in the oilfields and outside in commerce and banking—were for white people only. Bright people who were black or Indian had to enter the “professions”--law or medicine to build their careers.

All social life in the colony was stratified by race and colour, and shades of darkness. White privilege, although it did not carry that title, was dominant. And indeed it still is— not to the openly racist extent that we see in the United States—but in far more subtle ways than before.

So when people, and not only white people, seek to dismiss this reality, I wonder if they were born elsewhere and only just arrived here. And this has been on my mind for a while now, well before a Ms R de Verteuil published a letter condemning “Laventillians” as lazy and seeking handouts. While I am aware that those views are deeply embedded in too many of us, I was surprised to see them published as they were.

I was more surprised to be regaled with the hardships and sufferings of her ancestors when they first arrived on our shores.

Yes, many of the French who came here under the Cedula of Population were wealthy people driven from France by the French Revolution. But when they came to Trinidad from the other islands they were given 32 acres of land for each family member and 16 acres for each slave who they brought in. Not a bad deal if you can it. Their wealth was in land, agriculture and in the ownership of slaves, who provided their wealth. These were massive “handouts” which descendants appear to have forgotten.

When slavery was abolished, the slave owners were compensated for their “loss”, and they simply opened the gates and turned the slaves off the plantations.

They were given no land to plant, and there were no jobs, no housing, no education—nothing.

And they had long lost every vestige of their original selves. In short there was no opportunity for them, and no social structure to build family and community life.

For me, the words “slavery was long ago—it is time to get over it” betray either a continuing hatred of black people or a distressing lack of empathy and personal analysis of mankind’s greatest atrocity, far exceeding the Third Reich’s extermination camps and other known genocides. But however flawed is the thinking of many fair-skinned people here-- believing that they do not carry their privilege of colour-- it is far worse in America, as we see all the time. But we should not seek comfort in that fact.

Ms de Verteuil’s “cutlass letter” has opened a long infected wound for us to examine. It is time for white people to realize that we are not “over slavery”, and therefore we cannot expect that black people should be.

And again I am reminded of Stokely Carmichael’s call to a white supporter in Houston to “go out and educate your own white trash!” But people have to become receptive to the concept that we, all of us, need to discuss this issue properly.