We cannot avoid a discussion of marginalisation in Guyana

Aug 02, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor
In his column, “What about a Black Guyanese Entrepreneurial Class?” Mr. Freddie Kissoon claims that while I identified an “African Security Dilemma” I did not proffer proposals for addressing it. In the last 25 years, Mr. Kissoon has studiously refused to acknowledge our various proposals for the African Security Dilemma and its corollaries: Federalism, Shared Governance, Alternating Presidencies between major races, Ethnic Impact Statement, and specifically to the issue of his column, Affirmative Action to assist African Economic participation. And imagine all of this was done in the pages of the Kaieteur News.
I offer one such column from 2008, where I addressed some issues on African Economic Marginalization:
One reason why the charges of “marginalisation” from the African Guyanese community were being contested was that by and large its articulation had been disjunctured from its roots of racism and African slavery. In the words of the scholar Cornell West, “there is the lingering effects of slavery and past discrimination in the continued attack on black humanity and racist stereotypes which are designed to destroy black self-image” and in the process keep Africans on the “margins’ of society.
In Guyana, the promise of emancipation was also subverted. In economic terms, of course, most famously was the undercutting of the bargaining power of the freed slaves to sell their labour when the sugar planters were authorised and facilitated by the state to import cheap labour from, in order, Madeira, West Indies/Africa, India and China.As to whether the ex-slaves could have actually extracted greater wages in an environment of plummeting sugar prices is another issue but the fact remains that the agency of the freed Africans to struggle directly against their oppressive conditions was weakened.They were marginalised.
Laws were enacted to compel individuals who wanted to purchase land to do so in plots of at least one hundred acres.This was clearly intended to discourage Africans from purchasing land since it demanded a substantial capital investment that could only be met by persons pooling their resources together.In those instances where the challenge was met – and in several instances where even whole plantations were purchased – the viability of the endeavour was frequently challenged by the refusal of the authorities to integrate the drainage and irrigation system to that of the nascent village movement. Today, we all appreciate the imperative of a functioning D&I system for our survival.
Steered into the resultant growing urban centre of Georgetown, the efforts of enterprising Africans and Coloureds to break into petty retailing by supplying vegetables and ground provisions to the urban population, was nipped in the bud when the authorities favoured the newly arrived Portuguese, who quickly decamped the plantations for the retail trade.
Africans who had “gone into the bush” to try their hand in gold mining remained as petty “pork knockers” since the onerous land rights question were not lifted until the 1890s when the Portuguese were in a position to take advantage of the newly discovered goldfields in the Essequibo.
In all urban centres of the 19th century, an underclass developed with its distinctly picaresque orientation – this was true of Dickens’s London as with Rodway’s Georgetown.
In Georgetown the lumpen element just happened to be African. In the countryside, refusing to be driven back to the sugar plantations (excepting for the well-paid artisans who never left), the Africans were driven into subsistence agriculture.
The economic marginalisation of Africans that was the hallmark of slavery was therefore transferred into the ‘emancipation” era. As I have tried to explain so often, once a pattern of activity is transferred into habit by the workings of the institutions (both formal and informal) the individual becomes socialised into accepting it as ‘the way the world is’ and it becomes extremely difficult to alter – especially if the habits have been transferred across generations as it has been in Guyana. Witness Indians and the Police Force.
Most Indians and other individuals including many Africans – and that’s another story – look at the present situation of Africans and assert, “Hey! My fore-parents came here with nothing on their backs and worked hard, saved as did my parents and so we’re doing better.Why can’t “marginalised” Africans do the same?” They ignore the possible “lingering effects” of the economic system and its echo in the psyches of individuals which may affect their ability to compete within the present system.
In America, to deal with the analogous situation, they introduced a nuanced approach to the norm of “equality”, to which value we all genuflect but rarely actualize.
Equal Treatment
In 2002, I wrote in response to the then early charges of marginalisation that were being floated: “In the implementation of this norm of equality – and to determine if violations are causing marginalisation – two concepts have been utilized.Firstly, there is the standard of “equal treatment”. Here, individuals equally situated are to be treated equally: the focus is on the individual and not the group.
The decision-maker should be colour-blind. In a frequently used analogy, individuals would be to competitors in a footrace, with the winner being the one who runs the fastest. A meritocracy would be created.The footrace analogy, however, points to the problem with the “equal treatment” standard and suggests the second concept – equal opportunity.
To extend the analogy, it was pointed out that while everyone might now theoretically be starting from the same point, the legs of some might have been broken simply because they belonged to a particular group.
The results would thus be a foregone conclusion. It was then considered appropriate to sometimes consider the race of an individual to ensure that decisions made did not continue to disadvantage a particular race.There were also two theories of discrimination to assist in the enforcement of equality – disparate treatment and disparate impact.
The former is the most easily understood type of discrimination. The person in power simply treats some people more favourable than others because of their race, colour, sex, religion or national origin.Proof of discriminatory motive is critical, although it can in some situations be inferred from the mere fact of differences in treatment.
Disparate Impact
The latter, disparate impact, involves engagement practices that are facially neutral in their treatment of different groups but which in fact, fall more harshly on one group than another and cannot be justified by the necessities of the institution.In reference to charges of marginalisation by African Guyanese today, firstly, they cannot be just rejected out of hand. It should be obvious to even the most casual observer of the Guyanese scene, that there are ethnic imbalances in every sphere of the nation’s life.
The question would be: are the imbalances the operation of discriminatory practices? If they are, then we must move to remove such practices.If there are no present discriminatory practices but past ones have worked to create imbalances, then we have to make decisions as how to rectify matters.
Should we adopt affirmative action programs? Should we set quotas or just broad goals? Are imbalances in the state sector to be treated in the same manner as those in the private sector? How much are those personal preferences due to past discriminatory practices? Whose responsibility is it to change personal preferences?
The point is that we cannot avoid a discussion of marginalisation in Guyana, but it must be done in a structured manner and not merely be exploited to prod African Guyanese into taking up arms. It must be done to bring justice and equity to all groups in Guyana.”
Ravi Dev

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