Freddie is unaligned on matters of race

Jun 11, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

In a retort to Freddie Kissoon and Ryhaan Shah on “how African racial violence against Indians defined their Indianness” (Jun 4), Otis Paul Junior Chase contends that their revelations of experiences tell one side of the issue. He asserts that Indians were involved in abuse of Africans, relating a non-violent experience of a brief encounter with Indians on the East Coast almost two decades ago. He was clear to note that Indians were not physically abusive of him or of others. The propensity towards racial violence as a response to verbal prejudice can never be justified and neither is the hurling of verbally abusive (curses) prejudicial language towards others. Nothing should be invoked to justify racial violence against a people.
Chase says he is a Mixed Guyanese, describing himself as “a Boviander” (a Mixture of African, Amerindian, and a touch of European as the term is explained to me) and claims he was verbally abused as a Black Guyanese by an Indian female. That is wrong; no one should be abused (not on account of ethnicity or any other factor). I condemn such behavior, but unlike Chase, I will not equate verbal abuse with physical violent abuse. Freddie and Ms. Shah are well known non-racialized scholars; they too will never condone such acts or equate ethnic physical violence as a justifiable response for verbal abuse.
There is virtually no Guyanese who consistently has championed the causes of Africans as Freddie to the point of campaigning for an African led coalition in 2015 that was declared winner of the elections. Freddie penned repeatedly that he grounded with Africans all of his life. But after seeing what he described as ‘the dark side of Africans’ who he thought were friends, non-racialist, and champions of democratic elections, he distanced himself from them especially post March 2, 2020. He, like Ryhaan, and other humanists and rights activists saw those characters as racist and authoritarian for condoning violence against Indians and for supporting the rigging of the March 2020 elections in favor of an African led coalition.

Few came out against the attempt to rig the elections and Freddie assailed those who were silent during rigging or the racial onslaught in West Berbice in September 2020; Freddie was/is a hero. While Ryhaan is a rights activist especially on matters pertaining to Indians, Freddie is unaligned on matters pertaining to race and religion; speaks courageously and condignly on racial abuses.
We must not pretend that all is well with race relations. We are a racially polarized nation – Indian-African animosity was exacerbated by global powers fighting over control of Guyana since the dawn of the cold war in the 1950s. We must confront this ghost and work together to find a workable peaceful solution.
We can’t equate verbal abuse with or cite it as a precursor for physical violence as Chase has suggested. Chase, whose essay is very scholarly written, suggesting he is a very educated man, is also wrong to insert the Indian caste system and the matter pertaining to Nirvan Singh to justify racial violence rained on Indians and or on his or African interaction with the Indian community.
Nirvan disputed the account of his accuser and the matter is before the court. He has not been convicted of any crime. Chase should respect the law and abstain from defamatory statements about the young man who has refrained from responding to his accuser.
Surely, Chase can’t think that physical assault and being robbed are the equal of verbal spat or the result of the Indian caste system or being a ‘Kshatriya’. Not all Indians are ‘Kshatriyas’. I don’t think Freddie and Ryhean are Kshatriyas except being so intellectually. Also being assaulted and robbed and even murdered after every election while the police looked on is not the same as a verbal abuse or the violence was a result of them being racially prejudiced kshatriyas.
As an educated man, Chase should enquire about the “lived experience” of those Indians who cursed him out of the Indian village. Some East Coast residents are from Wismar where Indians were ethnically cleansed and many others would have lived through the Burnham years, as well as the 1997, 1998, and 2001 violence. They also experienced the massacre of Lusignan. If Chase were to interact with Indians about those and other horrific experiences, it may help to understand the behavior of some Indians towards him. I should inform Chase that Indians faced verbal abuse and robberies when they moved in Black American and Hispanic neighborhoods in the Bronx. They also experienced abusive language from Whites, though not robbed and violently attacked, in Queens and Long Island and other parts of America. The Indians did not respond in kind or with violence to their experience in America or elsewhere in the Guyanese diaspora. Prejudice and racism in America or Canada or UK did not cause Indians to be violent.

We must not evade responsibility for racial violence by justifying it with alleged prejudices of the victims whose verbal response to others may very well have emanated from the racism they experienced. Proffering instances of alleged Indian prejudice and the Indian social caste system can never be used as justification for violence against the Indian community. Prejudice may be the response to the violence experienced while caste is totally irrelevant having nothing to do with contemporary Indian social behaviour in Guyana and the violence rained on them that shaped their identity.

Yours truly,

Vishnu Bisram