We need national consensus on diversity

THE EDITOR: I wish to pay homage to His Excellency The President Professor Max Richards for giving momentum and legitimacy in his speech to Parliament to the expanding cadre of patriotic citizens (Newsday June 22 p11) who has appealed for national initiatives to be undertaken geared to manage, harness and exploit our diversity. Diversity management will enable our cosmopolitanism to lead fulfilling lives as well as to compete more efficiently in the challenging globalised world. In my view diversity management should take precedence and planning priority over and above the elusive, pie in the sky, expensive Vision 2020 public relations facade.

Gone are the days when a culturally assimilationist policy of nationalism dishonestly emphasised our cosmetic similarities and refused to cater for our fundamental multicultural differences and strengths. I am cautiously optimistic that the Presidential appeal in Parliament on diversity will influence the Government to issue the long, outstanding White Paper on Managing Our Diversity. This paper will constitute the fundamental policy framework to guide and stimulate national dialogue on the values and virtues of our multicultural landscape out of which should emerge the national consensus on diversity. We must provide vents and internal pressure release mechanisms to stabilise the cauldron.

In my view, it is the exclusionary policy of rampant, nationalism that has long created fissures and fault lines and culminated in a highly polarised society. These racio-cultural rift valleys long pre-dated the current deluge of letters appearing in the print media that is merely the tip of the festering iceberg. The role of the liberated and mushrooming media is to facilitate public-spirited dialogue even if some of these offerings may be extremist and cause some concern for the traditionalists. Let the people talk and vent their decades of pent-up frustration to make their claims and counter claims. Maturation and consensual thinking will follow when we see each other as brothers and sisters and when the pangs of alienation, deprivation and discrimination have receded. I am confident of the peaceful outcomes of the internal dynamics of the dialogue. The realisation/restoration of harmony in TT must not be at the expense of the absence of justice and equality so characteristic of the pre and post 1950s. Harmony must not be based on the sanctification of the status quo that is favourable to the ruling elite.

Harmony must not be silence-based, conformist and conservative in its contours. There are so many hypotheses, theories, theses on racio-cultural relations that must be dispassionately investigated in the interest of achieving harmonious cross cultural co-existence and amalgamation that they call for a High Powered Commission on Equality and Human Rights to be established. The Centre for Ethnic Studies and the National Cultural Commission have been abandoned. The two race relations committees are stymied of the requisite human, institutional and financial capacity and therefore, in the words of His Excellency unable “... to go below the surface to separate theory from fact.” We are all expected to remain quiet and docile almost in karmic style because there is an invisible, blind hand that has been dispensing and will continue to hand out distributive and restorative justice and equity. Even the Divine does not confer his grace and favour in this fashion. Orare est laborare (Working is praying) There is a correlation between agitation, representations and lobbying and the enjoyment of the rewards dispensed by Mother TT. Why do people join political parties?

The Karmic philosophy of cause and effect, of equilibrium, of slavishly accepting your station in life as a just perspective reward of pre-destination, is just not on in 21st Century TT. Healthy civilised dissent is not the harbinger of ethnic gloom and doom. It is the bedrock of democracy that is fuelled by a responsible, public-spirited media. In TT we are afraid to provide avenues for race relations to be faced frontally because we are uncertain of our ancestral memories, our cultural identities, loyalties and the constituent ancestral elements of being Trinbagonian. Perhaps Senator Seetahal will outline the elements in due course. The more we postpone and waffle in initiating the dialogue on confronting full frontal racio-ethnic nudity the greater the internal strains and stresses.

STEPHEN KANGAL
Caroni