Dear Editor,
One day perhaps I will dare to engage Ryhaan Shah on topics like nature versus nurture, but today I must hasten to beg her and other writers and speakers to try and keep racial stereotyping out of our national politics.
Race is being shamefully used to divide the electorate and perpetuate fear and distrust as reasons for voting on the same atavistic lines that have always damaged our national prospects. In apparent desperation, certain politicians are openly trying to inflame racial antipathies that needn’t, in fact don’t really, exist outside their own opportunism.
Maybe we can trust the average voter to see through the dishonesty, but tensions are being raised that respectable citizens should be trying to calm. There is a time and place for public debate on sensitive issues. But to go on emphasizing ethnic awareness at this time when it is being unworthily misused is, to use a time-worn metaphor, dangerously close to shouting “fire!” in a crowded cinema.
To stress, for whatever reasons, a direct link between racial loyalty and these elections in Guyana is not tactful but at best incautious.
Yours faithfully,
Gordon Forte
