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Jul 24, 2016 Countryman, Features / Columnists
By Dennis Nichols
Guyana – land of six races! The concept was never really clear to me, although I understood that there were groups of people who looked, spoke, and generally expressed themselves differently from one another.
As a young child growing up in the area between Mahaicony and Mahaica on the East Coast of Demerara, I was aware of two groups only – East Indians and Blacks. There were a few of what we called mixed-races, and one White priest, but I never understood them to be distinct groups like the other two.
I was confused. How could a mixture of races be defined as a race itself? And weren’t the Portuguese originally White Europeans? If, as in my case, my ancestors came from Egypt, Scotland/Ireland, and the West Coast of Africa, how could I be boxed by someone else into a single racial type? And what was ‘race’ anyway, apart from the way you looked and the customs you kept or inherited?
As I look back, I imagine the reason for the lack of clarity was probably because differences in appearance were offset by the use of non-racial words like friend, neighbour, child, mommy, daddy, aunty, uncle, teacher etc., with reference to residents. It was as if you could see the differences only occasionally; otherwise they seemed to be doing what they had to do to exist as harmoniously as possible with each other.
The Coolie and Black Man jibes meant little to me and, I suppose, to other young children who were still unadulterated. In any case, I was then between the age of four and eight.
I became more aware of the other races only after my family moved to Georgetown. There I saw a few other Whites, several Portuguese, Chinese, and some Amerindians. Gradually the racial differences, especially among adults, became more evident in their personalities and their professions, but still fairly innocuous – Whites, unapproachable managers; Portuguese, friendly shopkeepers; Chinese, suspicious laundry proprietors; Amerindians, shy bush-people. And for reasons never fully understood, although I identified as Black, I felt myself more tuned in to ‘mix-race’ people, especially but not exclusively the ‘Dougla’ and ‘Buffiander’ types.
Then came the 1960s, and with them, blatant racism. I and other journalists have written much about those dark, ethnophobic days when Blacks and East Indians hated, attacked, bombed, and murdered one another, and Guyana seemed headed for a civil war, so I need not rehash that period. Through my eyes at the time, the Whites were lords and peacemakers, the Chinese and Portuguese mostly uninvolved commentators, the Amerindians silent watchers, and the Mixed Races caught ducking in the crossfire.
Two fleeting and deceptively minor incidents from those days underline the disquiet which still lingers in my mind today. The first was when my mixed-race friend, Vincent, was lashed across his back with a bicycle chain while liming on Russell Street because he was perceived as Indian. The second was when an Indian fellow schoolmate at Queen’s College offered me a ride home on his motorbike (after passing me walking on Camp Street for almost a year) because he had to pass through a rough, predominantly-Black neighbourhood in Charlestown. I was to be his safeguard.
As the years went by, the concept or race although globally pervasive, grew more and more illogical to me, sometimes ridiculously so when linked with those of class and religion. I am one of those persons who see the idea of race as not very scientific, especially with the knowledge that it only really began to flourish after the ‘discovery’ of the New World and the related slave trade involving Europe, Africa ,the Americas, and the Caribbean – a social construct, and a perverse one at that.
With the steadying hand of maturity guiding me, I forced myself to look beyond a local understanding of race; not very successfully in a country like ours. The perceived differences, particularly between East Indians and Blacks, and the superiority some of them assumed over Amerindians, irked me. As a ‘free spirit’ and an underdog champion, I felt a growing sense of kinship with the latter, partly because of their naturalistic way of life, and partly because they had been imposed upon by so many interlopers. The other groups appeared to be more or less above the fray.
My part-solution was to accept the physical appearance of the mixed races (combinations of two or more of the so-called pure races) as more suited to my own country-view, and to hope that the consideration of their multi-ethnic make-up would somehow help diffuse the antagonistic feelings those groups may have held against each another. To me it’s a no-brainer that it is harder for someone to deny a part of his racial identity than it is to be intolerant of someone whose skin colour and hair texture are different from his.
That’s why when I read of the recent population growth shift in Guyana in favour of the Mixed Race and Amerindian groups, I experienced a feeling of mild elation, and renewed hope for a solution to the racial problems that have haunted this country and stymied its overall development. It’s a hope also that the old hard-headed racists in our midst are in fact a rapidly diminishing minority; one that is being replaced by a younger, more open-minded generation which increasingly sees the worth of the individual (Mixed or not) as more relevant than any clannish race mentality.
This bourgeoning of the mixed-race population appears to be a worldwide phenomenon. In many countries where there are significant biracial or multiracial groups, they are currently the fastest-growing demographic, though often too scattered to be recognized en bloc.
The United States is a good example. The US Census Bureau notes that while the population reporting a single race grew by 9% between 2000 and 2010, those reporting multiple races grew by 32% over the same period, with some multi-race groups increasing by 50% or more.
By the way, in a country still reeling from White-Black racism, the multi-race group exhibiting the most significant change in America is the White and Black population which grew by more than 1,000,000 and increased by 134% since 2000. This was followed by the White and Asian population which grew by 750,000 and increased by 87%.
And as if taking cue from Big Brother, Guyana’s mixed race population increased between 2002 and 2012 by some 23,000, standing at almost 149,000 in the latter year, accounting for almost 20% of our three-quarter million people. The only other significant increase among ethnic groups was the Amerindian population which grew by 10,000 over the same period. The two major ethnicities, East Indians and Blacks, showed relatively significant decreases. Is this trend translating to a corresponding lessening of racial animosity between them? Hmmm!
Throughout the length and breadth of Guyana, the growing visibility of our mixed race brothers and sisters is unmistakable; and beautiful. A purge of virulent racism may be underway. The stigma of ‘half-breed’ and ‘no-nation’ is being replaced by a rainbowed display of nuanced shades and textures that may finally give credence to our national motto. If and when this happens, the Race to a truly national Guyanese identity will have reached a most satisfying and cathartic climax.
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