Do Guyanese have a mentality like Clifford Krauss?

Jul 25, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There is an outpouring of vitriolic anger from Guyanese with the New York Times correspondent, Clifford Krauss, and rightly so. But there are lessons to be drawn and we should draw them quickly. There are some positives to take home from such a horribly fictional account of Guyanese society painted by Krauss.
Krauss simply represents the line-faults and fault lines of humans. There are countless numbers of Krausses in the rich, white, developed world. One of the mysteries that few Guyanese would encounter is how Americans view their neighbour, Canada. If you spend time as a travel writer in the US you would get a rude awakening you will never ever forget.
Americans hardly know about Canada. It is quite possible that if you take a poll among Americans, it will reveal they know more about a country named Jamaica than Canada. Yet Canada is one of the strongest economies in the world. The leading entertainment magazine in the US, “Rolling Stone” will get you livid if you know which songs are included in the magazine’s list of the greatest 100 songs ever made. The choice is determined by the cultural make up of the reviewer.
My favourite foreign newspaper is the Guardian from the UK. I am left wing and that paper is left-liberal, so I find its analyses of world events more relevant to how I see things. But the journalists even in such a newspaper cannot escape their cultural bias. In writing about a libel case involving the singer, Taylor Swift, the paper referred to her as the most popular singer in the world. That is not true. I think Rihanna and Beyoncé, in terms of sheer popularity in all the countries in the world, are measurably more known than Swift.
I don’t know who Krauss is, but he is not alone in the white developed world as to how the Third World is viewed by middle class white folks in the developed world, and it is so viewed because people like Krauss, though they come from rich countries, don’t necessarily have a perspective on life that is a healthy one. I have learnt one lesson from travelling through rich countries – people can live in top class modern nations and be as ignorant as the uneducated toilet cleaner in a low income Third World state.
The US is a colossal contradiction. Its technology, science and wealth are indeed impressive, but it has horribly ignorant people whose ignorance is indeed frightening. I have always said to countless friends of mine – the US is not New York, Illinois and California only. There are substantial numbers of citizens in that country that think and act as if they are not from a rich, educated, knowledgeable country. There are huge parts of the US nation where you would not believe how uninformed the citizens’ views are on people and the world.
Krauss is not the only guilty party. He had an editor who approved of his story on Guyana. His editor is just as ignorant as him. As the Krauss incident fades as the days and weeks go by, one hopes that Guyanese and Caribbean people who read what Krauss wrote for one of the top papers in the world would have learnt that not because you are American, French, German or Russian, you have a better perspective on life.
We here in Guyana must stop thinking like that. Let what Krauss did in the New York Times open up your eyes. Krauss is a typical middle class, white man from a limited philosophical background, who is culturally prejudiced, but he comes from a country that is wealthy and globally powerful.
There are certainly more lessons to learn from the Krauss infamy and Guyanese should ask themselves if they are just as poor thinkers as Krauss. The answer is yes. How modern and philosophical is our thinking that makes us better humans than people like Krauss. I have seen educated young men and women in Guyana in large numbers who cannot think outside the ethnic box. When those people express themselves they come across like Krauss.
We don’t like Guyana because our president is not from our ethnic background. We will always vote for our president because he is from our race group. We are in the 21st century and we sit in silence and fear, and watch horribly backward things taking place that if Krauss knows, he will write even more sickening fiction about us.
Krauss was wrong about the country living without electricity. But we sit in silence and watch money spent by Jagdeo, Ramotar and Granger on things that the money could have gone on a better electricity supply. Krauss is wrong, but we are still an unmodern nation.

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Do Guyanese have a mentality like Clifford Krauss?

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