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Appeals to race are now being dishonestly used for purposes of naked greed

Jun 04, 2013 Letters

 

Dear Editor,
Some of your news stories, and much more your letter columns, are lately focused on the misuse of racial loyalties. Healthy, I suppose, to confront unpleasant issues affecting our society. But so depressing  and so subjective. Where does it leave me, and perhaps a third of all Guyanese, who are not of any one race, but mixtures which some of us can’t even trace? Maybe we have a positive word to put into this unhappy discussion. Because, hey, it’s our country too.
I find it so irrelevant, to what really matters to humanity, to be thinking about what part of the globe one’s ancestors happened to come from, and so immoral to try to use it for personal advantage. Looking closely at development trends among one minority, as I have been over the last half of my life, I do believe ethnic characteristics come down to response to environment on an evolutionary timescale. Nothing anyone can do anything about, except to try and change the social environment, for the sake of a decent human life (don’t let me get started on animals) now and in the future.
From this comes a preoccupation with justice, at individual and governmental level. Politics, we are forced to admit, have to come into it; we need systems for widest participation in evolving the laws under which we live. But underneath and above all the rules and mechanics of organised society, isn’t there a basis of amity we can all respond to?
I’m not being facetious when I advocate biodiversity in humans. I’m in a privileged position to recommend interracial partnerships, including marriages. From how many generations I don’t know or care, my own family has been so ethnically mixed that we can’t even find a common set of genes to marry. I believe all my siblings are as proud as I am of the results in just plain happiness.
Forget all the snares and delusions of achievement, power and wealth — what’s more important than ordinary contentment in family and friends? I believe in the power of mixtures to realise the highest ends of life.  Appeals to race are now being dishonestly used for purposes, let’s face it, of naked greed. Can Guyanese of all stripes rise above that degradation? Can our mixed-races and other minorities organise to lead the way forward?
Gordon Forte

 

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