In a homi­ly mark­ing the 50th an­niver­sary of the Black Pow­er Rev­o­lu­tion ear­li­er this year, Arch­bish­op Ja­son Gor­don de­liv­ered a pow­er­ful state­ment: “To­day, as Arch­bish­op of Port-of-Spain, I ask for­give­ness for the way that we, as church, have not been more dili­gent about the de­vel­op­ment of our peo­ple: for the ways that we have held prej­u­dice, for the ways that we have been snooty, for the ways that we have not giv­en ex­am­ple to this peo­ple of what it is to build a won­der­ful na­tion.”

Five decades ear­li­er, the Cathe­dral of the Im­mac­u­late Con­cep­tion was in­vad­ed by an­gry young peo­ple who draped stat­ues in black cloth and con­demned the in­jus­tices over­looked for decades.

Arch­bish­op Gor­don’s ex­am­ple on con­fess­ing all the sins of mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion, ex­ploita­tion and ill-con­cealed dis­crim­i­na­tion com­mit­ted in this coun­try should be fol­lowed. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly im­por­tant to­day as the na­tion cel­e­brates an Eman­ci­pa­tion Day over­shad­owed by the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment.

To­day, 186 years af­ter The Eman­ci­pa­tion Bill came in­to ef­fect in the British West In­dies, the strug­gle for true free­dom con­tin­ues. The end of en­slave­ment of Africans on Au­gust 1, 1834, did not re­sult in lib­er­a­tion from all forms of bondage. To this day, racism con­tin­ues to in­flu­ence, through prac­tices of in­equal­i­ty and ex­ploita­tion, ac­cess to cap­i­tal, sta­tus, po­lit­i­cal pow­er and pres­tige. It is a ves­tige of the past colo­nial rule still em­bed­ded in the na­tion­al psy­che.

This na­tion es­caped some of the more bru­tal ex­pe­ri­ences of slav­ery in oth­er Caribbean is­lands. How­ev­er, that does not ob­vi­ate the scars from and the lin­ger­ing ef­fects of the bru­tal transat­lantic trade that brought thou­sands of our an­ces­tors in chains to this re­gion.

T&T can no longer af­ford to be bound by past lies and de­struc­tive agen­das that will lead us fur­ther away from be­com­ing the pow­er­ful mul­ti­cul­tur­al na­tion, small in size but “over­whelm­ing in worth,” that we are meant to be.

Al­low­ing the vi­brant African lega­cy we cel­e­brate to­day to be taint­ed by prej­u­dices, his­toric and oth­er­wise, ham­pers T&T’s de­vel­op­ment. It is time for all cit­i­zens to com­mit to eman­ci­pa­tion from those evils.

In­spi­ra­tion can be drawn from Derek Wal­cott, who cel­e­brat­ed T&T’s beau­ty in his No­bel lec­ture on De­cem­ber 7, 1992: “Break a vase, and the love that re­assem­bles the frag­ments is stronger than that love which took its sym­me­try for grant­ed when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the seal­ing of its orig­i­nal shape. It is such a love that re­assem­bles our African and Asi­at­ic frag­ments, the cracked heir­looms whose restora­tion shows its white scars. This gath­er­ing of bro­ken pieces is the care and pain of the An­tilles, and if the pieces are dis­parate, ill-fit­ting, they con­tain more pain than their orig­i­nal sculp­ture, those icons and sa­cred ves­sels tak­en for grant­ed in their an­ces­tral places. An­til­lean art is this restora­tion of our shat­tered his­to­ries, our shards of vo­cab­u­lary, our arch­i­pel­ago be­com­ing a syn­onym for pieces bro­ken off from the orig­i­nal con­ti­nent.”

This is the beau­ty we must show the world. In it re­sides the pow­er that could set us free.

Hap­py Eman­ci­pa­tion Day.