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Jul 06, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Kaieteur News– I hate, and I mean the word literally, the sociological vulgarity in this country that race baiting, racist vocabulary, racist manipulation and racist deportment are the exclusive privilege of the PPP and PNC.
It is a misleading belief. It is an intellectual debasement. It is puerile nonsense. You pick up the newspapers and this false construct is there often to see. You see television interviews and this depraved deception is there to look at. You watch those discussion programmes on Zoom and this mediocrity in thinking is repeated ad naseum.I read a long letter in the newspapers by Alissa Trotz and Karen DeSousa and the sermon was the PPP and PNC are the culprits.
I read an article by the same Trotz and Arif Bulkan, a Guyanese lecturing in Barbados, and the theme is the same. I saw a Zoom panel on Globe-Span, and civil society activist, Vanda Radzik lamented the role of division perpetrated by the PPP and PNC.
Dr. Omar Shahabudin McDoom, of Guyanese extraction who teaches at the London School of Economics, has repeated this perspective of PPP and PNC being the cause of our racial problems.
Then an editorial of the Stabroek News in 2020 was on the same wavelength.
I have replied to all these misleading outpourings about the PPP and PNC being the worst preachers of race hate. Please see the following five articles:
(1) Tuesday, July 14, 2020, “In the diaspora, in Plato’s cave.”
(2) Wednesday, July 22, 2020, “Dr. McDoom’s pair of red underwear has lost its brightness and shape.”
(3) Tuesday, July 28, 2020, “Trotz, DeSouza and rigging: The imprisoned Freudian mind.”
(4) Sunday, October 4, 2020 “Dialectics in Guyana’s politics: An alternative theory.”
(5) Monday, December 28, 2020, “The nation of Guyana and its internal enemies.”It is exasperating that once more one has to return to this worn out topic but the dynamism of politics as it is unfolding in 2022 necessitates this. One examines the story of Guyana since March 2020 and there are parallels with the US after Obama’s victory and Nazi Germany.
There was a fertile bed for the racist advocacy of Trump when he decided to run for the presidency.
That soil was planted not so much by the Republican Party but extremist racists in business, the media, academia, etc. When the Nazi party came to power, they took their theory of the pure Germanic race from intellectuals who had promulgated it long before Hitler became chancellor.
The PPP and PNC have long been in the business of racial sermons to keep the flock intact. They have been at it for over 60 years. But it is a sociological and political deception to inform Guyanese that these two giants are the only race preachers.
Guyana has dramatically changed since the huge arrival of the AFC and WPA in power in May 2015 and the enormous consequence of the March 2020 election disaster.
These two developments have unleashed a negative dynamism that compels academics to search for other paradigms than the prevailing theory of the two big, bad racial performers – PPP and PNC. In Guyana today, racist and racially shaped narratives can be found in the mainstream media, civil society, other political parties and in social media.
The composers of these narratives do not belong to the PPP and PNC.
Their Macbethian racist brew exceeds anything we see in the PPP and PNC in 2022. It is the contestation of this commentator that there are more ethnic lava spilling from the remnants of the WPA that has no match inside the PNC and PPP.
There is no leader in the hierarchy of both the PPP and PNC the past 50 years that has called for ethnic participation and one doubt that they will do so. A big name in the AFC in July 2020, when the election crisis was on, suggested that in an AFC discussion.
Look at some of the writers in the letter pages of the newspapers, some of the online news-outlets, some of the columnists in the newspapers, some of the voices in civil society and you will find racist poison which is hard to detect among PPP and PNC leaders, no matter how much we may not like them.
No PNC leader the past 60 years has publicly used the C word to describe Indians. Last week one of the five persons that comprise the WPA, Kidackie Amsterdam, in an interview with Mark Benschop described the PPP government and the president of Guyana wildly using the C word. It is idiocy in 2022 to tell us that the PPP and PNC are the only racial plotters.
(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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