A Lesson of The Bahamas

My recent trip to The Bahamas was a personally very revealing experience for me. Superficially I learned that, no matter how far I’ve come on the career journey, no matter how well I may have managed to marry, I ain’t rich. The Atlantis Resort as a vacation destination requires one to be very well-to-do or unconcerned with mounting credit card debt!

But I learned a philosophical lesson about myself, something I had not anticipated learning, nor had I even suspected would be a topic I’d encounter.

It’s difficult to say this without sounding racist. A personal pride of mine is that I am fairly open minded – or at least I try to be – about most things. A person’s race, gender, sexual preference, religious beliefs or other personal traits do not affect how I treat that person personally or professionally. So I am reluctant to publish, as it were, something that sounds patently racist: I generally have never found African-American women attractive. There have been a few exceptions, but the general feeling has prevailed. It was always a point of potential personal embarrassment for me as an open-minded, easy-going, white man of the world.

I wasn’t oblivious to the fact, nor was I uncomfortable to know, that the population of the Bahamas is 85% black. The Bahamians are an English-speaking people, having gained their independence from Great Britain only 33 years ago. Most have an island accent of varying thickness, but I mistook a lot of them for Americans, their speech was so unaccented.

After a few days of interacting with hotel staff for various reasons, I became more aware of the occasional attraction I felt towards some of the female staff. I am a flirt in general, always trying to get a laugh or a smile from any woman, so it came as a surprise when I felt the tug in the tummy when the ol’ libido was tickled. She was fairly dark-skinned, with brown eyes and relaxed pitch-black hair, and the “typical” African facial features. In the past I had observed within myself that most attractions I had ever felt for African-American women was for the lighter skinned women, an obvious indicator of my preference for women of my own race and, again, something beyond my control which I have not been proud of.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t screw around. However, I am aware that my male instincts are still intact, and that my brain and my body still respond in the presence of an attractive woman.

And there I stood, before a woman of a type I had rarely found attractive, finding myself attracted. I couldn’t figure out what it was. She was fairly tall, slim, with a great smile and bright, friendly eyes, all the earmarks of a woman I usually find attractive, plus the dark skin. It gnawed at me for a couple of days.

And then it dawned on me. All my life it has had nothing to do with the color of a woman’s skin. Where I had been experiencing my hang-up was with attitude.

Again, at the risk of sounding racist, there is a certain percentage of Americans of African heritage who, due to life experiences or parental or peer examples, grow up with, or adopt, a particular attitude about the world and about their place in it. These individuals cultivate a pattern of speech different from that of other Americans around them – black as well as white – despite their geographical location or their economic position. For lack of a better description, I call it “street” slang. I don’t claim to know a reason for this, but only to state the fact of a distinct sub-cultural difference that sets them apart. This smaller percentage appears averse to a broader intercultural assimilation, rather preferring to stick together socially and culturally, remaining largely separate socially and psychologically from the larger group. The same can be said for any number of white sub-cultures in the United States, I’m sure.

It is this “street” attitude that has been the turn-off for me all these years.

What made itself clear to me in the Bahamas was that there is no “street” culture there. No “street” attitude. Theirs is a population that, in essence, is THE population. They are not subject to a minority representation in a larger entity. They were never subjected to a “separate but equal” existence. They were and are the people. They were and are the government. The success or failure of their society is on their shoulders.

As this realization opened itself to me I saw beyond just the attractive women, but to every local I encountered, and I realized that just about every one of them was friendly and courteous and, yes, beautiful, and not hung up on cultivating an image. My hang-up was – is – not so broad and ignorant and superficial as an aversion to the color of skin, but much more deep and complex, and perhaps just as ignorant; a failure to understand a culture within my own that is as foreign to me as the Chinese.

There is no easy way to describe this feeling, this perception. Reading back over what I’ve written I can’t help but feel that a reader would view me as racist as the average Ku Klux Klan member from 1950s Alabama. I certainly hope that’s not how I am perceived.

Whatever a reader thinks, whatever traits I may be unaware of or too afraid to notice, my visit to The Bahamas gave me a new insight to my view of the world, my view of ME. Where I thought for most of my life I had fallen short I was not falling short at all. I still have similar issues to work out in that area, but at least I believe now that the shortcomings in my social attitudes are much more intricate, more subjective rather than objective, than I ever thought they were.

If I can consider this lesson a step toward a better self-awareness, then I can consider it a step forward in my journey to become a better, more whole person.