 discussion in commemoration of Emancipation 2023. My name is Natalie Shorin-Franes, and it is a real pleasure to be here among four distinguished scholars and professionals who are here to elevate this discussion on Emancipation for 2023, under the theme encamping our consciousness. So I expect some real heat in here as they ignite our consciousness. And let me just introduce our four panelists. Today, we are going to take that theme, and we are going to focus on the town of Viewfort. And we all know what has been happening here, but we want to look at how our history, how historically Viewfort has come to be where it is today. So our topic today is history of land and property ownership in St. Lucia and implications for development with particular reference to Viewfort. And joining me in this discussion today are four gentlemen. I seem to be the only lady here this today, but it's my pleasure to have them with us. And I'm going to start to my immediate right with Dr. Ras, Dr. Wayne. He is a Caribbean brother, a historian by profession who lectures in African diaspora history at Morgan State. Welcome. Give thanks. Give thanks. And also joining us next to him is Dr. Anderson Reynolds, who I think needs no introduction, born and raised in Viewfort. So he's going to give us that perspective that we need. He resides in Viewfort. He holds a PhD in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida. Dr. Reynolds is an author, a national best-selling author, and he's written a number of books in St. Lucia and he is an authority on socioeconomic history of St. Lucia and Viewfort in particular. Next to Dr. Reynolds, we have Dr. Winston Fuljans, who himself is a historical anthropologist. He's at the South Lewis Community College in the role of vice principal of academics. He too is qualified academically in history from the University of the West Indies, anthropology from the University of Florida, and he was also a Fulbright scholar and he focused on Caribbean prehistory and heritage management and his PhD is in archeology. And our final guest also needs no introduction. He is well known as a CMO for a very long time and as our only resident pathologist for a number of decades, Dr. Stephen King, though is an advocate, advocates for the disadvantaged and he's been doing a number of things in St. Lucia. He's one of the architects in Rye St. Lucia and he's currently all over the island and in Viewfort helping to alleviate the problems there. So gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us and it's a very, very special welcome to you. Welcome gentlemen, I expect to hear your voice. The same mission, yeah, I need to hear your voice. Yes. Great, so the solution population is waiting to hear from you. I want to start off by thinking about the theme, the overall theme for this year's commemoration of emancipation and to hear your thoughts on how we can encendle consciousness and I want you to do that in the context of what is happening in Viewfort now. So just in about a minute, can you just share your thoughts on that theme and I'll start with you, Ross Fiend. Thank you, thanks and this is love to the St. Lucia family. Certainly I am no authority on St. Lucia or Viewfort but having been in St. Lucia, having worked and volunteered through work in St. Lucia, I've seen the dynamic energy of Viewfort and in fact most recently been part of a project called the Scenes Project, which is a restorative justice and peace initiative to ensure that the residents of Viewfort have the ability, the capacity, the capability to live and function in peace and there was a spike in violence so we've seen some of these dynamic things but it doesn't speak to the history and I'm very sure that the ones who are most familiar with that history will unpack that but I certainly have my two cents to share and I'm very happy to do that at the appropriate time. So, I'm happy to say it. Dr. Anderson? Yeah, well what I think of emancipation what comes to mind is repairing the damage, the psychological damage brought by slavery and one clear way to do that is education most specifically and as the Prime Minister promised the teaching of African and St. Lucia history throughout our school system. This is very important because most times our history starts with slavery but who wants to be a slave? Who is proud to be a slave? If we can start our history, if a history of the African civilizations does it babble with the great African civilizations? I'm talking about Egypt, there's a lot of pyramids if we can start the history there so by the time we get to slavery we would have already built up our people and so forth. So, also it's like slavery has become defined in terms of black people as if it is only black people that has been slaves but if we go back to the 14th and 15th century the quintessence slave was a white person so much so that the slave comes from the root root word of one of the Slavic countries. So really if you go back to the 14th, 15th century the quintessence slave was really a white person. So if we can introduce that kind of thinking and that kind of teaching in our history then we become less ashamed that we were slaves, that it is slavery isn't unique to black people even though Atlantic slavery was a more extreme form of slavery, I agree. So yes, so all that would be part of repairing the psychological damage that has come out of slavery. Thank you so much for that education. Dr. Fulgens, I expect you to continue here. Hello, for me, first of all, thanks for having me. For me the commemoration of emancipation is the commemoration of incompletion and it was incompletion by design. Only else slavery, Atlantic slavery if you want to get it down to the essence of it. Determination of that was not determination of status. It was the improvement of a condition to allow for the further dispossession because for me, slavery and colonialism was about dispossession, dispossession of land, dispossession of person, dispossession of body, dispossession of spirit. Because if you look at the way the African was enslaved and what happened to the African, it was that dispossession, they lost their land, they lost themselves, they lost their, there was a structured approach to dispossession and it ended up with the black body. Of course, we know psychosomatic, the physical and the mental. You have a situation where even today, it hasn't ended. You have a perpetuation of these acts where people still believe that they free and the truth and the fact that they're not because emancipation did not bring freedom. Emancipation did not give freedom. The only people who got anything with emancipation would have planned the class all over the world. Every single emancipation project around the world from the early 18th century to the 19th century when it was completed, early 20th century in Africa, for example, the only people who got anything from emancipation were the people who perpetuated the system. The people who were enslave got absolutely nothing and we have a continuation of this dispossession even today and I hope at some point I think we will be able to connect these histories which lead a foundation for what we have in our society today. Let's Dr. King, form that. Enkindling our consciousness and for me, that's the mind, the mindset and the question is what is our mindset today? What determines our consciousness today as we sit here? And I want to say thank you for being here and for engaging me in this panel as I sit here. And so when one looks at how do people think the way they think? What drives thoughts? What drives decision making? How does a brain work? How does a brain, how has a brain trained to work? And is our ecosystem nurturing the brains that we believe are conscious and driving the development of themselves or communities in our country as we should? And when I think about that, and that's what I think I'm the panel, I will spend my time speaking about, I think that consciousness or history and one's history and a people's history. So your own personal history as well as your people's history or society's history is a crucial part in the development of your current consciousness. And many of us are unconscious of our history and therefore unconscious peoples. And so we kindling or in kindling our consciousness today is crucial. And first to do that, we have to know ourselves. And first to know ourselves, we have to know our history in its most blunt, raw and real state. That's an excellent way for us to segue Dr. King because as we go through this panel, the plan is for us to look at the history before we delve into the here and now. So I want us to get into that. But having been engaged with you and also I need to mention Dr. Julian Hampson, who's not part of this panel but who was certainly part of our conversations before and whose writing I think really speaks to what we are going to talk about. So I want to start on the discussion from the historical perspective and then for us to move into the here and now and the solutions. But there's something that in her writing that I want to use just to set off our conversation, where she speaks about slavery and the roots of landlessness which Dr. Fuljans and Dr. Anderson alluded to. And she says that a century after emancipation, the enduring influence of plantation economics, the ongoing socioeconomic inequalities and the intergenerational pervasiveness of a sense of political and personal powerlessness is in the here and now of the 21st century. So Dr. Fuljans, I want you to set it off by speaking to the historical context which you already started to do. But make us understand the loss that already existed and how it is well, we'll focus on the now in a bit. But give us some historical background. It has me to make you understand. I put it before you and hopefully you will understand. Like I said when I started, what slavery was is basically about dispossession. And I spoke about the fact that emancipation gave nothing because if you were supposed to be emancipated in the time, because the context of emancipation, people are speaking about human rights because that is the beginning of the conversation about human rights in Western thought. At the same time, you have the project of dispossession being even more insidious. So you emancipate people in 1834, but up until 1838, they still don't own themselves and they're supposed to continue working for somebody. They don't have the right to own land. It is structured in a manner that they cannot own land. They cannot express their spirit in a manner that anybody else can. They must go to certain species, churches, to express any kind of connection. We're in a situation even in the 20th century when African religions were found, they were supposed to be crushed. With practice of African, anything African was actually illegal, drumming, self-expression. So when we speak about slavery, we have to understand it was about ensuring that these people owned nothing, not even themselves, not even their thoughts. So that kind of pressure, if you will, people talk about the beautiful Caribbean space and it was even more beautiful back then, but for me, when I think about it, it's a pressure cooker that was used to make sure whatever came out came out in a specific manner. So we look at our society today and we're wondering how could it be what it is? If you understand the previous 350 years, you begin to understand what it meant to be a solution at that time and you begin to understand, for example, the legacy of violence, but then it was forged in a space of violence. The Caribbean was created by violence and now, whoa, it's a very violent place. Why? Because somebody else is in charge or because we are made to believe that we are in charge of it. So I take it all the way back to slavery and the fact that this possession was constant, was instrumental and was systematic and that, I believe, are legacies that we still inherit and we're still fighting today. There's an awe-fighting in Manjapur who spoke about the fact that it is, we're chasing ghosts. We're chasing ghosts. You're supposed to die, right? But the ghost is a spirit that is still restless. So we have a lot of ghosts among us and we're still chasing ghosts, the ghosts of slavery, because slavery is not dead. I know you want to follow up on this. As a fellow historian, I just can see that you want to jump in. Before we contextualize with Dr. Anderson in a few fort situations, jump in. Yes, and the reason why I'm jumping in is because of what has been said by both Brother Anderson, Brother Winston and Brother Stephen, they thought about being blunt, this possession and of course history and it's the origins of these things. And also Brother Winston spoke about how to address these things, right? If we're really gonna be honest, blunt, and rip the bandage off, we have to go to what gave the right to Europeans to come into indigenous spaces among indigenous people. And by the way, doing it with a conscience that was clear. Conscience, institutions of religion. Because when someone believes themselves to be religiously or morally correct, they do things without any form of regret or apologies. Up to today, many of these institutions fail to apologize for the institutions of enslaving Africans or fail to make the redressings that are necessary. So what we have to do then, which we're really gonna be honest about and share in the history, is talk about 1493. The year after 1492 when this cover was said to have taken place, in 1493, Pope Alexander VI decided that he was going to have an edict that gives the right to Portugal and Spain to possess whatever lands and whatever were on those lands, whomsoever, and whatsoever were on those lands, they were gonna give them the right to do so. He said doctrine of theft. Let us be blunt then, brother Stephen, like doctrine of theft. And therefore, since we're not speaking Portuguese or Spanish in St. Lucia, but certainly the empowerment of colonialism came through Portugal and Spain as first actors. So every other European country, including Britain, including France, which I reported to St. Lucia, acted with clear consciences in coming into indigenous lands, imposing their will on indigenous people, bringing Africans from Africa, going into Africa also and imposing that will on the people, on the land, and decidedly, up to today, to keep as to what they believe is right because their consciences were clear by the church, and particularly by the Catholic church. Now mind you, and I'm going a little long, two minutes, but I'll tell you something. March of 2023, the current Pope of Rome decided that he was going to on the pressures of indigenous people in Canada, indigenous Americans, Canadian indigenous people. He was visiting Canada at the time, and because they pressured him, he decided to rate, what is the best term for it is to say he's, he didn't apologize, so he said, the actions. He regretted the actions. Yes, he was too strong, decided that it was not consistent with Catholicism, the actions of the past, but he was technically correct, but legally correct, so as not to say enough that would rise of lawsuits from indigenous people and current governments. So he said, it's not consistent with the church and it's perhaps a regrettable act, but stop short of apologizing. These are the gimmicks, the games, the unfortunate things that consistently permit our reality, and then we want to look at our current governments and our current systems and say, well, they're not doing enough for the people. They are bonded by law, international law, established by international institutions, the church, global institutions, that many of us, our spirituality is no bend to those things. So if I criticize a Catholic church, I am sure we have Catholics right, we are going to take exception to it. And the Anglican church, which is a church of England, joined in suit and acted, and diverted with the rest of us, and dedicated to that. So we have these problems, we have to go to that as the root and address it from a sociospiritual reality, consciousness, truth, and reconciliation. I stop there because- And we will come back to that. You are watching the Emancipation panel discussion. When we get back, we can textualize this to our view forth situation. Please stay with us. Better life, but we're forced into domestic slavery. Any gender. Education in commemoration of Emancipation 2023. I am here with four panelists, Dr. Russ Dr. Wayne, I'm getting that right. Dr. Anderson Reynolds, Dr. Winston Fulgens, and Dr. Stephen King. And we had been given some historical context to what we have gone through as a people that was quite an education. And we had a very animated presentation there from Russ Dr. Wayne. And we want to move now to Dr. Anderson Reynolds. Given all what we have heard so far, and I know you are historian yourself, but tell us how that feeds through our current situation in the town of Viewfort. Yes, I'll begin where Winston left off. I mentioned dispossession as one of the features of slavery. But what he alluded to, but he didn't go into specifics was that after emancipation, the plantocracy along with the government took specific definite steps to keep the former slaves dispossessed so that they can continue getting a cheap source of labor for the plantations. So they took a number of steps. They taxed horses on other means of transportation. They set the price of Cronland arbitrarily high and increased the minimum acreage size that the former slaves could purchase land in some territories like Barbados and the US. They passed the, what do you call it, pregnancy laws. So any black person they found that seemed idle, they imprisoned them and loaned them out to plantations. They imposed the slaves, because St. Lucia is very mountainous, the slaves could go up in the hills and cultivate what is called marginal lands. So in other words, the former slaves could find ways to survive without money. So to prevent that, they went and they set specific taxes so that to force these people to go work on the plantations so that because they will need the money to pay the taxes. All this was part of keeping the former slaves dispossessed making sure that the plantations continue getting a cheap source of labor. Now, in terms of UFO, what I have just described there, it is in UFO, it became the most extreme in terms of the welfare of the former slaves because unlike many other parts of the country, UFO is relatively flat. So that means the plantations, the green slavery, the plantations occupied the totality of the land space. So the blacks in UFO could not find what is called marginal lands in which to cultivate. So they were more totally dependent on the plantations. So after slavery, they still remained totally dependent on the plantations because there was no extra and marginal lands to cultivate. So if they didn't work for the sugar factory and the plantations, they would have to go fishing and get into charcoal production and so forth. So what we should remember is that during slavery, sugar plantation, the UFO lands was totally occupied by the sugar factories. In the mid-thirties, the factories closed down. But instead of the land being distributed to the former slaves, it was sold to a badadian scheme where 2,000 badadians came to establish, to keep the sugar factory running where each of the 2,000 badadians would receive five acres of land to plant sugar cane for the factories. And what about the euphorians? Well, they wouldn't get land, but they would remain as workers for the... So in other words, they were dispossessed. They remained dispossessed. But in the middle of that badadian scheme where were 2 came, what happened? The British sold the whole of UFOs, or at least the whole of UFOs to the Americans for destroyers. So again, the whole of UFOs was totally occupied by the Americans, so there was still no land for the euphorians to have. Okay, World War II came to a close, but the lands were at least belonged to the Americans, so euphorians wasn't free to take over the land. Okay, then I think that your child's government was able to secure the land from the Americans. The land became crown lands, government lands, still not available to euphorians for use. And then after that, what you had was one, the lands were basically set aside for large-scale projects, the last of which was the SH. So here we have euphorians, landless, but the best of the lands is reserved for large-scale enterprises, most of which are externally determined and usually by foreign entities. So today, we are in a situation where most of the lands in Euphor town self is flown by the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church and crown lands. Many of the people that occupy lands in Euphor build their homes, they cannot have title to the land because the land belongs to one of those churches. So for the most part, Euphor has remained landless, but imagine emancipation, the slaves didn't own anything, they are kept dispossessed. So what you have is a sheepless population trying to take root but don't have no means and so forth. So let's get to Bruceville. Bruceville resembles St. Lucia just after slavery. What you have is a bunch of people, they don't own the land, they are sheepless, they don't own the land, they are in a state of, they are in the same state of dispossession as were the former slaves just after emancipation. So what was the main difference between a slave and a slave master when ownership of yourself, ownership of land, ownership of the factors of production? So here we are in Euphor, to the extent that Euphorians don't own land, don't own the means of production, our unskilled, don't have marketable skills is to the extent that they are slaves because if we define slavery based on ownership of yourself and ownership of land, if you don't quite own yourself because you have no marketable skills and so forth and you don't own any of the factors of production, then to that extent you are a slave. And that translates to a powerlessness, that is what I'm hearing. Powerlessness, people not empowered. That seems to be ingrained, who wants to jump in here? My difficulty with emancipation and the fact that it needs to be commemorated. And this one asked me, we just took this ship around. We celebrate emancipation. If you look at emancipation, in the ways presented, it's supposed to be where you free people. But emancipation, as we commemorated, did not free anybody. A free person has the right to own land or has access to land. A free person has owned their body or free person has access to education. A free person has the right to vote, the right to self-determination. In St. Lucia, the right to vote came in 1951 and 1952. That's 100 how many years past slavery. So when I speak about the fact that emancipation gave nothing to the people who were enslaved, that's what I'm talking about because if emancipation within a framework presented by European thought is the freeing of people who were enslaved, the project has failed and continues to fail. And that's why I'm saying emancipation is the ghost of slavery. Slavery was never killed. And we're still chasing that. The notion of the right to vote is so farcical in the Caribbean. And it's someone who wrote, the name forgets I'm slipping right now, about the coloniality of Caribbean existence. The fact that the right to vote really is not a right to vote. You go, you cast a ballot, but we can have a better conversation than that. Access to land, what do you have to put up to get access to land? So my thing is, we need to start reframing this emancipation to start to see a way to building citizens. I want to challenge you first to do that now because I think from the perspective that we have grown up with, we celebrated it because we saw it as something that the slaves did. They fought for their freedom. I think that's what we have been schooled for the last how many years. I think that is a reaction to the, how you call it, the willbofosization of emancipation, where the great white man free. So in Caribbean historiography, the pushback was, black people fought for it. But I think, yes, willbofosin is guys, it is things, but I think in the conversation about emancipation, that act that was passed, we forget that there were actually black people who were involved and initiated the conversation about not just emancipation, the freeing of black people. Black people, and when you read about them, you shocked a guy who left a plantation in Jamaica and goes to work on the docks in England and he riles up dog workers and begins to ask questions and begins to demand things like the right to vote before the British Parliament starts talking about slavery. And I mean, we could go on and on, we could go on forever because now we have the information to start the education and to reframe what this thing was because if we reframe it in a manner that we begin to put ourselves, we begin to understand Anderson spoke about the fact that we need to go back to ancient civilizations. I am saying that is necessary and that is wonderful, but we have enough, the diaspora, African diaspora has enough capital, intellectual capital to show that it was a force to lead to that emancipation as well. But the thing is, the history is not accessible to everyone. I tried to avoid reading on it and I think it has allowed me to understand a lot of things and I try to speak on it. But it's a little difficult now to pull that from the ivory tower and spread it among the people because it was the avenue. People say, oh, we need to teach here in schools, but how much can it teach a 12-year-old? The gravitas of this thing, I think we need to start thinking about how we move with it because we could parcel it and allow it to pull me for the rest of the society, but it has to be a reframing of thought, a reframing of self, a claiming, because remember, we got nothing, a claiming of everything I was taken from in a manner that allows us to continue building ourselves because we're standing on the shoulders of giants, a lot of people of African descent, of the African diaspora, and even Africans themselves who are involved in this process, who have not gotten the kudos for what they did. So my argument here is a reframing of it. This is someone who argued that there's a time that the Caribbean was the center of European thought and civilization and now we're on the periphery. It's because of how the story is being told. We need to take that over, we need to take it back, we need to repossess it. I'm sorry I'm using the word possess and dispossess so often, but for me, that is what it is, a repossession of what was taken because nothing has ever been given even after a massive dispossession over centuries. I want to stay along the lines of reframing of thought and of self, Dr. King, in terms of the work that has been done in view in terms of what you're seeing there because we want to make that the center of our conversation, how do you see that working in a space as we have already established where everything was taken away, where it was just a state or military and we're still seeing that these people are dispossessed? How do we rekindle that fulver to drive our people to do for themselves or to get government if that's what it takes? Before we get to how, we have to understand what has been happening. So listening to the panelists, you hear very clearly that there are two main psychopathological forces that have been inflicted on people, our people, especially view for people. Is the inequality, gross inequality, which speaks to the fact that you don't have land, you don't have ownership of yourself, you don't have ownership of means of production, you don't have ownership of your social or economic mobility. That is massive inequality. In social science, inequality is highly correlated with significant violence, significant issues of poor decision making, poor life choices. There's a whole psychopathology to explain how that happens. You have to look at trauma, psychological trauma. Now, when we spoke about history, we talked about, if I speak about complex psychological trauma, which means here we have history of significant trauma that has been described. That is actually passed on to generations. That's intergenerational. How? Because trauma creates stress in our brain. Stress causes a body reaction. That body reaction becomes imprinted in how cells function, because human beings are ecological. They respond to their environment. You stress a body, it will imprint. The response will imprint, because the being needs to know how to respond best. That phenomenon is passed on. So you have people that are born with a sensitivity to respond to stress. You further stress them because you've kept them powerless and dispossessed. You will further stress them. What that does, a stress reaction in a human being causes you to shut down your higher functions and deal with the impulsive reaction, which is short term, bounce and draw. I must respond now for now. I'm not thinking strategically. I'm thinking immediate, because I must survive now over a threat that is coming to me. A brain does not differentiate which trauma is coming. It just has a reaction. But you know what's even more interesting naturally to me as well, is that that same chronic stress causes chronic immune suppression and chronic metabolic dysregulation and hormonal dysregulation, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, or to immune disorders. In other words, this ecological system that has persisted from history right through till today and kept people in that chronic stress state has also kept them in a state where they cannot be truly conscious. They cannot be truly empowered and they get sick physically, mentally and socially sick. And that is a legacy that you are hearing, spoken about here. And with that background, we can then begin to talk about what we now need to do. And we will talk about that when we come back to continue this panel discussion in commemoration of Emancipation 2023. Please stay with us. We'll be right back. Imagine being away from hope, surrounded by danger and hostility, unable to escape or speak the language and being exploited. It might sound like fiction, but for 40 million victims of human trafficking worldwide, it is a reality. Innocent people are enticed by the promise of a new life, then enslaved into forced labor or sex trafficking. Human trafficking happens in plain sight. Know the signs, see it, report it. To report suspected cases of human trafficking, call the TIP Hock-Lyle at 847. This panel discussion as we look at Emancipation 2023 and the historical impact of slavery and the landlessness issue that we face, the dispossession issue that we face, particularly in the area of viewport. Today I am accompanied by four panelists in the presence of Dr. Rasveil, Dr. Anderson Reynolds, Dr. Winston Fuljens and Dr. Stephen King. And we have really looked at the historical legacy that confronts us and we want now to move to what can be done. We can't stay for me in the state of what has been. We really need to find ways for us to move forward and gentlemen I want to sort of challenge you to see a number of things. A question that was posed is, is how can we facilitate awareness of that process to change the paradigm of citizens land ownership? If we can start there because we allude to that dispossession. So what roles can we play to ensure that those injustices that we somehow are able to reform those? Dr. Wulund, let me start with you and from a Caribbean perspective. Yes, defense, you know, so one of the things that brought me into St. Lucian and activity I have been involved with and continue to be involved in is a justice and healing initiative. And it was not targeted outside of ourselves. It was to look at ourselves as a family, both as a St. Lucian family and then within the context of the broader Caribbean and then the broader black spaces to say we need our own reconciliation itself. We need forgiveness among ourselves because we have done some things. We have perpetrated the wrongs that have been brought on as a trauma on ourselves. We have shared it with each other and we continue to do those abuses as Brother Stephen King said, it becomes a psychosis. So the first thing is really to be able to uncover that, take that from under the rug and then set our own Caribbean governments who are now carrying forward the vestiges of colonialism, the negative components of colonialism and continue to articulate and share that and make it part of the reality of our people to set these governments within the Caribbean or Caribbean spaces, we need to take a stand, right? In terms of justice for our people, ourselves. We're no longer gonna say, as a raster man, to say fire born from the government and the prime minister and the politicians. We're saying let us all come together and unpack this thing and find some solutions because we know how to, you know. All of us are problem solvers in industries and in so many different spaces. Yet we cannot do it for the family, for ourselves. Internally, we cannot do it because we are afraid to address the elephant in the room. One, it starts with religion and how we've been oriented. Mind, spirituality is all part of our reality, of our being, but the way we express it and the loyalties that comes through it needs to be broken down and overstood completely. So we don't need to be loyal to a pope or to a church name, space, or whatever it is. We need to be truthful within humanity and for how much of a process we must ultimately or allegiance, not the nation states, but to our fellow man, starting with the individual. But the Winston, I owe my allegiance to you and I'm gonna answer that on a Stephen because I'm gonna tell you the truth. And it will sting, it should because we have been traumatized for so long that we didn't realize that this is what is really happening. So when we stop using the term slave as a noun and really start saying, our people are enslaved, but my ancestors were doctors. That's why I'm one today. Let us face that because if generational trauma is real, then generational excellence is also real, right? So my people who were enslaved were doctors and so were all of your people because I am my ancestor, right? And let us then stop saying slaves as we did last year when we went into the schools. We said, don't you describe to me what comes to your mind when someone's a slave and every student said, a black man, not recognizing as you correctly said by the Winston that it is part of brother Anderson also. It is part of the evolution of humanity. But of course our trauma is recent and so atrocious. So the first things then, so I will be sure is the use of language. Well, Winston said, change a ship. It's the first way to do that if you believe the Bible as I use it for my benefit. Amen, God. So God in our hearts then can bring life. So the first thing we start saying, my people were not slaves. They were enslaved as bodies. And then we start going through all the other words that keeps our psychosis in a space of enslavement. Now it says emancipate ourselves from that mentality because only ourselves can free our minds. Give thanks. Give thanks. And Dr. King, as he speaks to that, the importance of language. I mean we talk about the slave mentality. That's a phrase that I've heard used here. And we talk about the psychosocial importance. What are your solutions? Yeah, and I go full circle when we speak about the consciousness. Because what Dr. Wayne Rose mentioned is the consciousness, raising that consciousness which starts with speaking the words of empowerment and positivity to yourself. Because the human brain is neuroplastic. It can be morphed. No matter, there's no such thing as a burned mind. No mind is burnt, okay? So every mind can be reprogrammed. And you can reprogram your brain. We now need to create spaces for our children and our people to start to unpack and reprogram their minds, learn how to cope, learn how to understand options that they may have that they did not see before. Learn that they have the right to exercise those options. They have the power to exercise those options. Our job to hold their hand if necessary or show them where they can go to get those resources so they can have that social and economic mobility that they truly desire. So that needs to happen. Now that happens in what we, where we call them safe spaces. Because a safe space, when you have a traumatized individual, psychological trauma, you need a safe space. In a place they can come where they can trust people and they can feel comfortable so they can let their guard down. Their vulnerabilities can show and then they can start to articulate their traumas and then they can begin to heal because you can't heal unless you articulate it, right? Word, word. So that's what, for instance, a resource center does. That's why we talk about a resource center in view for it. For instance, there's one solution, creating a space. But it's not, it's not like Bunny Whaler says. He says, you know, it's not a physical space. It's a mental space. And that's what we have to get to. So even in their home, their minds become a safe space now for themselves and their children. Next place, so next solution. Schools. Schools, schools are a powerful place that could be a safe space, a trauma sensitive space where our children can come and they can now, again, unpack. They can be vulnerable, they can express themselves. And we have teachers and counselors and other adults and mentors who can support those children. The volunteers that can come in, Winston, myself, Anderson, Ross, wait. Help them, help them to be the powerful beings that they have that potential to be because every child has that potential. But we need to create that mindset, right? And that's so schools can do that. The other place, of course, is our government. I told the Prime Minister the other day, every policy coming to you should have on the top of it, how is this going to reduce inequality in our country? Or in our community or wherever. Because every policy of government, the only role of government that I see is to reduce inequality in the country. That's why we come together and create a government, fund a government with a budget, with a set of money to do just that, to set a balance, to create opportunity for people to have access to land, access to business, access to jobs, access to their means of production, whatever that may be, that is what I see. The other thing is, of course, or as we said it, business community and all of us in the society must come together. The siege mentality, the us and them mentality has to go. This is a community, a unity. We must come together, hold hands together. Why? Because when you reduce inequality, not only do we make people more productive, we make more money flow in the country, we make the country develop, we as business people do better. Our current businesses do better when we reduce inequality. And that is an economic as well as a social science fact. So these are some of the things that I see we as a semblution people can do. Thank you, and Dr. Foggens, you said earlier about just teaching history to a 12-year-old, but we see the power of education and of schools as Dr. King said. How do you think we can revolutionize our education system to facilitate that mindset change that I think we are referring to here? Schools have been one of the places where the tools of colonialism and slavery actually were really, really forged and implemented. And I think is a place that we can actually start reversing the process, addition of history in schools starting from young. You don't have to understand the great forces of dispossession, if you will, but you begin to understand where you came from, what your role has been, that you are a person, that a negative image you see on TV every time you see a person who looks like you, that's not actually real, that there are people who look like you have done great things and continue to do great things. And you begin to see yourself as capable of doing great things. So I'm saying start teaching the history, be it be steps and eventually you get to the higher level and so on and so forth. So I feel this community college should be teaching history. I think, well, if we do it once, we do it in with one course where you can graduate without doing that history, but it should be more optioned with history. So right through the system, we should be teaching people history, the history of the diaspora, history of America. When I say America, I'm not talking about the US, I'm talking about that space. And even Africa, I'm not talking about the mother Africa, if you will, because I, some things taught me some time ago, I won't say where and what I was doing. The only continent in the world that actually has a female gender is Africa. And I'm wondering what it has to do with anything, including that famous wall that has been part of, that has been injected into our culture, if you will. But I will leave that there and that's a conversation for a different time. This is certainly a different panel discussion. And as we round up, Dr. Anderson, you get to situate this in your own constituency. One of the thoughts that have been shared here today, how could you see that impacting the town of Newport? Yes, of course, the German has covered a lot of what I remain. So I just go straight to Newport and what I proposed recently, that we need a Marshall plan for Newport. And I don't know if everybody is acquainted with the Marshall plan. That was a plan the US put in operation to resuscitate Europe after the world war. Europe was in crumbles and the US spent billions of dollars resuscitating Europe and Japan. I think in areas like Newport, the socioeconomic conditions there are keen to a catastrophe that has happened. Post-war, we are facing post-war conditions. For example, Newport faces the highest unemployment rate in the country, like 30-something percent unemployment rate. Newport is the third poorest district. And as you can see, and we have taken note of the spike in crime. Some people would think Newport is like the capital of the island. And Newport has been talked about as a failed state. So the same conditions, similar conditions that obtained in the aftermath of the war you have in Newport. So I think we need nothing less than a Marshall plan. We need to get about 300 billion U.S. residents and introduce serious socioeconomic programs of Newport. Both not just physical development, but as Dr. King has been expressing, social programs, educational programs, cultural programs, sporting programs, and also creating employment. We need serious employment activities. So we really need a Marshall plan for Newport. Gentlemen, our time is almost up. I really want to thank you for being here. But I just want to give you just three seconds for some closing thoughts as we end our panel discussion for the commemoration of Emancipation for 2023. Yes, so give thanks for the opportunity again to share with the St. Lucian family. These issues are very important and dear to us, all of us, and this is why I'm here in St. Lucia. I want to thank the Ubuntu Cultural Center and its initiatives that seeks to address these specific issues of injustice, of healing within the family, and of finding solutions to the challenges that are facing St. Lucia, Viewfort, and the larger Caribbean community. What I will commit to is my own will to work and certainly to make a difference in whatever small ways. And so I'm grateful for this opportunity. We have a seeds project that is launched in Viewfort for the specific purposes of addressing some of these challenges. We know that it's a drop in the bucket to a Marshall plan, but certainly what it represents is intention. And so we have a collective who are intentional about addressing these challenges. We ask people to join us. They can join by virtue of linking with the famous Dr. King, but there are others. All of us who are here are committed to that process. And I want to just thank you again for the opportunity to share. Thank you. Dr. Chansen? Yes, in terms of emancipation, I think what we all have been discussing is about how do we go about repairing the damage and then by slavery, colonialism, and so forth. How do we go about repairing that damage? And there are, we have been listening to different names and approaches. So we look forward to that seed going back through to a Viewfort. Yes. Dr. Fuget? Come for me. Whenever I have a mic, I speak about and shout about the fact that we should be teaching history in our schools. I think that is how we start the process because the child taught one level will go up and eventually be an adult who starts, who becomes a minister, who becomes a lawyer, who becomes a doctor, who becomes somebody of influence who understands what their role is or their responsibilities are to the society that they're growing up in. So, yeah, well commitment, that's my part. That's okay. For me, I think, as I close, I want to thank people of Viewfort. Here's why I want to thank them. At our last mediation session when we had all communities together, talking in the Southwest Committee College conference room, I want to, I told them that the future of St. Lucia should be spearheaded by Viewfort, the tip of the spear. I knew what was being the first in so many things and Viewfort can be the first in the transformation that is necessary. And they agreed. They said, and I wanted to commend them for their faith and their courage because they take great faith and great courage to after 13 people have been murdered for communities to say, okay, enough is enough. We will stop and we will commit to a transformative future. That I don't know if people who are listening to this can understand how deep and powerful that is when people can do that. Most of us don't have to face those kinds of things. Okay, so I just want to thank them and I want to thank them in advance. I'm thanking them in advance for the, when we see and St. Lucia sees how Viewfort can rise and what Viewfort can do. And that's what I'm looking forward to. And so far, so good. Thank you so much for joining us here today as we commemorated Emancipation 2023 with a panel discussion of, I would say, four intellectuals who really educated us on the legacy of slavery and how we can change our thinking and they really, really encandled our consciousness and hope your consciousness was ignited today. And I ask you to reach out to all those who are trying to make a difference in Viewfort. Happy Emancipation celebration. Although I was told it's not a celebration, but let us fight for ourselves. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.