Clevon Raphael

In spite of all our prob­lems–and I do not feel that they are as bad as some would like us to be­lieve–T&T has an en­vi­able record with re­spect to the way the var­i­ous eth­nic groups live to­geth­er in har­mo­ny.There are those who would like us to be­lieve, even though there is ev­i­dence to the con­trary, we have a racial prob­lem, but I do not share that view. I pre­fer to see it as a racial and a class is­sue.

No way can we ever be count­ed among coun­tries such as Amer­i­ca, which has done a lot to im­prove its race re­la­tions and has in­sti­tut­ed stiff penal­ties for deal­ing with civ­il rights and hate-re­lat­ed crimes. We have nev­er ex­pe­ri­enced the Amer­i­can kind of sit­u­a­tion. Amer­i­ca has dealt with its share of this very emo­tive is­sue.Al­though we en­sured that "every creed and race find an equal place," we did so long be­fore Amer­i­ca and oth­er much larg­er coun­tries dealt with theirs.

Un­like South Africa, too, where apartheid pit­ted the mi­nor­i­ty whites against the ma­jor­i­ty blacks un­til the first free and fair elec­tions in that coun­try in 1994 broke down the hat­ed apartheid sys­tem, which for years op­pressed the ma­jor­i­ty black pop­u­la­tion.Racial­ly-bi­ased laws in­sti­tu­tion­alised apartheid, de­scribed by the white mi­nor­i­ty regimes as sep­a­rate de­vel­op­ment, but which man­i­fest­ly dis­crim­i­nat­ed against the black pop­u­la­tion, who had to fight bit­ter­ly, re­sult­ing in the killing of hun­dreds of blacks over the years.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers