From Where I Stand: We can’t heal if we tiptoe around race

Sep 28, 2025 Features / Columnists, News

---

By Janelle Persaud

Kaieteur News – We love a slogan in Guyana. “One Guyana,” “Social Cohesion,” “Unity in Diversity.” However, we can agree that slogans in this case, are incapable of holding together the fractures that have been deepening for decades. If we are really serious about healing and building a nation that works for all, then we have to first do the uncomfortable work which is to talk honestly about race.

An indigenous friend told me recently that in his village some believe that “Africans are thieves”, a stereotype he himself believed as a child.

That honesty struck me, confirming just how much of our divisions are sustained by what we’ve been told, what we’ve inherited, and never had the chance to interrogate together. Prejudices are commonplace and narratives about who “steals,” “owns,” “rules,” and who “belongs” classified into unquestioned truths. And because we tiptoe around race in public life, they go unchallenged, that is until they show up in our voting patterns, hiring practices, social interactions, and our politics.

For every Indo-Guyanese who recalls Burnham’s years with pain, there is likely an Afro-Guyanese who carries scars from PPP policies that excluded them. For every Indigenous or indeed Chinese Guyanese there is a stereotype that misrepresents their lives and cheapens their heritage. So, until those truths are spoken aloud, without fear and or shame, they will continue to haunt us.

This is why voices like David Hinds matter, even when they make us uncomfortable. His choice of words and tone may offend but the very discomfort his comments expose, tells us that we lack the maturity to talk about race openly without immediately shutting down the conversation or dismissing it as racist. If we cannot face our own discomfort, how will we ever face our shared history?

The truth is, conversations about race will never be easy. They will make us uncomfortable. But isn’t this discomfort worth embracing if it helps us to confront what has long been left unresolved?

I have felt that discomfort myself. I remember the first time I heard the term “house slave” used in the Guyana context. My initial reaction was rejection but once I read Malcolm X and understood the historical context and intent, it no longer shook me. I understood what it was pointing to, although the language was sharp and not part of my own vocabulary.

We are a society carrying layers of pain from slavery and indentureship to colonial divide-and-rule, and the betrayals of post-independence politics. These experiences have left behind narratives and falsehoods passed down in silence and whispered prejudices. And because we have never truly unpacked them, we remain divided.

Dr. Walter Rodney understood this. He reminded us that race and class in Guyana are intertwined. The poor across all our ethnic groups share more with each other than with their elites. Yet the divisions remain, manipulated by politicians and reinforced by history. As Frantz Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks, colonised people often internalise the very narratives that diminish them. We in Guyana have not been spared this inheritance, clearly.

And so we find ourselves here, where even talking about race feels taboo. Hinds, provokes outrage because his words drag into the open the wounds we pretend are healed. If the only response is to shut him down, we lose the opportunity to confront the real issues beneath the language.

Other societies have learned this lesson. South Africa, after apartheid, knew it could not leapfrog into reconciliation without first digging up the truth. Rwanda, after genocide, could not move forward without confronting its pain directly. These truth commissions were not perfect, but they created spaces where citizens could finally say what had been buried. As bell hooks wrote, “Moving through pain to understanding is the work of love.”

Guyana will not arrive at cohesion or unity without a similar reckoning. To my mind, one of the first things the One Guyana Commission can do is to kickstart a truth-telling process that acknowledges our legacies of race and class. But that must sit alongside action. What might that look like? At minimum, a sober review of whether existing policies or programmes systematically advantage or disadvantage any group; an honest look at access; who actually benefits, who is excluded, and why; and deliberate work on how government language, symbols, and institutions signal inclusion or alienation.

Other societies show this is possible. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its flaws, paired truth-telling with amnesty and some institutional reforms that gave the process teeth. Rwanda’s gacaca courts worked because they were rooted in community. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not end injustice overnight, but it forced policy shifts around Indigenous schooling, land use, and cultural recognition. None of these was easy. Each shows that healing requires conversation and concrete steps that prove inequities are being confronted.

In Guyana, this will be difficult. Ours is a multi-ethnic society where every group has its own claims of exclusion and its own dance with poverty. That tension will not disappear but we can start by committing to an honest reckoning, and then carefully, deliberately, building policies that broaden access and build trust across divides.

Yet what we must guard against are superficial solutions- slogans dressed up as substance and performance masquerading as progress.  We’ve seen it before in the vulgar plastering of lipstick on the pig that was APNU+AFC government’s Social Cohesion Ministry and now the odious pantomine of “One Guyana”. It is not enough to gather people for staged unity events or to repeat soothing mantras about togetherness.

From where I stand, we cannot afford to tiptoe around the issue of race and we must acknowledge that it will be uncomfortable. Maybe, if we hold space for each other through that discomfort, we can move from fear toward understanding.

Until we are ready to do this, slogans will continue to fail us, and “One Guyana” will remain just that — a slogan.

---

• Janelle Persaud, Race, social cohesion, Unity in Diversity

---