The New Plantation

This video is brought to you by my streaming service , Nebula .

He challenged me to a day without my car .

I am too .

And if I survive , all right , calm down Jay Beast and everything got be a challenge , you know .

Alright , let's try this again .

Me and not just by fusion into not just white .

And while slaughter may be more seasoned in this scenario , I is a bohemian .

So I'm ignored to the sweltering heat of the Bahamas .

So here I was thinking this was gonna be a walk in the park you thought because it quickly became apparent that this was more than just a bottle of cardio and calves .

And let me tell you some few minutes into this walk .

I was looking like spon and I was sounding like old boy on the plane when the turbulence hit me .

Slaughter scoured the streets of NASA to create an amazing adventure into the oppressive traffic of downtown .

I'm being a worldly traveler .

Slaughter saw a tag that I haven't seen in my own country .

So I highly encourage you to check out this video after this .

One .

Of course , don't play with me .

He focuses on the environmental and city planning system of analysis in his video .

Whereas I alongside a star studded cast of talented bohemians focus on the sociopolitical history that engenders the traffic he essays about a wireless channel is dedicated to dismantling white supremacy , fighting against capitalism and advocating for the most marginalized .

Today's adventure starts with addressing my own privilege .

Today , I cause play as a local that relies on public transportation and I bore witness to the immense classism that runs deep in my country .

It's a huge social stigma associated with both Jitney riding and walking or riding a bike .

And that has to do with xenophobia .

It has to do with how we think about the Haitian as the other .

It has to do with how we think because for whatever reason , we are be behavior and we have some sense of entitlement .

And so riding a bike to work , walking , to work , going on AJ need to get to work is beneath us .

And it's true that those who catch the Jene , it's survival , they're just trying to get to work .

So it's almost like they're forced into it as a survival mode .

So we don't definitely don't see it as you know , privileged transportation or luxury transportation or public transportation that's safe and accommodating and on time .

And so all of these issues I think speak to a bigger issue at hand , which is social stigma and an issue of class .

Despite my education and my scholarship on the plight of people of color when I had , in theory , I loved in experience because there's a canyon class difference between me and your average G passenger .

Don't fall for the trap of divorcing class from race .

Because while I share solidarity more with an impoverished white trans woman than I do .

Jay Z , I'd be remiss to dismiss the class as inextricably tethered to .

And this is crucial to your apprehension of understanding the main division of people in this predominantly black nation .

Because even though I'm in my native land , I still felt like a foreign man on this bus in my country .

And that country is the Bahamas , a breathtaking archipelago of over 3100 islands and keys , but also a place of perverse inequality and our main export or import in this case being tourism which may fuel the economy , but it only exacerbates the racial and class segregation that has plagued the capital city of Nassau for decades , which you can clearly see on Bay Street downtown was the marketplace .

I remember when the first fast food restaurant was introduced , Kentucky Fried Chicken back to the days when I and people my age and others lived around and in the city and that's what causes more commerce to come back to the city .

A bustling artery that ferries millions of visitors every year .

But this artery obviously got diabetes cause I be sitting behind a Honda fit with a missing bumper playing for , with rattles reserve for the rich to ski .

But I digress in order to adequately understand why traffic is just this abysmal in this current state of affairs , we need to examine the history of Bohemian tourism .

Specifically the idea of crafting the Bahamas as this wonderful paradise for the white and wealthy to enjoy with black people and their servitude being the crux of it .

Like it's literally the cornerstone of tourism Without the black bohemian being in a servile position , we would not have the tourism product that we do today .

During the transatlantic slave trade .

These magnanimous slave owners would allow one day off of soul crushing capitalism for their slaves .

How kind enslaved Black would create costumes and dance or as we would call Rush down Bay Street with music made from everyday items .

This cultural vestige was viewed by the white population and the previous colonial slave masters as an extension of OBA .

And despite that dismay , even to today , their descendants rushed down Bay Street and elaborate costumes and choreography .

And while this was the setting for many a celebration events such as block Tuesday , they reveal block Bay .

He means continuous fight for power over their own destiny and autonomy .

On Tuesday , April 27th , 1965 the tipping point was reached for the black community who were extremely tired of the white wealthy oligarchy who owned the majority of businesses on Bay Street and controlled the government .

They were furious for the gerrymandering that marginalized their communities and subsequently minimized their voice .

So supporters of the progressive Liberal Party marched on Ba Street in opposition of the constituency boundaries that prevented an equitable majority Black Bohemian parliament .

Mirroring the demographics of the country itself .

These protests ushered in a new era known as majority rule .

This allowed the party to win the 1967 election .

And six years later , the archipelago was finally independent from Turf Island .

I mean , United Kingdom .

That wasn't a mistake .

That being said a simple stroll down downtown .

Say that fast twice .

Well , have you incurring questions as to who truly owns the space Bay Street is as Virgil store and and Nona Martin have suggested it's always been a contested space .

It's always been this sort of mystifying space that needs to be demystified .

There's a power play at work here .

You have the NASA merchants that have been around really from 17 83 and onwards when the loyalists arrived , creating this space where they could operate as merchants uh dominate particular sectors of the economy , but they made it into something more than just a street .

It became a space for political , social and economic power and control as a heavily contested area .

Its historical conflict manifest in the numerous monuments and buildings throughout statues and bust , honoring both racist colonial figures as well as our heroes .

Why Columbus a dizzy whore responsible for a litany of genocide , intimacy and bloodshed and voracious rait violence is still looking down upon our downtown at that time , only the Lord Himself notes , but these colonial vestiges are ironically juxtaposed by our new colonial masters and Diamond International .

This reveals an unfortunate truth .

Our administrators still take into consideration the plantation tourism based model into our urban planning .

It's not a bug , it's a feature that's baked in .

For example , East has become a one way street in order to accommodate the traffic towards the Atlantis Resort or the way that our administrations ruined the way that we were able to go around the entirety of the island by gutting a particular pod just so they could facilitate traffic towards even creating the area known as Boulevard .

All a while .

Locals are complaining about the numerous decaying buildings with their broken windows and peeling paint , lack of activities and ideas revitalization fall on deaf ears .

The average black bohemian brave enough to build a brick and mortar business on Bay Street will get beaten into submission like Takashi 69 .

But the struggle of paying rent and eventually closing down Roy Collins is an American uh real estate developer .

He came to the bombs in 19 oh one and he was involved in politics , but he also and he had a number of legitimate businesses , but he also had things like rum running bootlegging prostitution rings .

He was all in that .

He moved to the Bahamas and he built this sprawling three story mansion and then had a huge , I think it's 10 ft tall and six miles long for the , for the wall .

And so bohemians had to walk around the wall in order to actually get where they need to go .

And that wall also coincidentally separated the White Eastern area from the over the hill .

It got , it gets worse , it gets worse because you can't hop over it .

However some bohemians tried , but of course , because they tried , the police had to intervene and would then patrol to make sure that they couldn't hop over that .

Yeah , literally where they had to .

Yeah , they had to .

But there's a curfew .

So black people had to be on the black side of town .

Literally after a certain time they had to leave , you could not be on that , that white eastern side of the wall .

You just could not , you would be arrested .

You would be fined a woman , she was pregnant and she had to hop over the wall and she miscarried right , Mr De Pew .

When he was representing that White Eastern district , he championed that cause and recognizing that that was not ok .

He eventually , well , shortly thereafter at the next election , he lost his feet simply because he was a voice for black bohemians simply for advocating for black bohemians and not miss charity .

He lost his power and our slaughter mentioned New province roads are extremely congested due to the broke down roads that we have yet to be paved and lack of regulated public transit , bike lanes on sidewalks and while the government may not pave the roads for their citizens , they show us he'll do for the , I mean , a lovely colonist that stole and occupied the land .

If you've watched this video , then , you know , my ruminations on the Royals prior to Will and Kate's visit in 2022 the government ensured that the roads they'd be chauffeured over were perfectly paved , pristine and even had personalized signs all paid for by the way , by the bohemian people .

Yeah .

When they come down here , they don't even pay organizations such as the National Reparations Committee released a response knowing that the Cambridge and their family of Royals and their government must acknowledge that their diverse economy was built on the box of our ancestors and then they must pay future me .

Can you insert the clip from the boondocks where Riley was saying , pay what you owe .

Oh Yeah .

Yeah .

This dude don't pay me enough .

I feel like I work at Twitter .

I'm coming for that ass again until you pay what you owe .

When we did the um planning for downtown NASAA , the vision that we had was a garden city in a historical district .

If you look at downtown , you just have to say , what do you have ?

You can't create stuff , you can't create history to exploit it right ?

There are chains that are hanging from by Moore's Candy Kitchen , which we don't know for sure .

People think that was a sales place for slaves .

I'd like to see downtown become , you know , lush with landscaping , highlighting these historical sites and different .

But I'll say it , I don't mind saying it .

I'll say it on camera .

The bottom line is a lot of work has been put into doing the right things , but we don't have political will to do it .

Long standing issue of metamorphic Nassau into a modern eco friendly city was also raised in 2021 when the Institute of Bohemian architects opine the country is in dire need of proper urban planning to take the bus in many cases , is to also be heightened .

It's interconnected .

If you fix transportation , you get people , it's more accessible .

People are more satisfied getting to their jobs .

However , they have more time and energy to look at the system in place .

So all of these things are designed intentionally to keep Black Bohemians down .

Staff did not call who was one of Hitler's favorite people to the Bahamas .

And it was in the newspaper that's even crazier .

They put a picture of them in the newspaper surrounded by a map of NASA saying , while they're gonna transform the tourism product , transform the industry in the Bahamas .

And here we are today almost like an extension of slavery slaughter .

And I observed on our excursion was that not only was it criminally due to the lack of trees but pedestrian infrastructure just as a nail .

Not that is safe for drivers in the rest of the region either .

By the way , one of my friends when I was about 14 , I was doing a film with a couple of uh girls that I just met , we were cast and she , she and I were both very small .

I was like , hey , what happened ?

And she was like , girl , I went on the , I took the bus and my mom didn't take me to the set .

I tried to , I walked and took the bus .

There was this guy there , this older guy just masturbating in the bus .

Yes , good .

And like the bus driver keep , it really ain't much we could do because the bus like the security like the and a previous report by the W O estimated that in 2000 , there were 26.1 road deaths per 100,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean which they then predicted to rise to 31 per 100,000 by 2020 the worst rate in the world and more than triple the predictions for the world's richer nations .

Now , these statistics don't stagger the average tourist or those given those contracts for roads , sidewalks and neighborhood construction , very difficult to have sidewalk cafes if you don't have a sidewalk , just a simple thing like trees .

So we're looking at putting some trees downtown now , but we're gonna have to put planters out onto those parking areas because you can't grow trees under an overhang .

Most cities .

If you look at them , they don't have overhang balconies in front of their stores .

You know , you walk down the street like New York or wherever it's your sidewalk and then they can put trees .

Well , we have , you know , balconies .

Well , the tree doesn't grow on that balcony .

The country's bread and butter revolves around the consumption , spectacle and servitude of the average black bohemian locals given the paradox of choice which as you know , would not be a choice at all .

In fact , it's coercion under the capitalism to take one of the innumerable jobs in tourism , spend lifetime in traffic just getting to and fro the hotels and their many shopping outlets .

The plantation of paradise paradigm is really all in same .

It's a reflection of what we call continuity because while we ended slavery in 18 34 officially , the unofficial version of it continued right into the 20th century where you have the black masses , persons who were formerly enslaved coming out and having to work in a debt cycle where whether it be the truck credit share system , labor tenancy , they're basically working without pay and they're working basically to pay off the debt for the credit that they borrowed on only to return the goods or the products to create that cycle all over again .

And they never get to own land .

And they never get paid wages .

And so it's this debt cycle much like the share cropper in the United States after 18 65 .

Moving in the 20th century , though , we still have this sort of extractive economy , working almost like a plantation system without the plantation where we're basically forcing people to work in industries where they exploit it .

And then we see that developing with modern tourism where you have a racial element assigned to it , particularly when American foreign investors come in the 19 twenties , you have the rigid stratification along racial lines occurring much more so towards the US variant of Jim Crowism as opposed to the West Indian Trump apartheid model which existed beforehand .

As a result of that , you have places like the savoy completely segregated .

You have hotels where Burt Cambridge is an entertainer wanting to come in , but he's got to go through the back door to play in front of an all white audience .

You have the dart , a mail boat that is split between white and black passengers , the white passengers get the cabin space , the blacks are upstairs on the deck with the livestock , right ?

So all of this speaks to racial divisions and it speaks to divided society .

Here comes the Stafford signs along and he's going to develop this idea of tourism can invest first .

It's called the Development Board , creating an environment where you can bring in multi foreign direct investors , establishing benefits and tax breaks so that they can invest in the Bahamas build hotels .

But guess what enforcing that racial divide inside the hotels .

But even when the anti discriminatory resolution is passed in 1956 which kind of officially ends segregation on the de facto , you still have the level where you have the customary cultural practices of race discrimination .

Us example that I can think of that comes to mind is the Civil Rights Act 1964 remember John F Kennedy is assassinated and so LBJ comes in .

He says you got to pass this , you know , at least in the memory of JFK because he fought for civil rights .

Malcolm X's response is simply says , this is like giving a dog a bone for 400 years of oppression .

Why even Martin Luther King recognized it didn't resolve segregated cities and the wealth gap , wealth inequality .

It didn't resolve the issue of voting rights .

That's why they had to go ahead and pass a few years later , Voter rights Act .

It didn't resolve police brutality and profiling in the 18th and 17th century when people would visit the Bahamas .

And the 19 even up to the 19th century , there were tourist pamphlets and they would have drawings of black people being called and talking about how White American people need to visit black bohemian churches because they're jumper churches and they will see the spectacle and they are acting like monkeys even going so far as to say the average bohemian negro is not as aggressive or as angry as their American counterpart .

Someone even wrote this .

I think it was a gentleman .

He was staying at , well , a racist man .

He was staying at I think the Royal Victoria Hotel and he had wrote in the tourism pamphlet that , oh my God , I love being here .

The Bahamas is so lovely and the Negroes are so subservient .

There was a black bohemian boy who was waiting for me and he waited three hours in the hotel lobby for me just to get 10 pence when engaged with such historical areas such as Bay Street should consider these stories requests by locals .

And remember the power dynamics of these streets and thoroughfares for more inclusive city accessible to all , not just a few tourism has to be pivoted in a way that benefits us .

Yes , we need to work on building out boutique resorts , smaller resorts that have a niche market in mind .

So let's think of an eco friendly resort that you know works on solar power has features of glass , a natural environment allows people to go out into an environment .

Maybe a park that extends from the resort that allows you to go kayaking , allows you to do some bird watching , allows you to do everything that's kind of connected to the ethos of B and T , right ?

And imagine on the other hand , if you have a boutique resort near , let's say Stephen Exuma , the jail house .

And so it's a heritage site , it's a heritage boutique resort .

And so you have almost like a museum inside the foyer of the of the resort .

All right , you have artifacts , you have a curator who actually has things on display .

So what I'm trying to suggest to us is let's build out boutique resorts that engage the orange , the blue and the green economies , right ?

And let's think a little bit more sustainability in a sustainable way , right ?

So that we are looking at long term benefits for our communities like our ancestors , we should endeavor to reimagine the Caribbean into a sustainable tropical utopia .

Focus on accessibility , walk , ability and naturally less of these dumb .

But despite the bloody history , expressions of black bohemian freedom continue illustrated not only through our juan but in the black owned businesses on Bay Street , school Children exploring the straw market , bohemian women perusing our stores and most of all beautiful black bodies moving without fear of curfew beatings or harm unless you're quit .

But for every beautiful black body , there's someone mocking like in Jay Balvin video where he paraded black women on a leash as he dribbled lyrics , Aaron's lyrics through his grills , studded teeth .

I cannot make this up while we're often fighting Mayor Sapiens in the foreign land .

Today's white supremacy manifests itself in the Colombian Jay Balvin bringing us to an exo and overdue conversation .

The blackness in the Latino community .

Now stop looking on my channel for that video because it ain't there .

At least not yet , but you can get it first on my streaming service .

Nebula Nebula is the prestigious largest creator owned streaming service that liberates us from the shackles of a biased algorithm in youtube .

You get bonus and extended videos from your favorite independent creators like little Joel .

I'm Big Joel .

No , they're not the same people you head , they're the same people or gain access to Nebula exclusive that will never be seen on youtube like the new F word by second thought and by using my link in the description , you not only get a 40% off discount for an annual plan , but you also get access to Nebula classes where you can learn to sue like legal , legal or conduct capitalism ethically with Thomas Frank .

But most of all you get to fight for the most marginalized alongside me because , but for people like you supporting sponsors like Nebula , I wouldn't be able to bring you the videos that you love .

Top the link in the description to support me on your by getting a 40% discount off of an annual plan to the smartest service in streaming Nebula and top there to see not just bikes , amazing analysis on the transportation situation in Nassau Bahamas .