Dr Virtue is off track
Dear Editor,
Through the prism of race, I must answer Dr Grace Virtue’s piece which suggests that we are mental slaves who do not trust black authority figures, that our education system is geared to keeping black people down, and that our salvation lies in addressing the legacy of slavery and colonialism.
Her basic problem is that she examines us through the prism of race alone, ignoring the political, economic, religious, social and personal influences that shape us, and therefore comes to wrong conclusions.
She takes one self-hating academic as representing the whole community and concludes that we don’t trust black authority figures. So who was JAG Smith, who was Carl Stone? It does not occur to her that Les Green might have been trusted because of his character or because he was not a part of the system.
Our education system, she claims, is geared to keeping black people down. Nonsense! It needs to be reoriented from academic to more business and vocational studies, but it does not keep us down.
She correctly states that policing alone will not solve the problem of gangs of alienated youth, but does not seem to notice that it is a problem of failed economic management that troubles white countries like Greece and Spain, and that if we take her approach we will never solve them. How do we solve the problem of underdevelopment? Barbados, Botswana and Costa Rica have shown us how, and we were a model to the Third World until Michael Manley and his socialism.
We need to find that path again instead of scaring ourselves with the duppies of slavery and colonialism.
Orville Brown
storyline6000@gmail.com