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Oct 08, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Kaieteur News – I was surprised at two directions Dr. Melissa Ifill took during the election rigging that went on for five months. I am not on Facebook but when individuals known to me make unpalatable pronouncements on Facebook, persons would send me screenshots. One was when Dr. Ifill wrote, “I believe that the unanimity of views expressed by the international actors is not accidental or primarily due to principles but is due to the intense and sustained lobbying by Mercury (the American company) on behalf of the PPP. Mercury supplied the talking points and likely even crafted the messages put out.”
To this appalling insult, I penned a responding column (May 17, 2020). When I reach the part where Dr. Ifill says she lives her life fundamentally as a Black person, I will show the contradiction of her Mercury pronouncement and how it insults Black people. The second direction was when she gave an interview to the Chronicle harshly condemning those who criticized the behaviour of GECOM chairperson, Claudette Singh, categorizing the chastisement as an insult to women.
This was bizarre because it implies that women cannot do horrible things and Singh was doing horrible things for which she should face perpetual condemnation. See my column of Sunday, May 10, 2020 – “After this, we will never see some Guyanese the same way again.” During the election crisis, Dr. Ifill wrote on Facebook, the following, “I am unapologetically Black – always was and always will be! I am unapologetically feminist – always will be! I march through this life and world as a Black woman.”
There is a huge contradiction in being unapologetically Black and being unapologetically feminist. Space would not allow for a discussion of what feminism means but if, as Dr. Ifill claims, she journeys through life as essentially a Black woman then what happens when she has to make a choice between her Blackness and her feminism, and should non-Black women trust her to protect women’s rights when those rights are violated by Black rulers? This is what happened to Dr. Ifill during the five months of election rigging. The rights of women who were disenfranchised by one of the worst fraudulent elections in the 21st century were overlooked by Dr. Ifill because her Black existence dictated that she support the election riggers because they were of her ethnicity.
Here is what Dr. Ifill wrote in that same Facebook post. “I will fight against any system/structure that kills, exploits and/or relegates people of African descent to the margins, to second class citizenship.” Let us now connect the absurdity of her Mercury statement with her insults assigned to African people who were part of the international observers. If the international observers were victims of the relentless propaganda of Mercury and that drove them to castigate GECOM as election riggers rather than out of principles then Dr. Ifill is saying that a White American lobbying firm was able to con two former Black CARICOM Prime Ministers (Owen Arthur and Bruce Golding) and two serving Black CARICOM Prime Ministers (Mia Mottley and Keith Rowley), a Black head of the Commonwealth Secretariat, a CARICOM observer team that were all Black, a Black UWI Vice Chancellor, and a Black Nobel Prize winner who was a former president of Liberia.
The question are as follows; (a) is Dr. Ifill so pompous and narcissistic that she thinks she has a higher psychological make-up than those Black icons named above so White propaganda cannot penetrate her; (b) is Dr. Ifill an instinctive ethnic advocate and that drove her to write her pathetic nonsense; (c) as someone trained in history does she lack profound familiarity with Guyana’s sociology?
Now, since Dr. Ifill will fight any system that relegates African people to second class citizens, will she do the same when in certain situations where women are reduced to second class citizens and the persons perpetuating the exploitation are Africans? There are more questions for Dr. Ifill. Should non-African employees and students at UG feel they will be treated fairly when the deputy head of the institution openly exclaims that she lives her life as a black woman?
Should any person see the essence of their journey through life as determined by their ethnicity? When Ryhaan Shah said, “I would never negate my Indian self. It is my DNA. It is my history, my legacy, my traditions, my culture. It is my spiritual home,” African Guyanese and this Indian columnist disagreed. I have the same feeling towards Dr. Ifill. It is not that Shah and Dr. Ifill should not be proud of their ethnic DNA. What is worrying is that both say that it is that kind of DNA that determines how they see the word. Nature then determines nurture. It shouldn’t.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
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