Prince Harry’s words will resonate in Guyana’s history

Nov 15, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

Kaieteur News – Prince Harry said that because of his privileged upbringing he couldn’t see the existence of unconscious racial bias in others. It was when he got married to a non-white woman he began to see it. He intoned that through witnessing the experience of his wife he saw how pernicious (his adjective) unconscious racial bias is.
The prince indicted that he will not point fingers, but it is obvious he had in mind people he knew that displayed such feelings. It is when certain situations are born, then, you discern things in people you would never have known about. Had he not married a mixed race woman, he would have never seen expressions of race instincts in people he knew closely.
I have articulated a position about the five-month election ordeal in several columns. I am repeating it here because I think it offers an interpretation on an event that will become an indelible moment in Guyana’s history. Countless Guyanese would have gone to their graves when they reach advanced age without knowing what resided in the minds of people they had good relationships with if it wasn’t for the election impasse in 2020.
Young Guyanese would have continued to admire iconic personalities without realizing the essential faults in such people if it weren’t for the nasty five-month election drama. So I repeat once more, this event that lasted for five months is a priceless occurrence that we should lock away in our psyche to remind us of things we would never know about people we so embraced so dearly for so long.
Prince Harry’s words are powerful because they deal with a Freudian mind coming to the surface. The five-month election imbroglio was about hidden racial waves that finally reached the shore because the election ordeal pushed them there. The unconscious race instincts that the 2020 rigging brought to life will never change the philosophy of many of us, by that I mean people I know intimately. Some of us will always be persons who disagree with people who see the world through racist lenses but it has opened my eyes. It happened too late in my life; soon I will be 70. I wished I had seen it before.
When I read those words of the prince, I thought of myself and vivid impulses ran through me. I said to myself, “God, he is so right!” I saw for five months what the prince was talking about. As each month passed, Guyanese that I thought were patriotic, philosophical in their thinking and essentially multi-racial were putting out their racist mentality for the world to see. These were people that at the end of the day I thought were so moved at what our country was becoming and the precarious position its future was in that I thought their philosophical mind would compel them to say, “No, this is wrong, Guyana deserves better.”
I was fortunate to be the only sibling out of seven to go beyond primary school and I was fortunate to combine academic training with social activism. Both spectrums led me to conclude that my country was a jinxed land. After UG, I went to other universities, studied my country deeper, and got more involved in political radicalism and the deeper my knowledge got, the greater was the awareness that Guyana was one of the sad lands of this world.
I saw bewildered, fractured, lost countries picked themselves up and became better societies, leaving Guyana way, way behind. The further we were left behind, the more galvanized I was to contribute to efforts to make Guyana a place that can have a future for the less fortunate. Guyana has failed all of us. Some stayed. Some took flight. But even those happily ensconced in other territories wanted to see their homeland become a normal land.
We are bigger than the entire landscape of CARICOM nations. We suffer no natural disasters. We have enormous resources. Yet Trinidad became a developed society, looking more like a North American/ European country. What kept us back, and is still keeping us back, was our poisonous political landscape. We never fully escaped the tentacles of Forbes Burnham because they were too long and devouring. But changes came gradually.
What took place on March 4 was simply the final death blow. None of us should have accepted that. Not one of us should have put our ethnic bias in front of our country. But it happened. As I wrote above, I am getting on in age but in my heart, I hope my daughter and the hundreds of thousands of young people like her will see a great Guyana soon.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

---

---