Bridgetown, Barbados -- There were fewer than a dozen whites at the African and African Descendants World Conference Against Racism here Wednesday morning, but that was enough to rankle a member of the British delegation who called for their removal.
“We told them we emphatically that we don’t want to be sitting down with no Europeans or Asians and they assured us that this is an African and African only event and that is why we came here,” Kwaku Bonsu of London told the press. He insisted that for anything substantive to come from the conference demanded that Africans address Africans without the presence of Europeans. It was not determined if Asians were asked to leave.
Faced with a mounting dilemma, Dr. Jewel Crawford, chair of the Central Organizing Committee, said the only alternative was to call for a vote. During the discussion, with people rising to debate the issues through several motions, a vote was taken and three-fourths decided the whites had to go.
“The fact that whites in attendance was fewer than ten—and this didn’t seem to bother a few participants—they still wanted to have a meeting among Africans only,” said Dr. Crawford. Upon asking the whites to leave, she encouraged them to form their own caucus group to discuss issues pertinent to the conference. It was not clear how that caucus would be related to the conference.
Although the presence of whites in Durban, the first leg of the World Conference Against Racism last year in South Africa, was never an issue, it was whispered among a few delegates during Tuesday’s magnificent opening ceremony. Nonetheless, it caught the organizers by surprise.
Dr. Crawford said the action was completely unexpected, and she was as alarmed as David Commissiong, the Director of the Commission of Pan-African Affairs, another prominent member of the organizing committee. “I wasn’t there when the resolution was passed, but it appears to have been conducted in a democratic manner,” he said. While he was sympathetic to those whites that shared in the conference’s overall purposes, he nonetheless felt that there was a time when Africans needed to speak among themselves about their conditions.
“There are times when African people need to come together as a kind of family gathering to take care of family business,” Commissiong asserted.
How this will impact a conference that was already struggling against the naysaying of some Bajans who felt that a discussion about racism was irrelevant, is yet to be seen. Dr. Crawford feels that the disturbance will not detract from the goals enunciated in the conference’s call.
“I think not to have dealt with the issue would have harmed the conference,” she said, “because our people have been traumatized by racism…so we have to deal with the emotional health of those who have been traumatized.”
Even so, there were delegates who said the issue should have been addressed before and whites should have been discouraged not to register. To have done this, however, might have sent out the wrong signal and might have hampered the cooperation of the government and the rental of facilities, one Bajan participant explained and asked not to be identified.
Many participants are hopeful that the row will pass over and the conference can forge ahead without any further distractions. “We come too far, spent too much money to have something like this become the news, and the only news,” said one of the delegates. “We can’t let white folks, whether they are here or not be the topic of discussion.”
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