Our Racial Hypocrisy: Those post-election protests

Mar 08, 2020 Features / Columnists, Hinds' Sight with Dr. David Hinds

Today’s column comes from a place of despair about my country. There is a sense of helplessness that one feels as one looks at Guyana unravelling right before your eyes.
To say that I am surprised would be the height of dishonesty. One knows it was there, always waiting to unfold. Yet, the rational, hypocritical side of our Guyaneseness surrenders to the aspiration rather than the reality. But once again a general election exposes that cruel reality—Guyana is a highly racially volatile place.
We are further away from the racial harmony we often boast about than we like to admit. The race-hate should not surprise us, but we would, as we are accustomed to do, pretend to be surprised.
Guyana voted on Monday, March 2. I am writing this column on Saturday morning—the morning after protests erupted in several PPP-controlled communities. The rare sight of Indian-Guyanese protesting and in the process being aggressive towards the mainly African-Guyanese police would have stunned the consciousness of observers who are accustomed to seeing African-Guyanese in that role.
Georgetown was quiet. This city has in the past been the epicentre of such violent protests, but on Friday the drama unfolded in the rural areas.
I have over the last year tried to call attention to the over-simplistic analysis of Guyana’s politics that flows from our pens and mouths. I challenged those of us who comment on our politics to go beneath the surface of our race-politics to try to discover a more complex dynamic.
On Tuesday March 3, I appeared on a Globespan24 web-TV program and had cause to draw my co-panelists’ attention to flawed narrative that anticipated post-election violence from the African-Guyanese-dominated Georgetown. I objected to that mindset, and observed that post-election violence could come from any of our ethnic communities.
Now, three days later, my observation proved correct. African-Guyanese are “peacefully celebrating “ as Indian-Guyanese are “violently protesting.” A few hours ago, I had to defend the Indian-Guyanese right to protest, including blocking roads, against the anger of two of my close friends who sought to convince me that those protests were evil and should be countered by fierce police action. My reminder that African-Guyanese protested in the same way when they sensed their side was losing, fell on deaf ears.
Why should Indian-Guyanese block the roads and prevent them from going about their normal business, they screamed at me.
You see, I have always defended the right of citizens to protest – it is a form of resistance that I think is vital to human survival. Without resistance, a society dies. It is up to the protestors in the public space to strike the balance between fierce protest and violence against others. Therefore, unlike most African-Guyanese, I do not have any anger against the Indian-Guyanese protests. What do we expect them to do? They feel that the elections were stolen from them. It is not a question of whether they are correct or not. In politics we often construct our own truths.
African-Guyanese who denounce the protests are hypocritical. I am very sure that had the elections results gone the other way, African-Guyanese would have been on the streets burning tyres and blocking traffic. And my two good friends would have been encouraging them to keep up the fight.
Indian-Guyanese are also hypocritical. Those very protestors at Lusignan, Better Hope, Bath, and other areas, were only yesterday calling African-Guyanese hooligans for what they themselves are now doing. And some media houses which are now holding up these protests as “defending democracy” were back then projecting African-Guyanese protests as unnecessary violence.
The coming period would be an interesting one. If it is not managed properly, it would tear Guyana apart. No side would allow the other to govern Guyana. We always knew this, but we persist with the winner-loser paradigm. In the end, nobody wins an election in Guyana.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)
More of Dr. Hinds’ writings and commentaries can be found on his YouTube Channel Hinds’ Sight: Dr. David Hinds’ Guyana-Caribbean Politics and on his website www.guyanacaribbeanpolitics.news. Send comments to [email protected]