What we want to be: Equality

Feb 26, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Our modern history can be seen as a quest for equality. The irony is that even before the British decamped in 1966, the struggle had shifted from one against the unequal colonial order, to one between the two major groups – Indian and African Guyanese. Even though both groups deployed the rhetoric of ‘equality’ in their mobilisation, it was soon obvious that they were basically jockeying to replace the British at the top of the social pile. Not much has changed since.
So will greater equality be achieved under the “new dispensation” of 2012 where the ‘two sides” are forced to negotiate with each other? We need to establish some ground rules about what we are talking about. Firstly, we should be concerned with our equality as citizens of the State: equality in reference to all that the state offers its citizens.
The state was founded to secure the rights of all citizens, so when discussing equality from a national perspective we should ask in which way are the citizens of a country equal. Here I think there would be broad agreement that if we are all citizens, we are all equal, or we should be equal in the possession of the rights guaranteed by the state.
From a group standpoint this equality of rights by each citizen, translates into a proportionate share of the power in a society. This is a very important connection, because ultimately it is the power exercised by the competing groups that shape the contours of the political and other struggles in the country. However, power is ultimately grounded in the possession of effected, not just “paper rights.”
Now for purposes of analyses we can group humans, as any other object, by whatever criteria we choose: we can classify Guyanese by gender, class, ethnicity, etc. If rights are equally distributed to all citizens then no matter how we categorize groups, each group should have equal rights and thus equal (proportionate) power. However, if the rights in its effects were denied to members of a particular classification while others enjoy those rights, the deprived group is oppressed:  it does not possess its proportionate share of power.
In human societies, oppression has been perpetuated on all fronts: thus a poor woman may be oppressed simultaneously on the basis of her gender, class, ethnicity, age, religion, and race. Each of these forms of oppression is ultimately debilitating, in that they cause pain, and suffering and stifle the humanity of the victims. While societies may prioritise their struggle against inequality since resources are limited, all forms of oppression must be challenged. In Guyana there is a general consensus that the racial/ethnic cleavage is the most salient in terms of actual denial of group rights.
Even if we are to limit our field of endeavour to the rights of all citizens to have equality of rights, this leads us to other problems. For instance, how do we deal with those that enter the race today with ‘equal rights’ but with disabilities historically imposed? This is the situation in Guyana with much of the aggravating ‘inequalities’.
Indians arrived as immigrants with the typical immigrant’s drive for material accumulation in addition to a “hunger” for land engendered in over-crowded India. They combined their knowledge of rice farming and cattle rearing with this drive for land-ownership to build an independent economic base for themselves. By the time they attempted to enter society outside the plantations, in large numbers, the Coloureds and Africans had been herded into the state sector by policies that stymied their early entrepreneurial thrust.
Indians were forced to enter the independent professions and petty retailing, using funds generated from their agricultural pursuits. In the modern world built on entrepreneurship, they acquired an advantage from the historically-induced demand to take risks. The Africans who had been channelled into the salaried state jobs of teaching, civil service, police, army, nursing, etc were socialised into less risk-taking occupations.
In the present dispensation of the “minimum state” facilitating a free-enterprise economy, Africans in Guyana are at a disadvantage. Analogously, the Indians, locked out of the police/army and bureaucracy in the early days are now at a disadvantage from a power-resource perspective.
This dilemma of historical contingencies has led many states to extend their definition of “equality” to mean, additionally, equality of results. Now while this may be desirable, we have to concede that this goal implies a distribution which is based on some notion of justice, a particular version of distributive justice, but will impinge upon the liberty of many citizens.
Equality from this perspective demands a more extensive and intrusive state, it may be what we want, but what we must accept is the ensuing struggle between negative and positive liberties, between the absence of interference by other persons and doing maybe what we ought to.

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