I’ll really try to be more “festive” from next week. Meanwhile bear with me these random thoughts in what should be one of the briefest offerings of the year.
Discrimination? The English language as we know and use it today, has thrown words at us – derived from varied roots and other languages — which have ‘normal’ meanings, legal connotations, cultural implications, even ethnic, emotive consequences. Take “discrimination” and say “Propaganda”. These two have perfectly normal meanings, which dispassionately point to ordinary, positive definitions and situations. But no, we tend to choose and use, sometimes exclusively, the negative senses.
So instead of just “discerning” to discriminate is mostly “to show partiality and prejudice.” Discrimination is then all about personal, official or institutional bias. But what am I going about?
I happened to be in an important, large government ministry the other day. Perhaps purely by accident (?) the large, significant section or department I happened to visit was manned by Indo-Guyanese completely. To me, physically “Indo” myself, nothing seemed wrong, strange, unusual. (There are numerous places where I see only Afro-Guyanese or Amerindians, for example.) But then the alleged remarks of the ubiquitous, tireless, ageless, consumer advocate Eileen Cox intruded into my consciousness.
Reportedly, she said that she felt that she was somewhere in India whenever she saw the staff at my favourite (mortgage) bank, the New Building Society (NBS). It is, frankly speaking, a real national pity that we even have to contemplate the racial/ethnic “distinguishing” with respect to employment, to opportunity, to religion, or to the composition of a cricket team from Canal Number Two, But it is the reality in “multi-ethnic societies”, I understand.
Our Constitution and our statutes have strict legal guidance against discrimination of any kind when discrimination means racial, religious, or political discrimination used to prevent equal opportunity or fair, unbiased consideration. (Elsewhere there are even equal opportunity laws that have something to do with population proportions. Wow.)
Mind you, I understand a few doses of a do-good discrimination when it means a preferred choice of the best qualified, the better trained, the most appropriate height or even someone I am comfortable with. Unfortunately, I suspect that in Guyana where Indian-descended Guyanese are still more in number and where they might be better qualified (because of wealth, cultures and opportunity) people are more likely to cry discrimination – of a racial, political, religious nature. It could be instead sheer numbers and qualifications.
A special liking?
Mind you I have friends – both “old PNC types” and younger qualified persons – who complain that government contracts are hard to come by because they are “Black”; jobs at hospitals, corporations, stores, or schools are reserved for “Indians” first. Security Services, I’m told, tend not to discriminate in terms of “race”. I mourn for victims of discrimination who are denied opportunity based on merit. I know that the job market is so small in a depressed economy. I feel for the high school and university graduates who have to contend for very limited opportunities. Racial discrimination should never be a factor within that challenge.
I conclude this teaser to provoke your own reaction with two points. When I asked former Empowerment Adviser Odinga Lumumba – this was around 1995/96 – he made me smile when he countered that what he found was favouritism! People extended favours to people they “favoured” – for all sorts of reasons. So when does “favouritism” evolve into rabid “discrimination?” Discuss class. Remembering that a “favourite” is a likely winner, one highly regarded because of “a special liking.”
Carifesta,
miscellaneous
matters
I’m still enthused about Carifesta 10 being hosted here next August. I just had good reason to hold comment. In print. Soon to resume.
Meanwhile, share this, which I just picked up from a Caribbean magazine: “The first real conference of regional artists took place in 1967, ironically, at the University of Kent in the UK, an initiative of the London-based Caribbean Artists Movement, spearheaded by Jamaica-born writer Andrew Salkey, Trinidad and Tobago-born activist John La Rose, and his compatriot novelist Samuel Selvon. Barbadian D. Elliot Parris, speaking at symposia at Carifesta V in 1992, noted that “it was a deep source of embarrassment to many present that such an important and historic event was being held in England, the seat of colonialism for the English-speaking Caribbean, even though political independence [was] being gained already by many former British colonies of the Caribbean.”
Where the politicians and their federations failed the artists triumphed. Grassroots culture movements blossomed across the region. And when the first Carifesta was staged in Guyana in 1972, it was met with relief by the artists and politicians alike. Symbolically, ideologically, politically, Carifesta ’72 was a signal that the Caribbean was becoming more than “a loose connection of islands”.
I’ve noted the various elements to our own observance of World AIDS Day last Saturday.
Note that in the USA, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon attended a church service associating the organization with the fight; a roll call of the departed was read in New York. “HIV immigrants” to New York were mentioned and a world famous survivor, Magic Johnson, gave more money to the battle.
If a cure for HIV is found, will American/European pharmaceutical manufacturers lose billions?
In Europe and North America during Autumn (Fall), “the trees shed their clothes.”
Farewell to Mrs Doreen de Caires, Happy Retirement. You mid-wifed Frankly Speaking.
The most used bedroom lie? “I never did that before”.
‘Til Next Week!
