Ethnicity for the wrong reasons

Just when some people were of the view that Guyana was moving away from the idea of ethnic polarization there, big and bold in the Sunday Chronicle is the alleged quotation of a man now dead. The man collapsed and died of a heart attack on Saturday while he was at a bottom house meeting of the People’s Progressive Party. The Chronicle reported that the cause of his death was the announcement of a coalition between A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance For Change. The man reporting this incident was said to be a Member of Parliament, Neend Kumar, who was hosting the meeting. To add icing to the cake, Kumar reported that the man feels so strongly about racial voting that he literally killed himself when he thought of Moses Nagamootoo taking eleven per cent of East Indian votes to A Partnership for National Unity. It goes without saying that Kumar did not even seek to address the issue of ethnic voting because one could sense his bitterness at not only the death but the reported cause. We do know that there was no love lost between himself and Nagamootoo. The nation must now wonder whether there are those among us who are so hopeful that we will one day be Guyanese instead of Indians, Blacks, Chinese, Amerindians and the rest, that they actually see movement in this direction. Indeed, at the level of the state some years ago, in fact, from the days when Forbes Burnham was alive, reporters were prohibited from describing criminals by their ethnicity. So if three men of African or Indian ancestry committed a crime the reporters were constrained to merely report that three men had committed a crime. The view was that crime had nothing to do with ethnicity. Further, since the society was so polarised back then, one ran the risk of stereotyping particular groups of people. This mode of reporting actually dates back to the violent days in Guyana—the early 1960s when the two major races were at each other’s throat. People were being killed and the newspapers were there to report the killings. The editors found that when they reported that three Indian men were killed, the next day they were made to report that four Black men were killed. More than half a century later in a country with less than a million people, who have been living together for nearly 200 years, inter-marrying and sharing the same space, we still perpetuate our differences. These differences must be very sharp for a man to collapse and die at the mere thought that eleven per cent of Indian votes would go to APNU, a party headed by a Black man. But then again, we are not unique. There must be something about this thing called race. Haslyn Parris, a mathematician and former Minister of the Government, sees it as ethnic preference. But a preference does not usually lead to violence or death. In South Africa, Sri Lanka, and in what was once Czechoslovakia, people were attacked and killed because they looked different. In the United States there is still racism. The police slammed an Indian man face down into the ground and caused him to be hospitalized because a White man called to say that a Black man was walking down his street peering into places and things. It turned out that the Indian man was visiting his son and was merely strolling down the street. The good thing is that the society took condign action against the policeman. As fate would have it, there are people who vote by conscience. These people would support a politician for reasons other than his race or religion. And while these people do not exist in overwhelming numbers they do exist. Trinidad which gained its independence a mere four years before Guyana has long torpedoed the vote by race. But Guyana is a different kettle. Some politicians hold on to race because for them there is nothing else.