Virgin-Islands-On-Line's Coconut Telegraph

The real root of our troubles

This was a guest editorial in the VI Daily News last week:

Peter Muilenburg Thursday, September 15th 2005

When my wife and I arrived here 37 years ago we were treated with respect and hospitality. St. John was a model of interracial harmony, a wonderful village to raise a child in, a Caribbean island owned and governed by Caribbean people.

Then things changed, slowly at first, then with frightening rapidity after 9-11. Whereas the early continentals saw themselves as guests and even the very wealthy ones satisfied themselves with modest homes, now more and more continentals came down, some of whom were impatient with the old island ways. People who didn't know "tun-tun" from tuna fish or Arrow from Sparrow were driving around like they owned the place - and guess what, they did!

They bought land which they proceeded first to strip mine, then to bury under tons of cement, erecting monuments to conspicuous consumption that were wholly out of step with St. John's style. The Grand Bay condos symbolize what went wrong with the island. How did that obtrusive monstrosity get approved by CZM? Those condos are selling for $900,000, (you gonna buy one?) selling St. John's beauty - selling it right down the river. Somehow they got permission to block that beauty from those behind them, who came before them and should have some rights. Human rights, born-here rights, live-here rights, raised-my-children-here rights.

Did we need this blot on the bay? No, nobody likes it. Then why was it built? Easy. Because a lot money was made off the deal by some high- finance "whup-whop man" who done the deal and gone.

People came to sail, or to drink cheap rum, for the world class beaches, or for the reggae or the fishing, or just for their piece of paradise. Believe it or not, some even came because the Caribbean culture was such a refreshing change from the uptight, materialistic mainland. And all of them were surprised, and some of them hurt when they first realized that, to increasing numbers of Virgin Islanders, they were the enemy.

The famous Japanese movie Rashomon explores how "reality" changes one incident, a rape, from multiple points of view to show how "reality" changes according to differing perspectives. The circumstances surrounding an East End rape are a case in point. For instance, barely a couple of weeks before the reported East End rape, a white woman in Coral Bay was robbed, bound and beaten in her home, then almost suffocated by taping her mouth and nose with duct tape. Two black men wearing masks were her assailants, she said. That incident barely made a blip on the local radar. The police treated it as humdrum, showed up late, didn't bother with forensics - just the way they have reacted to the spate of armed robberies on the island, unconcerned and useless. Nobody called it a hate crime.

Yet when a black woman claimed she had been raped by three white men half the Senate leaped onto the ferry to hold a meeting on St. John. Virgin Islanders were infuriated. Among the claims: the island was unsafe for native women and children because of white people; Coral Bay was an outpost of the klan and St. John another "Mississippi Burning," and the time was come to deal forcefully with white oppression.

Lost in the rhetoric was the fact that V.I. women and children are much more threatened by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting involving their own kith and kin than by a rampaging klansman. As far as rape goes, plenty of women have been raped in the Virgin Islands (open any newspaper) but does anyone remember a single instance where the rapist was a white continental? Not counting the "alleged" (as the police keep saying) East End rape.

To compare St. John with Mississippi back in the bad old days is dead wrong. It insults the memory of the genuine martyrs of the civil rights movement. Trust me on this one because I was there - I dropped out of college when I was 19 and spent most of 1965 working in Mississippi in the civil rights movement. I heard first hand the horror stories about murderous police and racist judges. I was privileged to meet the unsung heroes and heroines who laid their lives on the line and I saw with my own eyes - how hard to believe now - the signs on the bathrooms and water fountains in the county courthouse that said "Colored" and "White Only."

Here in the Virgin Islands virtually all the police, legislators, judges, commissioners (as well as the governor himself) are from these islands - and this has been the case for a long time. Case closed.

"Continentals are pushing Virgin Islanders off their land." That's one perspective. Another perspective might be: "Virgin Islanders freely sold off their birthright for the yankee dollar." But the most objective would be: "The laws of supply and demand are turning St. John into a high-priced commodity that only the wealthy can afford."

There's the root of our troubles.

Peter Muilenburg is the author of "Adrift On A Sea of Blue Light."

Posted by afinta at September 21, 2005 05:42 PM

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