The ongoing price of hate

Mar 19, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Eight are confirmed shot and killed in Atlanta, with six identified as Asians. Area police was rightly guarded: it is too early to link with likely anti-Asian bias made more pronounced by the speculated and concluded origins of the rampaging COVID-19 virus. The first thought that came, given the bulk of the murdered victims, was that it can be nothing other than that bias, which has been simmering and is now intensifying in places as far apart as California and New York. It was what exploded into harrowing violence on Tuesday night in Georgia.
It is the age-old story of prejudice knowing no boundaries, and hatred overrunning all restraining civilities. It may be said that the pandemic assaults are the root cause of the incidents of violence, with those eight deaths being the latest ones.

When certain toxic strains are sowed, then this is the whirlwind reaped: a hail of bullets; a community forced behind protective barricades; and the regret (and shame) that events would, inevitably, have led to something of this scale. When such embers are stoked, the bigots respond with zest; when the flame flickers, the racists run riot. Some do so with words, others do so with bullets in their eyes, in their hearts, and in their guns pointed and fired. We have done that here rather recklessly, but have been fortunate to dodge the conjunction of circumstances that flared, but did not overflow into the mayhem of Tuesday’s Atlanta.
At most levels in our society and almost in every social cell, we have the emotional stirrings that are unleashed by the harsh political postures of our leaders and their extremist followers. It is said, rather unwisely, that this mainly occurs during times of elections here. There is some fractional accuracy to that politically self-serving claim, which is also a racially comforting one. But while it is true that political and racial prejudices peak more during elections seasons, it is a more enduring truth that those prejudices and the passions they provoke are only then more publicly articulated and more individually manifested.
It is a part of the price of Guyanese prejudices that are more than seasonal, they are annual in the fullness of its length of days. What we are reading about in our newspapers, and viewing on our televisions, have come as close as a cat’s whisker to happening right here. We have had Lusignan and Rose Hall; we have had Linden and Bartica. Like Atlanta, it serves our purposes well when the executioner is a hate-filled Lone Ranger, or an ostracized criminal group, or an orchestrated mercenary band of phantoms. It gives our stealthily instigating politicians, our loyally responding partisans, and the rest of our distressingly unknowing citizens the kind of ground that furnishes protective coverings. The cover of being uninformed and uninterested, of being uninvolved, of being outside of the communal and national box that traps us and our sick prejudices.
When we stand smug and apart, we are no less innocent. When we refuse either to be troubled or involved, then we have contributed as savagely as any racist perpetrator of heinous deeds. We used to talk a hundred words a minute about truth and reconciliation just a little while back. It is interesting and revealing as to where we are now on that score. This, too, is part of the price we pay for our prejudices. Deny as we may wish, this is where we are, and why we get what we get in this country with racial truths. It is nowhere, and with that, we are just fine.

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