Perversity in paradise

Sep 13, 2022 Letters

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Dear Editor,

The disturbing keeps coming up in Guyana.  It is how one group soars, while the others are not just left behind, but kicked farther away.  A locally known businessperson and a companion visited a brand name hospitality site in Georgetown, and what came from that occasion is raw and ugly.  In both openness and behind the scenes, it is of a Guyana that is being wrenched more to the snapping point, with insulting arrogance part of the toxic cocktail.

First, the two were the only Black faces in the well-patronised establishment.  It could be a function of money: who has, who doesn’t.  I must correct myself, though, for there were other Black faces.  The waiting staff.  It could be that my fellow Guyanese missed the security and janitorial appointments.  Second, the exclusively Indo Guyanese crowd (minus two) was all fun frolic, business.  Noticeably, whenever Black staff members approached Indian tables to assist, they were dismissed.  Fourth, when a supervisor was engaged, Indian table help results. I take a chance and call this sequence the luck of the draw, random, and innocent.  But it is difficult to reconcile what followed, as if in seeming confirmation.

For five and six, represent the vulgar, the vicious, and the vast truths of today’s Guyana, like never before.  Respectively, there is neither customer interest nor desire for blacks to serve; and from the horse’s mouth itself: they don’t want blacks to help, only Indians.  The two reports are not from visiting Caucasians, but Guyanese Indians, and that blatant.  Sharp spotlights must be focused on this unacceptable racist mentality bedeviling our society, and at the heights, at this momentous time in our history, present, and towards our future.  This should not be allowed to stand, must not be given a pass because it gets worse through the collaboration of the entity’s managerial staff.

For seventh, and according to the Black staff, they are being given written guidance to provide a higher level of service to Indo Guyanese.  Now we have progressed into establishment discrimination.  Eighth, the offending staff (due to their colour) are being pressured to leave, so that they can be replaced by Indians, who are closer fits to the mental emotional, and new social décor.  According to the Black staff members, as gathered by the Black patron, they function in an openly racist and hostile environment.  Once accurate, as bolstered by facts and circumstances, then I assert what we have here is Jim Crow Guyana, in the open and 75 plus years later.

It is my position that Guyana is graduating to a pungently racist society peopled by mainly demagogues and their cronies who talk a pleasant racial game before public audiences, but are nothing but rabid bigots in private.  Like bigots all over, they have their company of occasional collaborating domestic faces to prove how pure they are.  But what we have here are layers upon layers of sometimes silky, sometimes strident, racist overtures and practices, that are fast becoming settled culture.  I know the subtle and the sharp when I hear of them because I have been near both.  Consider.

In the 90s, during early Wall Street days, we had a dedicated, productive colleague.  A new hire came. The CEO stopped by, and his words were: ‘this is my idea, my vision, for the company.  The newcomer was blond, blue-eyed Caucasian, the industrious worker was Chinese.  Almost 30 years later, her words wring a dagger: how do you think I felt then, feel now?  I think I know but know that I know nothing.  The second instance was when I hired a Black Guyanese.  He was pressured from day one, eventually left.  The only reason I lasted so long on Wall Street was because I always ensured I had secrets that mattered.  Still have.  Not just from there.

This is where our Black workers are in our Oil Age, where the face of the company, the brand, consideration, and hospitality of the establishment, starts with its colour schemes, including table waiters.  The troubled, likely offended Afro-Guyanese customer subsequently visited two other well-attended business places that cater to local and foreign clienteles.  Similar experiences were shared by the Black staff.  People don’t like this talk.  I know I have unsettled people when I dismiss ‘One Guyana’ as being visioned and vested in one kind of people only.  Well, from all indications, I got this one right from the first word.  Things like these can’t be kept secret forever.  We talk too much, live with technology, lose old camouflages.

A parting thought comes.  This must be exposed, like how KFC was over some roach or rodent, and rushed into corrective, careful mode.  I see this as a pressure point, exposure point, and escalation one, all at the same time.

Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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