I am tired of hearing it. I heard it again this week. In a private group and later in a public session I heard it again: Guyanese are an ethnically divided people, with racist attitudes, and (here’s the tiresome part) it is shameful that we are unwilling or unable to overcome this problem. Hardly a day goes without some variation of that comment coming before us in private settings or public expression, and the lamentations for our degradation are both plentiful and lasting.
Let me be clear going in: I am not disputing the ethnic division between our two dominant racial groups. Neither am I disputing that it is a problem we must engage with every sinew of our being – it is the biggest impediment to our progress because of the divisions and antagonisms 
and closed minds it creates. I am also not disputing that we should feel shame or at least embarrassment about the condition. But I am tired of the parallel position, almost always accompanying the discussion, which is that this is a particularly Guyanese problem that Guyanese are guilty of.
The historical evidence is that while ethnic division certainly exists here, it is also certainly not only here; it is a global condition that follows the human race around like a shadow. From the time mankind stood upright he has been sharply and inexorably divided along ethnic/tribal/racial lines. Prodigious spans of time and circumstance, and the efforts of well-meaning individuals, have done nothing to change the condition. It lives today as strongly as ever.
But it is bewildering why so many of us come to the discussion of it in Guyana by treating it as a fundamental flaw in Guyanese. Ironically, just this week, while a Guyanese living in the USA was regaling me with the “what’s wrong with Guyanese” on our ethnic positions, he seemed completely unaware of the racial tensions, flaring in the same USA as he spoke, over a black teenager being shot to death in the now infamous “loud music” case. How is it that we can live in countries such as the USA and Britain where, despite strenuous and enduring efforts to remove it, racialism is alive and well, but we still remain oblivious to that cancer, while, at the same time, waxing eloquent on what we need to “fix” in Guyana? Why is the admonition not aimed at both cases of guilt? Why are we so intent on pointing out this defect in our former home (and, by the way, the most frequent maligners are in fact Guyanese abroad) but so blissfully silent about the same defect where we now live? Why the double standard? I am tired of encountering it. It is irrational and irritating.
Mankind has been separating ethnically since the cave. What we have in Guyana is as old as that, and it is as wide as the world is wide, but it is interesting what a provincial view we have of it and how far the view sometimes goes. Just this week, after I made a comment that the ethnic separation that we practise in Guyana continues in the places to which Guyanese migrate, I was told, “Guyanese who migrate continue the practice because they have been poisoned by life in Guyana.” In fact, as the visiting Professor Clem Seecharan told us in his captivating Distinguished Lecture at the Umana Yana recently, his research showed that, in the area of India from which most Guyanese indentured labourers had been drawn, dark-skinned people were considered the lowest caste of life, and he quoted a famous Indian psychiatrist on the widespread prejudices in Indian culture against “persons with black skin.” Simply put, if “poison” is the catalyst, it did not originate in Guyana. Mankind’s struggle with this problem is part of his story going back to his origins. In our time, the “poison” is behind the recent eruptions in the so-called “Arab Spring” in the Middle East where ethnic divisions have left four established countries torn apart with thousands losing their lives and millions fleeing from their homes in an ongoing turmoil.
The “poison” is there in the horrendous tribal divisions across Africa, where one group wipes out another in the name of purity. The “poison” is there in the absurdly named “ethnic cleansings” that have taken place in Serbia, Croatia, Yugoslavia, etc. It is there in countries such as Afghanistan, where, for over 2,000 years, the Sunni and the Shiites have been at war and where, as the end of the American military presence approaches, the battle between them re-ignites. It is there, despite all the world’s efforts for 60 years to settle it, between the Palestinians and the Jews over who should live where and control what. The irony is that when one considers how the rest of the world is dealing with its ethnic/racial/religious divisions, our situation in Guyana is more benign than most. As bad as our story is, it does not approach those of the suicide bombers, or of jet planes flying into buildings, or the mutilation of women and young children in the name of one tribe over another, or of one way or life over another. In Guyana, and in the Caribbean generally, we have found a measure of acceptance or accommodation other than the outright rejection that has been the response in many lands.
Ultimately, no argument: Guyanese have to strenuously engage ways to increase the measure of human concord even as we see the rigidity of cultural positions, and even as we see others, wiser and older and more powerful than we will ever be, failing in the task. However, in the process, we have to reject this aspersion, frequently thrown at us, that we are particularly defective in our failure to build a nation of harmony. Ethnic division in Guyana is a malady we share with all mankind, and as we put our minds to the remedies it is useful to remember that we are actually relatively new to this endeavour. Also, the news this week of the happenings in Syria, the Sudan, and the Ukraine, remind us that there is little or no evidence anywhere that others have yet found the cure for the malady.
