KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

The Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion (MATT) is con­sid­er­ing fil­ing a com­plaint with the Equal Op­por­tu­ni­ties Com­mis­sion (EOC) against Joint Trade Union Move­ment (JTUM) pres­i­dent An­cel Ro­get, af­ter he re­ferred to ed­i­tors of the three dai­ly news­pa­pers as “house ni**ers”.In a state­ment hours af­ter Ro­get at­tacked the me­dia hous­es at a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, MATT de­scribed his ref­er­ences as an egre­gious ex­am­ple of in­fan­tile lead­er­ship.

MATT said Ro­get’s com­ment was an at­tack against a free press that has rep­re­sent­ed the voice of work­ers through­out the his­to­ry of me­dia in T&T.
“This is sil­ly sea­son, not open sea­son on jour­nal­ists,” MATT said.

“Lead­ers seem in­ca­pable of eman­ci­pat­ing them­selves from nar­row ide­olo­gies and lim­it­ed vo­cab­u­lar­ies. A sim­i­lar mat­ter in­volv­ing our mem­ber, Ke­jan Haynes, is cur­rent­ly be­fore the Equal Op­por­tu­ni­ties Com­mis­sion (EOC). MATT is ac­tive­ly ex­plor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of fil­ing a sim­i­lar com­plaint against Mr Ro­get on be­half of our mem­bers.”
In 2018, Haynes filed an EOC com­plaint against Pro­gres­sive Em­pow­er­ment Par­ty leader Phillip Alexan­der. Alexan­der had de­scribed Haynes as a “half-pint house n--ro, bent over back­wards to sell your broth­ers and sis­ters for a few pieces of sil­ver and a pat on the head from Sab­ga.” Alexan­der claimed that he did not know Haynes’ eth­nic­i­ty when he com­ment­ed.
The term is a de­riv­a­tive of the slav­ery era which was used to de­scribe a house slave of African de­scent who had a high­er stan­dard of liv­ing than his or her peers. It al­so de­scribed a black per­son who strives to please white peo­ple, even if it means dis­own­ing his or her own racial iden­ti­ty.
Dur­ing JTUM’s me­dia con­fer­ence at Para­mount Build­ing, San Fer­nan­do, yes­ter­day, Ro­get used the deroga­to­ry ref­er­ence as he at­tempt­ed to clar­i­fy JTUM’s calls for the com­mence­ment of out­stand­ing wage ne­go­ti­a­tions be­tween the var­i­ous unions and the Gov­ern­ment.
“I want to make the point for those ed­i­tors, those house ni**ers whose cry­ing is for the 1 per cent and who for the es­tab­lish­ment, ad­vances the es­tab­lish­ment’s po­si­tion, that this morn­ing, I as the pres­i­dent of the Joint Trade Union Move­ment is not call­ing for more mon­ey,” Ro­get said.

“I am not be­ing un­rea­son­able. I am tak­ing the most rea­son­able po­si­tion, the moral high ground of a po­si­tion to say ‘lis­ten, you ought to treat with all of those work­ers with re­spect’. Any self-re­spect­ing ed­i­tor who is not in the hands or at the be­hest of their one per cent, mod­ern-day slave mas­ters would agree with the po­si­tion that him­self, at the end of the day, is treat­ed as a work­er be­cause that is how they see them.”
He added, “Even though you would car­ry out their dic­tates as your lo­cal, mod­ern-day mas­sas and write against the trade union move­ment that ‘elec­tion time and they are now com­ing to raise these is­sues’, I want to re­mind you house ni**ers in the Guardian and the Ex­press and the News­day and so on, I want to re­mind you that we have been rais­ing these is­sues all of the time. We will con­tin­ue to raise them in this time, we will con­tin­ue to raise it af­ter elec­tions. Elec­tion or no elec­tion, we will con­tin­ue to raise it. That is the con­sis­ten­cy of us.”

He said JTUM wrote to Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert on three oc­ca­sions to dis­cuss out­stand­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions but there was no re­sponse. He said jour­nal­ists were there when JTUM de­liv­ered those let­ters.
“The me­dia was there. You ed­i­tors, you house ni**ers, your hard work­ers were out there, so you can spin these how you want, they were out there. We re­al­ly do not care about any of you all any­way.”
He al­so warned “syco­phants” of the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment and Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress that if they were against the trade union move­ment when their par­ty was in gov­ern­ment, they should not seek to join the band­wag­on fol­low­ing Mon­day’s elec­tion.
“All of those per­sons to­day, who donned them­selves in red or yel­low jer­seys, walk­ing all over the place, we want to re­mind you that your is­sue is un­re­solved as we speak.”

Kafra Kambon

De­plorable con­duct

Al­so con­tact­ed on the is­sue yes­ter­day, T&T Pub­lish­ers and Broad­cast­ers As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Ki­ran Ma­haraj said she could not com­ment un­til re­view­ing the state­ments.
But vet­er­an jour­nal­ist Wes­ley Gib­bings said Ro­get used com­plete­ly un­ac­cept­able lan­guage to ap­ply to jour­nal­ism and the jour­nal­is­tic com­mu­ni­ty. He said it was al­so a ref­er­ence that should be re­moved from peo­ple’s vo­cab­u­lary.
“What kind of de­plorable con­duct is that?” Gib­bings asked in a tele­phone in­ter­view.

One news­pa­per ed­i­tor said for a leader of the labour move­ment to take the lan­guage of op­pres­sors and use it against work­ers was not on­ly dis­taste­ful but a cru­el act of vi­o­lence.
“Mr Ro­get should be ashamed of him­self and should do some in­tro­spec­tion be­fore apol­o­gis­ing to this coun­try for his dis­re­spect,” the ed­i­tor said.
An­oth­er ed­i­tor said such a ref­er­ence was un­nec­es­sary, es­pe­cial­ly three days af­ter T&T com­mem­o­rat­ed the abo­li­tion of slav­ery. The ed­i­tor said as a leader, Ro­get ought to have known bet­ter, es­pe­cial­ly as his com­ment was com­ing fol­low­ing the back­lash UNC leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar re­ceived for her “black man/blank man” com­ment in ref­er­ence to Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.
Many cit­i­zens al­so took to so­cial me­dia to knock Ro­get for the com­ment as sto­ries were post­ed on­line, with some say­ing it was dis­taste­ful and dis­re­spect­ful.

Wesley Gibbings

Al­so con­tact­ed for com­ment, Di­rec­tor of Re­gion­al and Pan-African Af­fairs at the Eman­ci­pa­tion Sup­port Com­mit­tee, Khafra Kam­bon, told Guardian Me­dia that wrong or right de­pends on the con­text of the state­ment. How­ev­er, Kam­bon said it is not a term that peo­ple in pub­lic life should use pub­licly.
Kam­bon, one of the lead­ers of the 1970s Black Pow­er Move­ment, said the use of the phrase “house ni**er” as a de­scrip­tion is com­mon with­in pro-African groups and used as an in­sult. He said while the his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence is the per­son who seem­ing­ly ac­cepts the sta­tus as a low­er class be­ing in so­ci­ety and does not act like his or her peers, it is some­thing that some peo­ple of African de­scent would say among them­selves.
“I don’t think it is a good term for peo­ple in pub­lic of­fice to use pub­licly. Maybe in the group of ex­ec­u­tives or trade union­ists, it would be some­thing else,” Kam­bon said.

“If you look at the his­to­ry of trade unions, they al­ways found them­selves hav­ing to be in ad­ver­sar­i­al po­si­tions with com­pa­nies and peo­ple in gov­ern­ment. In the his­to­ry of the trade union move­ment in this coun­try, lan­guage of that kind is pret­ty stan­dard.
“I have heard a lot of it be­cause I have been around the trade union move­ment for many decades. It does not rat­tle me. There is some­thing spe­cial about the plat­form for union­ists. I do not ad­vo­cate for it, but I have heard the lan­guage of that kind, and in oth­er move­ments, even peo­ple in pro­gres­sive African move­ments may throw it out in terms of in­sult.”