December 10, 2021
Is it because we all started off broke so we felt we had to catch up in the white-man’s capitalist system? Or was it always a part of these Western hemispheric countries to just be as corrupt as it is, passed down to us by the white-man? I don’t want this to be about race because we tend to think only black people can be or are corrupt, we have some White, Chinese and Indian brothers and sisters who know how to wheel and deal.
No race of people are immune, so when we see the Caribbean Development Bank talk about corruption in the region, while we understand that it is just a cycle of the season, we have to laugh. Not because it is funny, but because the corruption in our countries is just the way it is and has been for 300 hundred years.
We can go back as far as slavery and the plantation days, which the white man loves to forget, but that was human corruption to its core. See, we not only have to think about “corruption” but expand our thought pattern on what corruption is in our existence.
Nothing has been more corrupt that white slave masters stealing coloured people from their homeland to bring them to uninhabited lands to farm and work for them for free. That is human corruption and depravity to its core.
When we move further into our history in these countries we have to talk about the various ways the white man tried to thwart Emancipation and freedom of the coloured people they stole and forced to work for free. Oh, don’t think that the fight for Emancipation happened over night, it was a long process and one where people of colour had to deal with betrayal and heartbreak until they finally broke through. From land ownership rights to the right to vote.
Then we can now move into modern history with rum running and drug trafficking. Both consequences of the white man pulling out all of his money that he made off of our backs when we decided we won’t be ridden by him anymore, but those eras still take a toll on our daily lives. We thought we were owed the fast money for our years of servitude and slavery, but what we reaped was an engrained mentality and coolness to corruption.
We have politicians who fight not against corruption, perish the thought. We have politicians arguing over who was allowed to be more corrupt and who was not allowed to participate in the corruption. Like he average God fearing man and woman understands their world. The average man and woman understands the corruption, because they play a part in it too, but they don’t know what these politicians and senior men and women in the community are up to and the network of bullshit they weave to keep their smut and sleaze confusing- not hidden, but confusing.
Corruption to the Americas is like White Supremacy in some parts of Europe. It’s just the way it is. It is a cultural thing. I hope we can move away from it and overcome it overtime like we did slavery and racism, but it is just a part of our cultural and historical makeup.