Power, not race, the problem

THE EDITOR: Last January I was fortunate to hear a piece of real politics that fell into my garden of reality. The political insight came via an interview with a Caribbean literary giant Mr George Lamming, on Gayelle (the channel) that covered a lot of ground about Caribbean people. Reacting to an invitation to specifically comment on issues such as race, women and hucksters in the Caribbean, the following is his response to our so-called racial problem.

“There are a number of things happening that seem to be vexatious and uncontrollable. I think particularly of what is called the racial problem in Trinidad and Guyana. I don’t believe that the problem in Trinidad especially is a racial problem. I think the problem in Trinidad is essentially a battle for getting hold of the instruments of power and it is a battle being fought by the petty bourgeois of two groups, and that essentially, is a political battle. What happens is, if you do not have a vision to bring to people, you play the ethnic card. The ethnic card is only played when you do not have a real message to bring. but as political education develops among masses of people it is going to become less and less effective to play that ethnic card.

“And what I think Trinidad will move to, and has the capacity to move to, is the creation of an environment in which there is really a civic, a civic nationalism that includes all ethnic definitions and so on. There is no ethnicity that will not be at home within that civil nationalism. I think that the capacity for it is there and I think that it is going to happen and that we are going to get through this. It is very important that we get through this because it then becomes a model for how a plural society could in fact work and we have no way yet on this planet where we see plural societies working. We have not yet reached any stage where we are going to war over religion, over language and so on. We are actually going to war over instruments of power.”

I share Mr Lamming’s objective vision as it is the much needed political recipe to get rid of this misleading racial nonsense that is dividing the country and especially the poor and under-privileged Afro and Indo Trinbagonians who are unorganised and remain vulnerable to bourgeois mental and physical political abuse. It will be a long journey beyond 2020, because it has a lot to do with political education and changing of attitudes, but together with bonding cultural relations among the masses, we will get there. On the way we will have to use many vehicles and constitution reform should be the first vehicle to start its entire engine for the journey towards a united Trinidad and Tobago. Civil society, in its own interest, needs to find its conscience and play a positive role in demanding that a broad-based constitution reform commission be appointed now, if we hope to reconstruct this nation.

WYCLIFFE MORRIS
Tacarigua