Confusing race relations with racism

THE EDITOR: Thank you for space to convey my regret at the turn of events that allowed a group of UWI theoreticians to obfuscate, dilute, hijack and gloss over The President’s original motivation for embarking on his race relations demarche that he announed to the Maha Sabha on May 29.

The Anglo-colonial plantocracy not only failed to treat with race relations but if anything it also fanned the flames of Indo-Afro separation (the divide and rule policy) by richly rewarding African urbanism at the expense of Indian rural neglect. For 41 years independent Trinba-gonians have stigmatised the concept of race. We have avoided and failed to face full frontal nudity as well as the strains and stresses of Afro-Indo relations in spite of our growth to maturity. We avoided calling a spade a spade and allowed ethnic polarisation to fester and grow in the interest of political supremacy. The President’s National Self-Discovery Committee (NSDC) should have signalled this fundamental departure from the past in its modus operandi. It should have announced its intention to address the issue of race relations frontally and unambiguously. Instead the Chairman of the Committee Senator Ramchand (Newsday Aug 13, p 12) committed a definitional faux pas by agreeing to sweep “race relations” below the carpet. He euphemistically substituted “national self-discovery” perhaps confusing race, an accepted sociological concept with racism. This self-discovery label is not only misleading but also unnecessarily meaningless and confusing to the average Trini.

Since 1956 the term “national” incubated in cosmopolitan TT a virulent strain of ethno-nationalism that contributed to and brought us to our current parlous state of ethnic bi-polarisation. “Multicultural,” if this were necessary, would have been more appropriate than “national” — a term that compromises the future recommendations of the Committee. Chairman Ramchand emphasised that the Committee was “... not a race Committee.” If in his own words the end product of its work is “... not to make African and Indian relations better” then pray Senator what are your Committee’s objectives? That was the genesis of His Excellency’s Maha Sabha intervention. Research into, understanding and dissemination of knowledge on ethnicity cannot be undertaken in vacuo. They must be premised and conditioned on achieving identifiable and relevant social objectives of expected group and individual behavioural outcomes and changes ie better race relations. This cannot happen by accident or be a spin-off effect as Ramchand indicated. We are therefore wasting time by emasculating and deflating the President’s original race initiative. We are going to generate unfulfilling hopes and undeliverable expectations on taking our cosmopolitanism to new frontiers of peaceful and harmonious cultural co-existence, cross fertilisation, fusion and interpersonal harmony and understanding.

In examining the prospectus for the conduct of the proposed ethno-social inquiry as outlined by Senator Ramchand, I asked myself in the face of a non-existent budget who will fund the much-needed PR/media practitioners, the sociologists, the social psychologists, the pollsters etc to allow this National Self Discovery Committee (NSDC) “to go below the surface” of racial conflict and tension and arrive at meaningful and usable data? With the membership of the NSDC fully engaged in fulfilling their demanding academic/political responsibilities and without the requisite supporting Secretariat facilities, how can it deliver anything of substance and meaning on its broad, convoluted and diffused mandate within an initial limited time frame of 12 months? How can the NSDC maintain its independence as the Chairman asserted, without an independent source of funding to project its message on ethnic knowledge and understanding to its multicultural audience via the print and electronic media? Will it rely on the goodwill of Gov’t’s PR machinery and the private media? This will be another talk-shop. Finally there is an indisputable correlation between ethnicity and geography in TT. Who speaks for rural TT heartland — the victims of widespread geographic/ethnic discrimination? Must UWI and the East-West corridor constituency continue to define and dominate the contours of our cosmopolitanism?

STEPHEN KANGAL
Caroni