Racism is not the problem
Trinidad Guardian
October 26, 2003
Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday worked the crowd at the closing ceremony of the 2003 Divali Nagar celebrations, using the troubling chimera of racism.
“Is there a racial dimension to crime today?” he asked.
It was a continuance of a discussion that tends to be more readily raised in political speeches than by the man in the street.
People are far more worried about kidnapping, about murder and about runaway crime than they are about anything to do with race, because we are all vulnerable to the ready wielding of a gun in the hands of criminals without a shred of remorse.
It isn’t as if the ruling Government hasn’t offered the Opposition ammunition for its arguments.
By making decisions as disparate and unwise as publicly targeting young Afro-Trinidadians for vocational training and continuing the time-honoured policy of purging public sector companies of political appointments, they have actively worked to reload the repetitive weapons of the UNC.
In his Divali Nagar address, Mr Panday noted that racism will not go away if it is just ignored, but it won’t go away if it is made the political scapegoat for every failing in society and every criminal action.
Race is a problem in this country because it is the last remaining criteria that meaningfully divides the country into two identifiable political parties.
All other methods of polarising society have gradually either disappeared or become largely irrelevant, including wealth, ideology, religion and social standing.
The easiest way to divide the country into two large voting groups today is on the basis of race, and in steady, wilfully coded words, both parties have sought to reinforce their standing in racial relevant strongholds.
When people cross these clearly demarcated racial lines to serve in public office, they become targets for personal attacks and social denigration, and in failing to be committed to more than our bloodlines, Trinidad and Tobago has regressed as a nation.
Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi are both men who have been referred to by politicians with admiration, and both Mr Panday and PM Manning might well see their struggle as being foreshadowed by the works of these men.
But King and Gandhi never contradicted each other. Their messages were not for their enemies but for their people, whom they guided toward a righteous goal of justice.
If the political leaders of the PNM and the UNC want to be remembered with the same indelible passion, then they should understand what King and Gandhi did, and that was to deal with the monstrous problems of their society with clarity, firmness and compassion.
The problems of T&T are not rooted in race but in leadership and the management of plainly stated problems.
Criminals must be moved to laugh when they see the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader arguing over points of order.
Kidnappers must order champagne when they see the police and the army at odds with each other instead of standing united in challenging their criminal rule.
The challenge facing T&T is not dispelling “a dark cloud of racism,” but of raising the debate and focusing on the problems that are grinding the sweetness out of this country.
Until the UNC steps off the fence and again takes an active role in the country’s governance and the PNM stops fumbling the ball with crime, we will be faced with a grey cloud of ineptitude that we remain unable to dispel.