Dear Editor,
I wish to append my views to that of Lincoln Lewis, in his letter captioned ‘The racial issue has to be frontally addressed’ (SN, May 24). There is an obvious partisan effort to treat the issue of racism in Guyana as a sacred cow, and attribute its manifestations to everything else but what it represents. Many of those who had no problem defining their experience during the governance of the PNC, and rejecting the interjection of anyone outside of their grouping to do thus, now exhibit manifest hypocrisy in their denials. And they do so with the consciousness of the advantage they enjoy in a national informational environment where discrimination and marginalization in media ownership operate to stifle and mute the voices of the affected community.
There is great irony in the fact that in a nation like Guyana the descendants of those who were enslaved are being refused licences to own and operate the cheapest and most accessible forms of public media. Newspapers and radios happen to be the cheapest and most accessible forms of information in most under-developed or developing nations, and in Guyana it is no different. [Ed note: Newspapers and the broadcast media operate under entirely different regimes. Newspapers are governed by the Publication and Newspapers Act, and there is nothing preventing anyone from starting a newspaper provided they register its name as well as the names and addresses of the publishers and printers, and they pay a bond. Provided the requirements under the act are met, a licence cannot be refused, unlike the case with radio.]
One of the most, if not the most devastating effects of African enslavement happen to be the loss of control over the ability and capacity to tell their story, to define their own experiences and reality. In that vacuum of sovereignty, the history and present of Africans became a playground for the prejudiced and perverted imaginations of others. There has to be something frighteningly callous in the mindset of any regime that pursues policies and practices that perpetuate inhibition.
I do not believe that Wikipedia is an acceptable authority to cite in the examination of weighty issues like racism and its manifestations. Wikipedia is a user interactive website, so much of what we find there is the opinion or conclusion of its members. That does not mean that it is useless as a source of information when one is examining an issue. However, it is an inadequate source or authority for examining the racial issues that affect group interaction and relationships, as well as governance in Guyana.
The argument that seeks to differentiate between race and ethnicity in a nation like Guyana has no legs, without deep examination of the history of prejudice in Guyana, and how individuals and groups perceive themselves. The fact that, practically, the difference between Indians and Africans in Guyana is more a matter of ethnicity rather than race offers no solutions when the overwhelming perception among us is different. In fact, rather than making that argument, why not embrace the more all-encompassing reality that since our human origins have been traced to a small group in Africa, essentially, we are all cousins removed by varying distances.
When a woman of a certain ethnicity, who is a career professional, is experienced and skilled in her work, but sees someone being imposed over her who has no experience, no relevant work history, but happens to be of the same ethnicity as the majority of the ruling regime, that is an example of discrimination and marginalization. When a political regime deems it unnecessary to publicly argue for due process and the presumption of innocence for people of a certain ethnicity who are being kidnapped, tortured and murdered, but manifest no reservations about making such arguments for one of the leaders of a gang involved in these acts, and who happens to share ethnicity with the majority of the ruling regime, that double standard cannot be explained away with euphemisms. The deceitful and conniving strategy in play that amounts to telling African Guyanese to believe in the tired and bromidic descriptions of their reality rather than their lying eyes and experiences, is insulting of their intelligence to assess, analyze and define the circumstances of their reality in the land of their birth.
Racism is a product of cultural and religious belief systems that teaches, or from which interpretations are made, that our physical differences are reflective of our positive and negative traits and endowments. People are not born racists, neither do they wake up one morning and decide to be racist. If we were to objectively examine the patterns of racial prejudice in this world, we would recognize it as operating along a continuum of colour stratification with two extreme positions, one African black and one European white. There are positive presumptions associated with the white end of the continuum, and negative presumptions associated with the black end. Most of the world gravitates toward the positive associative end of the continuum, lured there by magnetic group enhancing myths and notions. Guyana has never been different, despite the current self-serving, politically expedient and convenient effort to present it as otherwise.
Yours faithfully,
Robin Williams
