Would anyone be able to tell what kind of politics people support simply based on their appearance?

Nov 05, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

Please permit me to respond to Mr. D. Da Costa’s ‘The damage done to Guyana thanks to almost two generations of selfish and greedy Politicians’ (Stabroek News, November 3, 2022). The writer should be given credit for expressing heartfelt feelings.

Da Costa suggests that our Politicians are ‘power-drunk’ and suffer from “tunnel vision,” acting in their own self-interest. According to the writer, Politicians manipulate race to gain and preserve power. For him, “it does not require multi-million-dollar research projects and/or wide-ranging analyses to recognize this reality.” Now, if this is to be taken seriously, then we must ask Da Costa how he arrived at such deep and irrefutable knowledge. From the temperament of the letter under consideration, it appears that Da Costa had a spiritual revelation. Evidence for this could be found in his accusation where “the majority…are selling themselves and their souls for a few pieces of silver…not unlike Judas in the bible story.”

Editor, contrary to Mr. Da Costa’s implied claim that messianism should replace research in understanding our challenges, I insist that we, in fact, need more courageous research. By courageous here I mean going beyond doing snap surveys and election-based polling. We need to go beyond exactly the things that are taken to be deeply institutionalized realities of society.

Our treatment of race is among the most important to be liberated from innuendo, hearsay, mere belief, and if I may, intellectual laziness fomented and reproduced in the “dreary sands of dead habits.” We also need to go beyond economic data and begin to think about things while drawing from the fields of sociology, psychoanalysis, urban-rural studies, political theory, constitutional law, gender studies, linguistics, semiotics, and among others, intercultural and cross-cultural communication.

Given the centering of race in Da Costa’s article, allow me to make a few observations on the same. Most writers treat race as if it were a self-evident, physical, morphological category, meaning that race and appearance are the same. Stuart Hall, that great Caribbean Sociologist who worked out of the Open University in the U.K. once warned that the approach to race by writers like Da Costa amount to the following – show me what they look like, and I can tell not only what and how they think, but who they are, that is, their Being. Hall systematically destroyed this primordial understanding of race and racism. This is the ‘theory’ of race that is the most rampant in Guyana.

I ask Da Costa and others this now, and with full respect to the persons named here – would you have been able to say where they stand politically if you did not know them and just saw their “persons” or images? Think of GHK Lall, Susan Rodrigues, Geeta Chandan-Edmond, Natasha Singh Lewis, Pauline Sukhai, Glen Lall, Christopher Ram, Yog Mahadeo, Malcom Harripaul, Amanza Walton-Desir, Kwame McKoy, Gail Teixeira, Joseph Hamilton, Freddie Kissoon, Gen. Norman Mclean, Raphael Trotman, Tandika Smith, or Alister S. Charlie. Are you or anyone able to tell where someone stands politically by simply looking at them?

The fact is you cannot tell what kind of politics people support simply based on their appearance? Stuart Hall had called for “a politics without guarantees.” He was critical of certain strands of ‘Black Politics’ that pre-analytically ascribe the ‘correct’ politics based upon ancestry, ethnic background, and morphological features. Yes, there are patterns and regularities in political attitudes and voting behavior, but you simply cannot reduce people’s politics to their nominal ‘racial’ markers.

Freddie Kissoon has made powerful arguments along the same lines regarding Rishi Sunak, Clarence Thomas, and others. In the meantime, I ask the writer to clarify what exactly is meant by race.

Sincerely,

Dr. Randolph Persaud

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