I was hoping to discuss Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari's excellent book on the war on drugs, but the CNC3 News story on March 11, which showed parents protesting "racism" at a school in south, stopped me. According to one parent, the principal "remove(d) a plaque with all the African children and leave the plaque with all the Indian children ... that says it all" (smug, knowing look). The education ministry's customarily terse response was that claims had been investigated and they'd found "racist allegations to be unfounded." But the pattern is familiar.
Last December 12, a CNC3 News story showed a group of children and parents camped outside the Ministry of Sport "protesting" the ministry's refusal to fund a sports excursion to Barbados. Parents and children were saying "if it was Westmoorings and Caroni or Siparia" there wouldn't be any trouble. And the PNM's "spokesman" appeared in a daily paper, saying it again, in case anyone missed it.
Then there's the NGC debacle which at least partially is about the ethnically inequitable disbursement of funds. In the last Dimanche Gras competition, at least four calypsonians complained about Indians "taking" what belongs to Africans. The sentiments are also repeated on talk radio and PNM online chatter.
Some years ago, the PNM's chief "spokesman" went around claiming that "Indian teachers were not teaching black children" in schools (Guardian, April 2, 2005, p8). The education ministry again tersely reported no evidence found. In 2007 Singing Sandra's calypso, Genocide, took it up a notch, claiming Indian doctors were performing unauthorised hysterectomies on African women.
So: not isolated, not sporadic: a recurring infection that afflicts the body politic. The meme has survived because the media and public persist in treating it like legitimate observation, to be countered with logic and fact. When the PNM's political "spokesman" made the statements about teachers in 2005, no less personages than Reginald Dumas and Selwyn Ryan refuted, giving the claims the status fact, when they should have been treated like hate-mongering trash. The other popular response is no better: ignoring it and letting it boil.
So rather than "respond" to these claims, I'll point out their historical context and character. The idea of resources being directed to Caroni and environs, and this being a wicked, unfair thing, issues from the still potent notion that people south of the Caroni are somehow less citizens that others, and therefore less entitled.
This notion has been around since the 19th century. It's been assiduously cultivated by the creole media and the PNM via calypso and its media of "tradition" and national culture since 1962. This is a plank of the PNM's ideology: its ethnic base's natural right to power, and it is, in a plethora of ways, endlessly repeated.
Well before independence, the early moves to stop Indian immigration were based on the fear among the black clerisy that growing numbers of Indians would lead to Indo political power at their expense. The best example of this is CP David's and Alfred Richards' testimony to the Sanderson Commission of 1909. The New Era of June 25, 1883, editorialised about the unsuitability of the Indians to be settlers. CLR James mentions the attitude in his Party Politics in the West Indies. As late as the 1970s, James Alva Bain's article in the Guardian on April 23, 1976 "Time is Running Out," made the fears of Indian takeover explicit.
The effects of decades of this? In an article in the journal Caribbean Quarterly (September�December 1994), Sharon Carew and Carla Mathison found that Afro-Trinidadian students and staff in a Toco school were paranoid that Indians (teachers and students) were racial and "taking over" the school. This was before the UNC came to power.
I belabour the evidence for obvious reasons–and there's plenty more. But there are two final facts many academics, politicians, and populists, wring themselves to ignore, which would nullify the arguments outlined above.
The main driver behind the entitlement argument is the assumption that the black population has been here from the days of slavery and, because they were here first, have dibs. The fact is, the vast majority (if not all) Afro-Trinidadians here now are descendants of emigrants from the smaller islands in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and many illegal immigrants after 1962.
It's likely that Afro-Trinidadians with roots from the 19th century (CLR James et al) would have left in the post-War migration to England, and the 300,000 people who emigrated to the US and Canada between independence and 2000.
But (to repeat) these are facts, and the facts are not the problem. The problem is the PNM noise machine, which continuously spews this rot, which works its way into popular culture and mass sentiment, and hamstrings any possibility of a national anything.
This sickness eating away at the psychic body of the country is much more dangerous than the Debe-Mon Desir highway, corruption, and how much the UNC tief. And there are ways to address it. First, the media need to stop reporting things like this uncritically, and the public needs to stop acting as if these statements and sentiments are normal and acceptable. Second, social scientists at universities have to stop being fence sitters, or pole dancers, and do the work to refute this garbage (as started with the Centre for Ethnic Studies in the 1990s), or hire people who can do the work, instead of hiring friends, relatives and outside women.
And finally, Indians who have piles and piles of money have to stop buying things with names they can't pronounce, and start using their money to address people who make these statements with impunity. Better to save yourself than rely on the kindness of journalists, government, and academics.
