Dear Editor,
It is more than a year since a Guyanese family in Queens, New York, has been harassed with no let up and very little assistance from fellow Guyanese in their battle against racial discrimination. The Gounden family of Howard Beach, the same neighbourhood where an Afro-Guyanese man was chased to his death onto an Expressway, faces what many people say is a case of ethnic prejudice against an (Indian) intruder in a (White) Italian neighbourhood. Minorities are not very welcome in this neighbourhood; many people have been beaten in this area in the past and several families were hounded out of the neighbourhood. An Indo-Trini was beaten a few years ago. Whenever I visited the neighbourhood, suspicious eyes were cast on me as an intruder. So I don’t stick around there for too long because I don’t wish to have my head bashed in or my knee cap splintered. The Gounden family’s sin is “not only that they live in the neighborhood but they also invite Afro-Caribbean nationals to visit them,” explained someone. “That was a no-no for Howard Beach and was sure to have angered residents of the community,” the person added.
Defenders in the local Howard Beach community paper say that Gounden has not been harassed because of his race or his visitors, but because he allegedly violated housing, construction, repair, landscaping, and parking codes. Howard Beach defenders say that Gounden was attacked because of the manner in which he has conducted repairs to his house and work around his yard. Assuming Gounden committed building code violations – failure to take out a building permit, for example – that does not justify a string of summonses. But the harassment of the Gounden family by his neighbours began immediately after the family purchased and moved into the property 17-months ago – blocking his driveway, dumping garbage, writing graffiti, and urinating on his property. Is it not reasonable to conclude that the basis for these actions lies in the fact that Gounden is of a different ethnicity than the people who live in that neighbourhood? It reeks of the abuses minorities suffered in the Deep South during the Jim Crow period.
Gounden got numerous summonses for a period of time; officials would visit his home daily to check and find violations. But his neighbours who did the same things as he did did not get summonses. Most of the summonses were dismissed by the court when the cases were brought for trial. But the city’s agents from a variety of offices, including the police, sanitation, firemen, etc, descended on Gounden’s home again to reinstitute new summonses, similar to the ones already dismissed, against Gounden. The bottom line here is that this attack has nothing to do with building codes. This is perpetual harassment.
Few Guyanese from Richmond Hill have come out in defence or in support of Gounden after a year of harassment. Instead the Richmond Hill community leaders have been fighting over petty matters like which group should control the Phagwah Parade or the Diwali Parade, etc. They ignore the greater threats and issues facing the community. I applaud Mike Persaud, Albert Baldeo, Chuck Mohan, and a few others, including a few from Brooklyn, who have stood by Gounden. It is now time for others from the Richmond Hill community to step up to the plate to fight for Gounden’s right to live in Howard Beach free from harassment.
Yours faithfully,
Vishnu Bisram
