Children, Race, and Inequality

Abstract

An old Creole proverb says, &dquo;wen Black man teef, e teef some, wen bakra teef, e teef all,&dquo; which means: when a Black man steals, he steals some; when a White man steals, he steals all. Anyone who is familiar with Belize knows that this proverb reveals truths about the history and people of this Central American country. The colonization process, if not the bakra himself, has been recognized by many scholars, including Magubane (1979), Memmi (1965), Nandy (1983), Nettleford (1979), and Fanon (1967), as having deprived people of their land, their labor, their resources, and their dignity. Although it has not always been demonstrated, colonization also threatens to rob them of one of their most critical resources, the next generation.In this article, I argue that, although formal colonization does not exist in Belize today, it continues to function in the form of a complex and multilevel socialization process, which serves to reinfroce and perpetuate colonial and neocolonial unequal relations of power and an ideology of European superiority. The ethnic identity that accrues to children in this situation creates the conditions for the reproduction of a world stratified according to political, economic, and social power, a world in which invidious distinctions between groups of people, based on such personal attributes as gender, skin color, or class, influence access to critical, life-sustaining resources.