Justice must indeed be consistent—but consistency is not sameness

May 30, 2025 Letters

Dear Editor,

I welcome Mr. Ramdyal’s thoughtful response, Selectivity in sympathy is still injustice ( https://kaieteurnewsonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/27/selectivity-in-sympathy-is-still-injustice/ ), and his shared commitment to justice, even as we diverge on how best to secure it. Disagreement, when grounded in a mutual pursuit of truth, enriches public discourse. I offer these clarifications in that spirit.

Mr. Ramdyal rightly observes that “justice must have the bandwidth to hold two truths at once.” I agree. But the act of holding multiple truths must not lead us to treat all wrongs as morally equivalent. The tragic death of eleven-year-old Adrianna Younge and the destruction of property—while both lamentable—occupy fundamentally different moral terrains. To say this is not to deny anyone’s pain; it is to insist on the kind of ethical discernment that is the foundation of real justice.

I did not trivialize the fire nor absolve those who looted and destroyed. What I challenged was the disproportionate moral attention paid to property loss, especially in a moment that demanded the nation’s full attention to the death of a child and the institutional failures surrounding it. When the Guyana Police Force’s narratives collapse within hours, when critical security footage is mishandled or hidden, and when public officials remain curiously mute, our first moral instinct should not be balance but scrutiny.

Mr. Ramdyal is right to be concerned about trust—whether it can be rebuilt after suspicion, fear, and ruin. But in societies marked by decades of institutional failure, where justice has too often followed influence rather than evidence, trust cannot be restored by silence or the mere absence of charges. It must be rebuilt through accountability and transparency. It is not enough to insist on the innocence of the accused; we must also account for why, in the eyes of many, the system’s silence often appears as complicity.

To reject mob rule—as I do without hesitation—does not mean we must ignore the roots of the rage. Understanding why mobs emerge is not the same as excusing their actions. We must have the courage to hold both thoughts in view: public violence must be condemned, and institutional betrayal must be confronted. Justice fails when it is blind to one side of this equation.

Mr. Ramdyal suggests that my logic drifts dangerously toward rationalising violence. I respectfully disagree. What I seek is not rationalization but reckoning. Guyana cannot heal from trauma by condemning only its symptoms. The looting and arson were unlawful. But so too were the deceptions and silences that incubated the public’s fury. We cannot stand for law and order if we do not also demand truth and justice from those sworn to uphold them.

Justice must indeed be consistent—but consistency is not sameness. It requires us to distinguish between a child’s death and a business’s destruction, between the actions of a mob and the failures of a public institution, between emotional understanding and moral approval. To collapse these distinctions is not fairness—it is flattening. Finally, this is not a contest of sympathies but a test of conscience. In how we respond to Adrianna Younge’s death—in what we condemn first and loudest, in what we explain and what we excuse—we disclose our deepest values. If justice is to mean anything at all, it must begin with the truth, spoken without fear or favour, even when it implicates the powerful, the comfortable, or the familiar.

Sincerely,

Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D.

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