The flocculation of statements and media expostulations over the last few weeks have been subtle. But the Guardian's front page on Monday was a smack in the face–Race Hate. This time, it's a Facebook video of a justice-seeker threatening/seeking retribution for a man killed by police. Specifically he said something about "Hindu" officers with "pretty coloured bands on their hands." The person subsequently said the statements were not meant to be "no trigger" but those sentiments need no trigger.
The TTPS can take care of themselves. But most of the rest of us can't (against guns and gangs), so what do we do? Perhaps Hindus should issue a national apology, and stop wearing the offensive wrist bands in public. This is more or less the community's response to everything: retreat, silence in the spheres that matter (legal, public, institutional) and expressing its dissatisfaction by voting UNC. And letting the Maha Sabha speak for it.
But Race Hate should be of concern to anyone interested in ethnic conflict and the deliberate institutional avoidance of it when it concerns IndoTrinidadians. A few things feed the problem almost invisibly. They are: first, the degree to which race and ethnic matters have interpenetrated the ordinary, everyday language of the society; second, the assumption of symmetry, or that all things are equal in ethnic matters; and finally, the abdication of responsibility of academics who are paid to study this and educate the population.
First issue: the degree of involuntary racialisation of the national discourse. My colleague in these pages, Tony Fraser, on October 16, wrote about the "marginalisation" of AfroTrinidadians. He began with the lack of AfroTrinidadian names on a list of investors for Chaguaramas lands, and somehow got to Eric Williams' march for Chaguaramas. (Again, I invite readers to look up the term "lebensraum".)
Then there was the poisonous babble on talk radio about the most recent scholarship list. The Indians taking over. Well, Lakshmi Girls leads the pack, so if you call studying and passing exams "taking over," and dispossessing Africans, they're guilty.
Elsewhere, Newsday published a letter yesterday from PanTrinbago's PRO making the connection of the steel pan, slavery and Africa. (So when you say the steel pan is the national instrument, what else are you saying?) And yet elsewhere, recent statements by Canon Knolly Clarke that Carnival should be "taught in schools" are also of this ilk: an indirect way of preaching ethnic solidarity. Similar statements have come from Fr Clyde Harvey, who had no problem with ethnic pride, if I recall.
These statements and sentiments cumulatively operate on minds already weakened by a collapsed education system, and steep them in race. Add the fact that these minds are consuming US media, with its recent stream of stories about protests against mainly white police killing unarmed black men, and you have a disastrous situation.
Many Trinidadians adopt US emotional reactions to US problems, and apply them here. In the case of Afrocentrists, their oppression needs an oppressor. And since the white folks have retreated, well, the new oppressors are Hindus/Indians, with their enraging wrist-strings.
The reason this kind of sentiment takes take hold so easily is a deep-seated ignorance and a culturally pervasive selective amnesia. The Williams version of history has been repeated so many times, it's now dogma. To wit, if the AfroTrinidadian population seems to be falling behind, there's an obvious verifiable reason, and it's not "oppression." Much of the AfroTrinidadian middle class emigrated between 1962 and the present. They were replaced by an influx of, uhm, undocumented immigrants from the smaller islands, who were stuck in ghettoes, given ID cards and told how to vote.
This was on the front page of all the Trinidadian newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s, yet many people choose to forget it. One history expert told me a few stories from old newspapers don't count. Well, here's one from a recent Grenadian newspaper, the New Today, on September 11, 2015, after the last general elections here: "It is our suspicion that most Grenadians were hooting for the PNM and not the outgoing United National Congress . . . for obvious reason (sic). It was the PNM under then founder Dr Eric Williams that opened the doors for large numbers of Grenadians to live and work permanently in the neighbouring twin island republic." Hmmm.
The second issue is the ethnic asymmetry in cultural representation. It's established (if you read cultural criticism, from Gordon Rohlehr, Louis Regis, Kevin Yelvington, Peter van Koningsbruggen, Anton Allahar and Selwyn Ryan et al) that "national culture" was designed to be Afrocentric to neutralise the Indo-political opposition. This meant their effective erasure from the national imagination, except for a series of Orientalist images in ethnic costumes, exotic gods what have you. This only started to change in the 21st Century. (Had any media scholar has done an image audit of the press or television? Do they know what an image audit is?)
So one ethnic position has enjoyed the vast majority of representation of its ideas as "national." This makes the screams of "oppression" mystifying. But more mystifying is Indo stolidity in the face of this. Probably the bright strings on the wrists are magic strings which make them immune from race hatred.
I'm not Hindu. But If I were, and rich, here's what I'd do: hire lawyers and start suing everyone, from the NCC for the Dimanche Gras, to media which broadcast and published hate speech, to individuals who go around saying things like "Indian doctors tie the tubes of black women," and calypsonians for singing it. I would audit the research of tertiary institutions to see whether there was an ethnic bias, and hold those on top accountable if there were. And thinking like that, I suppose, is the reason I'm not rich.