Dear Editor,
As the election campaign continues, the daily reports are on topics reflecting the most degraded aspects of our society’s leadership. The choice of our government fails to turn on any useful discussion of development agendas. I for one am more and more disgusted by reports of repeated appeals to racial defensiveness. Bringing up the race bogey is a distraction that is disingenuous, devious and, – to say it plainly – dishonest.
In a society made up of people whose ancestors came from different parts of the world, how can we build a common future by emphasizing only one point of diversity, and using it to create fears in one or other section of our fellow-citizens?
The issues that we have to deal with, to make a decent country for our children, are issues of power, not race. As an adult in Guyana over the last 45 years, I have had to think long and hard about the contributions that different groups of our people can make to building our nation’s value to the planet. I have taken an interest in what Amerindian traditional knowledge of our natural environment can offer to Guyanese solutions to global problems. In 35 years of enquiry, what I have found distinctive about indigenous tribes is not race, but culture. The same applies to all the Guyanese racial groups, including mixtures. There is no real point in stressing racial origin, if not to show how access to different traditions can help common development.
I mention Amerindians because a few weeks ago I was struck by a question raised by another of your correspondents: “Are we nine tribes, or one of six races?” To follow that line of thought, six races can make one people, who can have, as one nation, one destiny – but only as one people, strengthened, not weakened, by diversity. A functional synergy of cultures is the only positive significance of ethnicity. But we are expected to take the racial non-issue seriously, when it is misused by politicians who have nothing real to offer.
Our society is still disfigured by issues of education, class and gender, which we avoid talking about because they relate to economic power. I have long observed that political power equates to the power to get rich – at the expense of the poor, who are disabled by poverty from taking in common the long view so essential to development. It almost seems this election is really about getting a five-year chance to control the nation’s money. One despairs to see a campaign that centres, to that dishonourable end, on diversionary scare tactics, including the artificial issue of race.
Yours faithfully,
Gordon Forte
