I'd hoped to share my entry to the Prime Minister's patriotic song contest this week (it's called "Deport Trevor Sudama"). But a response to last week's column on the Black Caucus demanding "land in Caroni" changed that. The response was from one Joanne Gomo, and below is verbatim:
Mr Ram, I read your column in the Guardian... your racial, sour face was staring at me along with your s--t headline. U really brave. This papers going far and wide and u know u Indian is coward.
U know nothing about nothing always writing s--t especially about the people u love to hate. Africans, afro-trinis but Mr, Let me tell u, I am BLACK, AFRICAN and PROUD and u are all that is wrong with this place. You Indians is the damn corrupt, conniving, lying racists in this country. Left up to u, black people would eat grass. but not me because I don't support indians unless I have too. Ur a---s too greedy and racist.
The black man taught u all everything when u stepped off the Fatal Razak. You were washing your rear with your hands, but allyuh stink racial and greedy. Feel you could tie up our minds with yuh s--t. But not me at all I could see allyuh from a mile. Allyuh racist and can't see it but when Africans want to unify its a problem. Man go drown yourself or go back Boombay. Jah !!"
As interesting it is hilarious. But more and more, people routinely carry this kind of animus around–with what consequences? Before that, though, is this typical? I'd say more typical than the sentient reader would hope. I see similar comments to my columns all the time (the Guardian usually deletes them). The comments to the Farrakhan article in 2012 were identical, as are those to most Carnival articles.
A similar if more restrained response to a column on Emancipation Day, 2011, by one Dr Melisse Ellis (published July 31, 2011) illustrates the trend. It read (in part): "I read Raymond Ramcharitar's column of July 27... and for me it was the last straw that broke this camel's back. I am sick and tired of 'others' telling us of the African-descended community how they think we should, or should not, commemorate emancipation...
"Let me tell you the reason for the anger you see: We vex because today in lovely T&T we still face far too many of the same challenges that our forebears did. In this T&T, which is claiming to be multicultural, we are still being asked to justify our culture and our expressions of it. We vex because we are not 'free' to be as African, in all its diversity, as we choose to be.
"We vex because in the glaring presence of high academic achievement, contemporary and past, local and international, people are still treating us as though we are lower-intelligence beings. We vex because in national discourses T&T refuses to acknowledge the value of our past and present economic contributions."
The anger is unmistakable, and congruent with Ms Gomo's, and given the use of the term "other" so pointedly, I guess all o' we is not one after all. The anger isn't restricted to one ethnic group; you hear it from other Trinidadians too, though not so stridently or publicly. I recall Dr Tim-Tim Gopeesingh talking about ethnic cleansing a few years ago, in Opposition pre-2010.
But where does the rage come from? My guesses would be ignorance, and careful cultivation. The Minister of Education, commenting on the recent decline in school test scores, said students lacked the ability to think critically. The lack of critical thinking skills leads to (among other things) blind acceptance of whatever is placed into those minds, and persists through adulthood. If all those children and adults are hearing are rage, resistance, and resentment (in the Canboulay/Reparations/Resistance movements, aka State culture), anger is a logical response to the mental and material environment. And it seems pervasive.
The visible consequences of a whole population walking around angry all the time include stress and tension, increased crime and violence generally. The intangible consequences include increased mental illness, sociopathy in everyday transactions like the service industries, and civil and protective service inertia.
All are accepted as normal now, but it wasn't always like this, and I'm not talking about the ole time days either. The genesis of the present was when media, cultural, "moral and spiritual" civil society, and state institutions combined to unseat the UNC which won the 2000 and 2001 elections. The means included a deluge of ethnic and general hatred. (Compare crime stats between 2000 and 2010.) I don't like to quote myself, but at the end of the three-year campaign and Pyrrhic PNM elections victory in 2002, I wrote in another newspaper:
"The people who will suffer most are the black working and under classes who voted PNM. Culture will be redirected to its original course: Carnival, which, as the "calypso competitions" in the run up to the elections proved... the PNM offers in lieu of education, art and public institutions. If there is a boom, the rich will become unimaginably richer, and the poor might be given large handouts which will pass through them like a dose of salts, and leave them no better off at the end. People like me–educated, employed–will bear the brunt of crime and social upheaval, and will leave; this has already started."
This was widely condemned as being "racist," but not inaccurate, unfortunately. This is a PNM problem, and there are simple means to defuse it, but they must want to. From the decline in everything over the last year, however, it seems the PNM like it so.