Dear Editor,
There is something necessarily adversarial about politics.
It is with this in mind that I read Van West Charles’s proclamation of his intention to pursue a politics that will have as its means or its objective the dissolution of perceptions of “difference” that continue to divide us.
Mr Charles shares with us his perception of the content of the Obama message: “There are no blue states or red states, etc.” Obama would say. And in the rhetorical leap from the lived reality to the desired ideal he would traverse race, religion, ethno-geography… to debark on a plain where ideology and class interests become the dominants.
The truth is that Obama has, in a way, transferred the contention from the arena of race and other particularities to that of class. Upon close examination his programme, floating upon a text that is, on the surface a call to unity, we detect only a different definition of “difference.”
A definition that subsumes some identity markers (race, religion, traditional political loyalties…) in a broader category of “change agents.” Versus the “others.”
The Obama programme is fixed in the idea of the redistribution of wealth and power along new lines.
The transfer of wealth from a self-absorbed and venal elite, constantly replenished and reconfigured but nonetheless permanent, to the growing middle class and the equally permanent and anxiously scrunting underprivileged class. Hence from tax breaks for the rich we get to universal health care and social compassion.
The transfer of power from an entrenched political elite whose self-interests and self-absorption condemned it to certain types of subjection and to manipulation by disparate minority groups expressing themselves at a political level through myriad lobbies. Hence we get the strident condemnation of the Washington of the lobbies.
A transfer of the right to determine the content of the American discourse from the aging baby boomers and their parents to the cadre of post-boomers who no longer conceptualised the national needs in terms of the civil rights movement, feminism, the Moscow threat, the necessity to control international commodity supplies…
The subordination of racial bloc interests to common class interests. The racial voting blocks existed − Black, Hispanic, Jewish etc − and in fact were reaffirmed and catered to in the last elections. But the elections succeeded in precipitating these interests in a new coalition around common and more urgent class concerns.
In proposing a vision of the world that the emergent elite and the threatened middle class and anxious poor found incarnate in Mr Obama, the new president would find himself in active contradiction of the old order. He would however take care, in the composition of the cabinet, to placate those race-conscious and older ideological currents still flowing through the American bloodstream. The campaign fight and close results proved beyond a doubt that conflict at the class and ideological level had only partly replaced the old divisions and in fact, had plastered them over rather than eliminated them.
Mr Van West Charles is calling for a similar subservience of racial interests to a common “Guyanese” project.
But there is a difference.
Derek Walcott in his tribute to Obama describes the new president as “emblem of an impossible prophecy.” Which in a way he was to a certain generation of men. But the difference between Obama and Guyana is that Americans had already accustomed themselves, the white majority importantly, to voting across racial lines. We therefore had, in practice, the example of black state and municipal officials being chosen by a majority white electorate. In Guyana this is not yet possible in all groups. Hence the performance of the post-racist AFC when its ethnic support is measured. That is one difference.
Another is the celebration of diversity by Americans. A conscious effort at changing the discourse on race that reflects cultural change. But internal to the celebration of diversity is the valorisation of all races and ethnic groups. The psychic need for racial affirmation through political dominance has largely been neutralised or satisfied. In Guyana the need to feel and declare that “awe deh pan tap” signals that racial self confidence and concepts of equality are still issues.
We are said to be a “plural society” a concept that modifies old European ideas of “pillarisation” wherein societies are conceived as distinct vertically integrated groups. The solution to our national problem will therefore depend on the satisfaction of the specific social, psychological and economic needs of these groups or the transformation of the discourse we hear and we emit. We will need to see examples, as in America, of political allegiance that extends outside of the racial group. We will need to find other models of governance, as they did in Suriname.
But while our leadership parasitizes the racial groups from which it has risen, feeding on their insecurities and self-interest, and while the racial groups coexist with differing ideals of racial solidarity and conflicting concepts of human equality, accommodations of a structural order have to be made. We need constitutional changes to accommodate irreducible differences. It all goes back to mistakes we made in deciding on the architecture of the state and in delineating its role. The bad results are seen everywhere, from the state of the capital to the conditions in the villages. Mr Van West Charles would have to deal with all of these challenges at the same time.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
