Dear Editor,
The exchange on Afro-Guyanese “marginalisation” is of a particular interest at this time if only because it is one of the macabre shadows given new life in the wake of the multiple killings at Lusignan and Bartica.
Disjoined from the public discussion that followed these events, it reverts to its old role as a founding concept in the politics we have always known. The fact is that a permanent feature of Afro-Guyanese self-identity, from the days of slavery, has been a perception of the race as disadvantaged, disenfranchised, disrespected.
And there is another fact we need to consider. It is that ours is a politics in which each race and creed can claim victimhood and permanent disadvantage in one form or another.
One cannot dismiss the condition in which Amerindians found themselves, the geographic and socio-economic peripheralisation, as anything other than a form of marginalisation. The Portuguese community, “miniaturised” over time, and forever assigned a minority role in our politics, has its own case.
Indians, Dr Cheddi Jagan is known to have said, sufferred among us during the PNC years, a status similar to populations living under apartheid. An extreme form of social and political marginalisation.
Plus, “everywhere,” Dr Jagan is quoted as saying, blacks are at the bottom of the ladder. It is therefore unconfortable to me that among those boasting fidelity to his intellectual and political heritage are people in a stubborn denial of what he saw as a reality.
