Race Talk

There isn’t much to feel encouraged about in Trinidad these days, but there’s one major thing I think we can feel reasonably proud of: our attitude towards race. This may seem a very weird assertion, especially after all the race talk of the past few months. But this is exactly what I find encouraging. After all, as Selwyn Cudjoe himself has admitted, when he first brought up his talk about a racial imbalance at UWI, not one newspaper columnist, “African or Indian,” came to his defence. Instead of taking the hint, Cudjoe then went further and implied that Afro-Trini underachievement in academia was the result of  “Indian” teachers putting black students at the back of the class. Nobody has come out in support of Cudjoe, not even one of the idiots who clapped at his seminar. Instead, commentators, from newspaper columnists to Independent Senators to letter-writers, have castigated Cudjoe with a bluntness usually typical only of reprobates like Kevin Baldeosingh. Terms like “pseudo-intellectual” and “provocateur” and “clown” have flown freely. Such unanimity on any issue is virtually unprecedented.

The same was true of the general public. Trinis distrust obvious demagogues, maybe because we are essentially tolerant, or maybe for no better reason than demagogues are so utterly humourless. So, even if he were smart enough to tone down his rhetoric, Cudjoe’s strained smile ensures that he has no political future here. What this little teacup storm shows is that most Trinis are free of racism, if not racialism. We tend to use the terms interchangeably but, while I’m not much for semantics, the difference in meanings is important here. According to the historian George M. Fredrickson, in his book Racism, “It is when differences that might otherwise be considered ethnocultural are regarded as innate, indelible, and unchangeable that a racist attitude or ideology can be said to exist.” “Racialism” is different. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah defines this as “the belief that there are heritable [I presume Appiah actually means hereditary] characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits or tendencies with each other than they do not share with members of any other race.” It is the latter perspective, I think, which generally holds sway in Trinidad. Appiah, by the way, correctly says that racialism is factually incorrect, but not morally wrong. And it is worth noting that, by Frederickson’s definition of racism, even Sat Maharaj is not a racist: Sat, after all, continually argues that Afro-Trinidadians should try to adopt Hindu tenets and values.

The only persons amongst us who are quite free of both racist and racial perspectives are those who see themselves as Trini long before they see themselves as Indo or Afro. And eradicating racialism means creating a true Trini identity, not an “Indian” and “African” one. The latter projects will only exacerbate racial animosity, because human nature is such that bigotry is easier to create than tolerance. People have a natural tendency to split into groups and, once we align ourselves with a group, to see members of another group as evil or inferior. This was part of our evolution. While we were still apes, we split into groups and fought over territory and resources. The winners were always those individuals more inclined to group loyalty — or, put another way, more inclined to hate the other group. This has been comprehensively proven by many experiments, the most famous one being the Robbers’ Cave study by social psychologist Muzafer Sherif. Sherif’s research team took a carefully selected group of well-adjusted, middle-class American boys and randomly divided them into two groups that competed in sports and skits. Within days, the groups were attacking each other so fiercely that the experimenters had to intervene for the boys’ safety.

This does not, however, mean that racism is inherent in our nature. Indeed, according to evolutionary theory, it cannot be, since the formation of the different races of humankind occurred long after homo sapiens had already evolved. Instead, racism is a prejudice tacked on to our innate tendency towards groupishness. In order to test this hypothesis, the anthropologist John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides, who founded evolutionary psychology, asked their colleague Robert Kurzban to conduct an experiment to find out how people naturally categorised one another: by sex, age, race or other criteria. I won’t go into the details of the experiment (which involved matching written sentences to a picture of a person) but Kurzban found that it was relatively easy to make his subjects ignore race, but virtually impossible to make them ignore sex. All he had to do was put the picture of a person in a group where sex or age is the dominant category, or even create a scenario where people of different races were part of a group working towards a common goal. “This study has enormous implications for social policy,” notes Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture. “It suggests that categorising individuals by race is not inevitable, that racism can be easily defeated if coalition clues cut across races, and that there is nothing intractable about racist attitudes. It also suggests that the more people of different races seem to act or be treated as members of a rival coalition, the more racist instincts they risk evoking.”

Which bring us to the core reason that Cudjoe’s rants have gotten so much attention: not because Cudjoe himself is so noteworthy, but because he has the support of the Prime Minister. And this, in turn, should greatly worry Patrick Manning, because the attacks on Cudjoe are, to a great extent, an indictment of Manning. What does it say about Manning’s political savvy that he believes Cudjoe’s getting money to put on seminars is the same as getting votes? What does it say about Manning’s racial perspective that he believes that aligning with Cudjoe could win him some political benefit? And, finally, what does it say about Manning’s born-again morals that he was so quick to get rid of Hubert Alleyne but has left Cudjoe untouched? As long as Cudjoe continues to receive that support, then the Manning regime will be seen as treating half the population as members of a rival coalition. Luckily, on this issue, our citizens seem to be far wiser than our political leaders.
E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website (now updated): www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh