Racism - not just about black and white on the Rock

Speaking of star power, we were talking in a seminar the other day about why Hitler didn't capitalise on his own in 1940 to launch the invasion of Britain.

He'd just relentelessly mowed through Europe, on such a roll that the French sealed their own humiliation by practically handing Paris to him on a silver platter. The British had only begun to think the Germans might actually mean business a year or so before, and the Americans hadn't upped their production capabilities yet - i.e. there was no fleet of shiny American-made Spitfires at hand for the British to buy and turn on the Germans. And the German people themselves, while still a little dazed and confused about what they had actually done by giving this man power - and certainly not pro-war - were buoyed by the prospect of a quick and powerful knockout punch to Britain. The end was in sight.

But Hitler hesitated, for a whole month and a half. By the time he finally started attacking from the air, the British had rallied. The invasion was delayed, and delayed, and finally H turned his sights on Russia and the eastern front, and the full scale invasion of the United Kingdom never came about as planned.

So why did he hesitate?

We were throwing out theories left, right and centre - well, the rest of the people in my class were, I was busy making mental notes to Google phrases like "battle of Britain" and trying to remember who Goring was (the handicap of attempting a history Masters' while never having studied history before continues). Anyway a discussion was raging around me, and then our prof finally stepped in to offer his own theory.

Even though so much of WWII was anchored on issues of race, people rarely take that issue into account when debating what happened, he argued. The fact was that Europe itself was divided into three different races. This caught my attention immediately - clearly growing up in a culture where "race" is defined solely by "white" and "black" had conditioned me, for as soon as he said it, I thought: "But Europe is practically all white, what's he talking about?"

The three different races were the Anglo-Saxons - that is, the Aryan race, the Latin people, and the Slavs. He argued that Hitler, naturally, viewed Germans at the top of the totem pole, and had seen no problems with enslaving all the Slavic countries and rolling right over France, a Latin country. (And murdering all the Jews he could find, of course.) The problem was that with France under German occupation, the war had been reduced to a war between Britain and Germany - that is, roughly, an Anglo-Saxon war. That Hitler may have seen it as cousins fighting cousins - Aryans against Anglos. Suddenly an unnatural war. That he truly and honestly thought Churchill would also understand this, and would come around and accept peace. On Hitler's terms of course.

And so he hesitated, giving Churchill time to see the light. Clearly ol' Winston had other things in mind.

The point is, however, that even though I had always thought of Europe as one race - white - the argument did (and presumably still does) exist that Latin and Anglo-Saxon are two different races. Something which for some reason had never occurred to me.

The next day I had lunch with two Bermudian friends, and in discussing home we somehow boarded the subject of how Bermuda classifies Portuguese people as "Other". Black, white, or Other. I wasn't in thinking mode and the seminar of the day before had clearly left my mind already, so we all joked and laughed about how silly that seemed, to classify Portuguese as something different from white when clearly, since neither are black, they must both be the same. "We must be the only country in the world that does that," one friend said.

That afternoon, in another seminar, we were discussing English colonial rule in Africa, comparing it to French and Portuguese colonial rule. One quote jumped out at me: that the English colonial administrators wanted to be nothing like the "oily woily Portuguese". Suddenly, the penny dropped.

Clearly there is a severe race issue between blacks and whites in Bermuda that we are all focusing on and that will hopefully be resolved within a generation. Because of the sheer population numbers involved, that should definitely be a priority.

But to what extent is race a problem between Bermuda's Latin population and its whites and blacks? Do Bermudians (both black and white) view the Portuguese population as inferior? (Do we have a common bond in our views on the third significant chunk of Bermuda's population?) How much of a problem is this right now and what, if anything, should be done about it?