Ethnic identity

Jun 29, 2010 Editorial

The United Nations has designated the coming year as the year when the international community should focus on People of African ancestry. Perhaps it is a belated recognition that people of every other ethnic group are celebrated with the same frequency as some countries observe their national day.
For a very long time the people of African ancestry have argued that their lot was the worse that any other racial group, even worse that the Native Americans who were decimated when America began its expansion.
That the Native Americans have been confined to reservations pales into insignificance that the Africans were uprooted and transplanted to the extent that many would find it impossible to trace their roots.
These descendants also talk about their holocaust, the death of millions as their ancestors were being transplanted across the Atlantic to work as slaves—as people with no rights and who were branded like common cattle.
Theirs was nothing that anyone would wish on a people but the severity was ignored for centuries. And even with the abolition of slavery the people of African ancestry were treated in some cases worse than dogs. Less than three decades ago, in some countries they were the victims of apartheid—separate development.
In the United States and Brazil which have the largest concentration of black people outside of Africa, the people of African ancestry could have and were killed and the killers were often allowed to do so with impunity.
Today, the world has come to recognise a people and it feels that the time is right to correct certain wrongs. In Guyana this activity is not going to be ignored. The government has taken the bull by the horns and it has already begun putting measures in place. It is moving to establish committees to plan for aspects of this international observance.
But one gets the feeling that in some corners, there is the view that the government would not do justice to such observances. This is where the ethnic distrust comes in.
Those who feel that the government would not do justice to the observances are those who believe that the government is a non-Black government and therefore cannot plan activities to commemorate Black people.
It is here that the real problem begins. There are very few pure ethnic groups. One notable American leader once said that people should not shake their family tree too hard because a Black person may fall out. It is the same in Guyana. It is for this reason that there is an ethnic group called ‘Mixed’.
In some cases the mixture is subtle, having been diluted by relationships between people who were of one dominant ethnic group or the other. Are the planners going to limit their definition to those who look distinctly African in appearance?
There are so many people who have African ancestry but to look at them would never tell that story. These people, however, acknowledge their African ancestry. Must they be ignored because they do not look Black?
Indeed, there are those who, as in the days when people of African ancestry tried to pass for White, ignore their ancestry out of shame or just hatred instilled by some grandparent.
The 2000 census conducted across the Caribbean community found that in Guyana there was a redirection of ethnicity. There has been a massive increase in a category called ‘Mixed’ and a corresponding decline in the numbers of people who listed themselves as Afro-Guyanese.
This merely suggests that these people are not keen to identify themselves with their African ancestry. However, such people often feel free to move from one ancestral bond to another.
This United Nations designated observance may serve to make people accept their ancestry, regardless of their physical appearance.

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