The Repeating Island is a famous book by the late Cuban scholar, Antonio Benitez Rojo. I could get into its content (which is fascinating) but in this case it's just the first phrase that comes to mind in the present dispensation. It seems that everything in popular culture, academic, media, political and social spheres, is stuck in an endless repeating loop. This kicked me listening to Franklin Khan and Keith Rowley limply denounce the racism coming from their platforms, and try to flip it (suggesting the PP is the racial party).
Politics, in addition to being the art of the possible, seems in T&T to be the art of the amnesic.
No one has any memory of anything before 2010, which is the furthest historical horizon. The medium term stops at Section 34. The short term is Fifa & Jack, for this week. That's why the PNM can so confidently and brazenly say it's/ they're not about race. In the Express's two-article chuckle-fest in April about PP/government bloggers attacking women and Dr Rowley, the general secretary of the PNM, Ashton Ford, was quoted saying of racism something to the effect that "it's not who we are", or some such thing.
Which leads to a few obvious questions, the first being: WTF? The others including: do they actually know what "racism" means? Is this the PNM who selected as a candidate Maxie "Chutney Rising" Cuffie? Is it the PNM one of whose frontline supporters wrote in the Mirror (June 4, 2004, p 34) an article with the headline "Dem Indian and dem too deceitful"? The same person who was going round saying Indian teachers were not teaching black children in 2005?
Is this the PNM whose radio host supporters have shows called The Black Agenda and organizations called The Black Caucus? And other supporters who say and sing things like Indian doctors deliberately sterilize black women? (Singing Sandra's calypso, Genocide.) Or beg "bandit pardners" to "kidnap dem" (Cro Cro's calypso, Face Reality)? And what of Bodyguard, Snakey, Karene Asche et co? (Ever listen to the lyrics of Asche's Be Careful What You Wish For?)
What about PNM leaders meeting with Louis Farrakhan when he came here? If, in all seriousness, the PNM is aware of all these things and still thinks it's not racist, then we have a horse of a whole different species here: one with a horn growing from the centre of its forehead. The question is, how could such obvious delusion pass as normal? As discussed in this space, a large part of the reason is the fundamental flaw in Trini Afrocentric/ethnic logic: its premise that AfroTrinidadians are identical to African Americans, and are therefore entitled to all the rights and so forth. To repeat: wrong.
Suffice it say, of more interest is why this flawed premise persists. In the US (and the Metropole generally) ethnic positions and politics are so over-analysed, over-determined, and overdone, that talking race can be like walking though an ideative minefield. White people either keep discussions strict limits, or say nothing at all, but remain unconvinced. So their words say one thing, actions say another.
Thus African Americans have enormous cultural latitude in the US: in effect able to publicly say and feel things no other ethnic group can, but they're by far the most discriminated against in terms of employment, incarceration, and policy generally.
And it's not just opinion. There's no shortage of high-quality social science produced on the ethnic issue–from empirical studies like Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, and journalism and cultural criticism from Michael Moore, John McWhorter, Stanley Crouch, and Dave Chappelle. So whatever else ails it, US ethnic discourse doesn't suffer for data.
Here, it's the opposite: almost no empirical data, and most attempts at discussion on ethnic issues are anecdotal and moronic. The Centre for Ethnic Studies was formed in the early 1990s to address this need, but as its reports began to confirm that Indians were the real Africans when it came to discrimination, the institution was promptly closed.
A couple of edited collections like Trinidad Ethnicity (Kevin Yelvington) and Identity Ethnicity and Culture in the Caribbean (Ralph Premdas) exist.
They confirm that once the analysis becomes rigorous, the conclusions that racial asymmetries might not be against Africans, but in their favour, in Trinidad at least. And you get the impression that's the reason local academics prefer to leave the area understudied, and import conclusions from the US. I wrote a paper on the issue a few years ago and sent it to two journals.
One (where the referees were not locals) said it was good enough to publish with revisions. The other sent it to a highly respected local academic to referee, who concluded it was a conspiracy theory and not worth pissing on. (I kept all the emails.) Through this means, much scholarship which attempts to shine unwanted light on the ethnic issue in T&T is quickly stifled.
And the PP is more guilty here than the PNM. The PNM has its mythology (Father of the Nation, multi-racial, but not really). The PP has not attempted to counter with legitimate scholarship, and instead concocted "multiculturalism" to distract the nation while billion-dollar contracts were/are being handed out. One of the consequences of this PP cynicism, mixed into a population socialized by US "reality" television and the low end of African American pop culture, is that the PNM can claim they're not racial, and no one has the wherewithal, data, or apparently desire, to rebut.