Den­zil Mo­hammed

A bunch of dis­parate is­sues con­flat­ed re­cent­ly and cre­at­ed quite the nar­ra­tive.

• Two "Pres boys" shared the Pres­i­dent's Medal, one of whom is from my al­ma mater, Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege, San Fer­nan­do-reaf­firm­ing it­self as the best high school in the coun­try. (No hate mail, please.)

• The dis­cus­sion of In­do-Trinida­di­ans con­tin­u­ing to out­num­ber oth­er groups in the schol­ar­ship list made its an­nu­al emer­gence.

• A UWI law fac­ul­ty is said to be con­struct­ed in, of all places, Debe, sin­gle-hand­ed­ly re­vi­tal­is­ing the dou­bles in­dus­try in South.

• A cake sale by Cam­pus Re­pub­li­cans at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, stirred up a firestorm over its pric­ing, which was done ac­cord­ing to, not the item, but the cus­tomer's eth­nic­i­ty.

• An­oth­er colum­nist last week­end wrote about "Lo­cal ver­sus 'for­eign' ed­u­ca­tion," say­ing UWI "un­de­ni­ably" ex­posed him to ideas from the world out­side and helped him "de­vel­op...con­fi­dence" in who he was.

• And, last­ly, a ra­dio per­son­al­i­ty host­ed a call-in show on the top­ic of the ap­pro­pri­ate­ness of two men hav­ing din­ner in pub­lic.

The sto­ry be­gins here. It is to the cred­it of prin­ci­pal Er­rol Jaikarans­ingh and the Col­lege's tra­di­tions that Pres San­do copped yet an­oth­er Pres­i­dent's Medal. It is a school where stu­dents are mould­ed to be gen­tle­men with skills ex­tend­ing be­yond the class­room. In Pres, we learned to re­place our chairs when we got up, to stand for women en­ter­ing a room, that mu­sic was not "gay" but a rare skill (any­body see Kees on Fox NY?) and that nerds could be foot­ballers, too. (Yes, our foot­ballers have won na­tion­al schol­ar­ships. Se­ri­ous­ly.)

It's a shame, then, that such ac­com­plish­ments are de­con­struct­ed in­to race talk. Some­how, up to 75 per cent of schol win­ners be­ing In­do-Tri­ni, ac­cord­ing to an ar­ti­cle in an­oth­er news­pa­per ti­tled "Why are young blacks falling short?" in­di­cates some­thing sin­is­ter and op­pres­sive. Un­sur­pris­ing­ly, even though this has been the trend for years, there is al­so the talk of the "re­la­tion­ship" be­tween the PP Gov­ern­ment-an Afro-less ad­min­is­tra­tion, and the few schols won by Afro-Tri­nis.

Lack of race stats

For one thing, this is in­sult­ing to our schol­ar­ship win­ners, who are now of­fi­cial­ly among the bright­est in the world. Few of us would ever know of their high­ly in­di­vid­u­alised jour­neys of sac­ri­fice and grit. We do not tick a box for In­do-this or Afro-that for any­thing. There is lit­tle sol­id record of eth­nic de­mo­graph­ics in our schol­ar­ship win­ners, Pub­lic Ser­vice, pris­ons, Po­lice Force or doc­tors' of­fices. And yet we keep talk­ing race with au­thor­i­ty. For in­stance, Kevin Baldeosingh once point­ed out that, ac­cord­ing to sev­er­al sur­veys, "it ap­pears that In­dos and Afros are pret­ty much on par" in our schools: "That 45 per cent of Afros had been ex­posed to Or­di­nary Lev­el ed­u­ca­tion as com­pared to 43 per cent of In­dos, while... 20 per cent of Afros had some O-Lev­el sub­jects com­pared to 21 per cent of In­dos. In oth­er words, the ma­jor­i­ty of peo­ple in both groups are poor­ly ed­u­cat­ed."

In­stead, peo­ple want "some­body" (in­vari­ably the Gov­ern­ment) to do "some­thing" to al­le­vi­ate the scourge of "eth­nic im­bal­ances." Af­ter decades of Afro-Tri­nis out­num­ber­ing oth­er groups in the schol­ar­ship lists, and In­do-Tri­nis now tak­ing their place, what should we do to­day? Per­haps we could make a case for what those Cal­i­for­nia stu­dents were protest­ing: pend­ing leg­is­la­tion that would let state uni­ver­si­ties con­sid­er eth­nic­i­ty in the ad­mis­sion process. In their case, there were many years of "in­sti­tu­tion­alised af­fir­ma­tive ac­tion for White folks" and "racial­ly em­bed­ded in­equal­i­ty" favour­ing whites.

Per­haps the "racial­ly em­bed­ded in­equal­i­ty" in our own in­sti­tu­tions like the med­ical school and Form Six could be cal­cu­lat­ing­ly reme­died this way. Af­ter all, ac­cord­ing to some, the pro­posed UWI law fac­ul­ty in Debe is ob­vi­ous­ly be­ing sit­u­at­ed in the In­do-Tri­ni heart­land to serve In­do-Tri­nis. Clear­ly, these ed­u­cat­ed com­men­ta­tors know that uni­ver­si­ty ad­mis­sion re­quire­ments re­cent­ly stopped con­sid­er­ing grades in favour of ge­og­ra­phy.

A na­tion of 'thinkers'

It's sil­ly, to be sure. But this is what peo­ple think. And when enough peo­ple feel a cer­tain way about some­thing, no mat­ter how pre­pos­ter­ous, it is giv­en verisimil­i­tude. Per­haps this is the kind of think­ing en­gen­dered by our uni­ver­si­ties, them­selves. More peo­ple in T&T have de­grees than ever be­fore. And, at the same time as it un­der­went its Big Bang, UWI al­so sought to build a so­ci­ety of "crit­i­cal thinkers." Clear­ly, thus far, it has failed. We have "un­de­ni­ably" not been ex­posed to oth­er worlds, see­ing in­stead through our own lit­tle parochial binoc­u­lars. We have be­come so self-ab­sorbed that we've lost all per­spec­tive, all rea­son, all pur­pose.

The big is­sues like eth­nic­i­ty be­come a ca­coph­o­nous cy­cle of con­ver­sa­tion that ac­com­plish­es noth­ing ex­cept to show up the lack of "con­fi­dence" we have in our­selves as a na­tion. It shows up dai­ly in the con­ver­sa­tions per­vad­ing the in­nu­mer­able call-in ra­dio shows, which en­cour­age a loud di­a­logue of se­ri­ous non­sense among thou­sands of Tri­nis. I mean, one ra­dio pro­gramme went from analysing crit­i­cal­ly the pur­pose and ef­fects of the state of emer­gency to the ap­pro­pri­ate­ness of two men go­ing out and hav­ing din­ner to­geth­er. The calls came in fast and fu­ri­ous, and se­ri­ous. If this is the way we ap­proach se­ri­ous dis­cus­sions, then how do we ever re­al­ly dis­cuss race?