Hangover values from slavery hurting us, says Phillips

WESTERN BUREAU:

Opposition Leader Dr Peter Phillips says poor and outdated colonial values and attitudes are hindering Jamaica’s efforts to achieve economic growth and prosperity.

According to Phillips, the cultural experience of the plantation system is alive in Jamaica even though nearly two centuries have elapsed since the abolition of slavery and almost 60 years after the nation gaining political Independence.

“Culture is a living thing and attitudes and values are passed on from generation to generation, and some of the values which our young people are carrying now are values that were formed hundreds of years ago,” Philips said as he addressed the recent West Jamaica Conference of Seventh-Day Adventist Churches’ western leadership conference in Montego Bay, St James.

“Values which disrespected women in our culture, values which allow a youth to come and tell you today, in 2019, that him get five pickney and you have to ask yourself get for who?” said Phillips.

“But when I think about the question and the answer, I realised that it’s a conversation between the enslaved and the slave master of hundreds of years ago which is living on today,” added Phillips.

According to the People’s National Party president, Jamaicans need to understand the true story of slavery so as to turn their backs on those negative values that have no place in the nation’s current reality.

“We must remember that for hundreds of years, we were compressed in a system which set out to destroy families, to make us believe that sex was the same thing as love and it is not, because in that old, slave plantation system, a mother loving her child is contrary to the needs of that system of production,” said Phillips.

“If there is a flaw in the way we have approached our nation-building task since Independence, it is that we have failed to tackle head-on this pernicious, wicked inheritance that has become embedded in our culture,” added Phillips.

Phillips promised that if his party is successful in the next general election, it will be seeking to bring order to humanity and the family structure of the country.

“We have determined in our party that when we form the Government, we are going to set up an Institute of the Family and we are going to set up a Ministry of Social Transformation so we can change the value that has been holding us back as a country in life,” he said.

While not getting into the LGBT tiff between the St James Municipal Corporation (StJMC) and Montego Bay Pride, Phillips expressed a preference for children to be raised in a union of a male and female family environment.

“So time come now to demonstrate to our children that all the scientific evidence showed that a child growing up with two loving parents – male and female – perform better in life,” Phillips said. “It is some hard things to talk, but we must talk them because we must take our place lining up with humanity. We can do better as a people.”

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