Is this gentleman for real?

Jun 07, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,

Jamal Ali’s letter captioned, “The PPP is sincere in working with the African Guyanese sector of the society”, reeks of ethnic paternalism, historical stereotypical prejudice, and a smattering of deceit that brings out sensations of nausea.

In trying to convince African Guyanese not to rely their lying eyes and experiences, he indicts African Guyanese as the sole repositories of racial animus. It is people like these we need to beware of, because the gifts they bear appear harmless on the outside, but are no different from that which inundate our centuries old historical experiences.

Ali sets forth a basic argument that the good black people in Guyana are those who, caught in poverty and hunger, accept the help of the PPP.

The bad ones are those who continue to distrust the PPP, are critical of its administration and policies, and publicly give vent to such criticism. For Jamal Ali, like his symbiotic kin whether in the U.S., South Africa or elsewhere, a good black is one who sees him and his organisation as their saviors, and a bad black is one who does not. You cannot get more racist or prejudice than this.

African Guyanese have justification for distrusting the PPP, and that justification cannot be shunted aside by propagandists like Ali who seek to blame the black man for every problem in Guyana. Ali like so many of his kind, whose vision and perspective are filtered through the worse kind of ethnic prejudice continue to insult the intelligence of African Guyanese by proposing to them that the events of the past 17 years are figments of their imagination. Jamal Ali’s perspective represent the kind of thinking we thought we had left behind hundreds of years ago, but sadly is still alive and well in Guyana.

Jamal Ali wrote quote, “This sincerity, in my opinion, springs principally from the PPP’s realisation that it needs to destroy the myth that its governance of Guyana is deliberately configured to serve only the interest of Indian Guyanese”.

Ali is either conveniently amnesiac, or deceitfully wicked. He has to be to discount the trauma and impact on a community that witnesses its young men being kidnapped, tortured and lynched, with no public protest, outcry, or condemnation of the regime in power.

Reverse the ethnicity of the characters in this deadly drama, and Ali would be screaming and pulling out his hair in anger.

His platitudinous diatribe clearly identifies him as someone absolutely absent an iota of empathy, arrogant beyond description, and who clearly abuse the term sincerity by attaching it to his opinions. What kind of sincerity exists in a character that completely ignores events that impact a community, and with which he is incapable of empathizing.

There is a legend among People of African descent about the teachings of a man named Willie Lynch.

The strategies highlighted in these teachings are to sow discord among black people to render them more malleable, more obedient, and easier to manipulate and manage. Jamal Ali’s perspective represents a modern day interpretation of that teaching.

He sees the PPP going into the African Guyanese community where poverty and hunger reign supreme, offering them sustenance, and turning them away from their leaders to the beck and call of him and his cabal.

Yes, for Jamal Ali, the way to the black man’s will is to engage in Pavlovian conditioning by offering them the means to eke out an existence. The abstract contemplation of rights, equality and freedom are unimportant obstacles to Ali’s vision of what African Guyanese need.

The pitiful approach Ali recommends for his party, vis a vis winning over African Guyanese, again, brings about a sense of nausea when reading it.

Martin Luther King opined that, “Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul”.

I would suggest that Jamal Ali disabuse himself of the notion that he and his party are dealing with children, and that the African Guyanese community will not be able to dissect those kinds of pathetic and transparent ego masturbatory diatribes. He sounds like a present day Willie Lynch, whether the original existed in fact or fiction.

Robin Williams

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