Racism. Crime. Discrimination. For years these have been the catchwords that have discomfited and even chilled Guyana's multi-racial populace.
For some people, they describe ethnic Afro-Guyanese. For others, they describe ethnic Indo-Guyanese.
For others still, they imply an alien and hostile race that doesn't belong in a land where Afro- and Indo-Guyanese have lived for as long as the history of slavery and indenturship in Guyana records them being here.
But beneath the dramatic clashes and confrontations that sometimes mar relations between these two ethnic groups, a reassuring process has been underway and is continuing to give shape to Guyanese of all races achieving, by reasonable measurement, goals that otherwise would have been a hopeless dream.
Guyanese have emerged from slavery and indentureship to becoming as well heeled, well housed and well educated as peoples in many other countries.
There was a time in Guyana when, it seemed, many Afro-Guyanese had resigned themselves to a life of poverty and subordination. For older folks, the era of deprivation and hopelessness conjured up stories they'd heard of life in pre-emancipation British Guiana.
That is something, because hearing or reading about slavery could be emotionally depressing. After centuries of what historians label as "pure hell," the legal abolition of the slave trade by Europe and North America occurred over a period of over thirty years, from the banning of the trade by Denmark, effective in 1803, to the eventual acceptance of abolition by Portugal in 1836; the critical step being the outlawing of the trade by Britain, the principal slave-trading nation, in 1807.
Legal abolition was, of course, by no means the same as effective suppression, and the trade continued illegally well into the nineteenth century, as long as there remained a market for slaves in the Americas (principally in Brazil and Cuba). The trans-Atlantic slave trade did not come to a total end, therefore, until the 1860s.
With the abolition of slavery, and the dawn of indentureship - the importation of European and Asian labour to fill the vacuum on the sugar plantations abandoned by most of the now-freed slaves, Africans and Indians were pitted against each other to prevent them from collaborating in any significant way to destabilize the colony's crucial plantation economy.
Political independence did little to end the cleavage. Until now!
Though pockets of resistance to us forging a national identity remain, the general citizenry has shown that Guyanese of all races are making it, and that upward mobility still operates.
Much remains to be achieved, at the neighborhood, regional and national levels, to transform so-called depressed communities.
But the lessons of the past, the grit to face the future, and the commitment by Guyanese of all races to work together, can turn what now seems illusionary into reality. It's a good time for us to move ahead from the past.