Dear Editor,
I was horrified to open the December 15 edition of the Sunday Stabroek to find a cartoon depicting the First Lady of Guyana standing in a champagne glass next to a bottle of champagne labelled ‘oil money,’ and next to her a tilted over and spilling rum bottle labelled ‘rum shop’. The cartoon was an obvious reference to Mrs Arya Ali’s recently held Charity Fundraising Ball.
Mrs. Ali, under her office as First Lady of the State of Guyana, held a year end charity event without any political branding, and moreover without any state funding. The event was held at a location that is regularly the venue of choice for state, private sector, family, and international community events, none of which invite comment or condemnation from Stabroek News.
Yet, somehow, that charity event is singled out by Stabroek News’ cartoonist, and is sanctioned by its editor, for a caricature that is unapologetically racist and classist in its depiction. In the editorial view of the Stabroek News, the People’s Progressive Party, as embodied by the First Lady, has left behind the rumshop and is now contained within a champagne glass lifestyle as supported by ‘oil money’. As if the racist and classist implications of the imagery itself were not clear, the intention is made clear with the caption, “It’s about time the PPP learned about class and style…”.
This simplistic, stereotypical trope of the rumshop as symbolic of the poor, drunken, classless PPP-supporting Indo-Guyanese, foreign to the finer things in life, is not only indecent in itself, but especially abhorrent when applied to a First Lady whose initiatives have been executed without a whiff of ethnic or political bias.
Mr. Harris and the Stabroek News ought to issue an apology to First Lady Arya Ali and the Indo-Guyanese community for this distasteful and racially insensitive excuse for sociopolitical commentary.
Respectfully,
Ravin Singh
Editor-in-Chief’s note: There was nothing racially insensitive in this cartoon. The cartoon represents the view of the cartoonist and Stabroek News defends his right to freedom of expression.
