One of the greatest American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, once made a famous speech in which he said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. I could not find the exact quotation of his famous speech so you will forgive me if I quote him from memory. He said words to the effect that "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half believing in fiction and half in science and logic. The union will not be divided. The house will not fall. But I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become one thing or another."
And that is more or less what he said. If you think about it, you will appreciate that except for the names and a few other changes his words apply accurately to Trinidad & Tobago in 2021. We are hopelessly divided racially, and to pretend that we are not is similar to whistling in the wind. there are two main races in the country: African or Black and East Indian. If you are Black it is a pretty good bet that you vote and/or support the PNM. If you are Indian it is an equally good bet that you support the UNC. If you are neither one nor the other you will support the political party that you believe that you personally can benefit from financially. If you are Syrian/Lebanese this usually means that you will support the PNM because the Indian community has enough wealthy persons that the UNC doesn't need their money.
You will notice that nowhere in the above analysis is there any statement of the differences in policies between the two major parties. The truth is that there is very little difference between them in regard to policies on anything ranging from health care to education to taxes. The arguments at election time is always about 'we can do a better job than they can and we steal less.' The not so hidden subtext is that both sides not so subtly say vote for us because we are Black/Indian (as the case may be).
It is probably too much to hope that the current leadership of both sides will change anytime soon or do anything for the country that will put us on the right track of not caring about 'us' and 'them' but of 'we'. Oh! The politicians on both sides will bleat about equality and how they are not racists and will trot out persons from the 'other side' which they say prove their point, but nobody is really fooled by that.
Look: the sooner we talk about this racial elephant in the room the better. And the sooner that we admit to ourselves that we are a society that is hopelessly divided by race also the better. You can't fix a problem unless you acknowledge that it exists in the first place. After that acknowledgement then we can begin discussing how to fix it.
But then, the question will arise: do our politicians really want to fix a system that they benefit from?
While no one is unbiased, your analysis sheds light on the important matter of race relations. Successful countries tend to have values that all of their people rally around, so I hope Trinidadian can continue to do that.
ReplyDeleteOne correction, Indian is not a race. Black isn't either. There are people of African descent and people of Indian descent. So the differences between people is where their most recent ancestors came from. The color of people's skin does not establish race, if or to the extend it really exists. When I say recent, I mean 10,000 years rather than over the long course of human evolutionary history, say 200,000 years and the successive migrations out of Africa. Race is a label given to people based on certain external physical features. It's power to really describe humanity is very limited, but it seems like most people have accepted it is natural law, which it is not. The only natural law at works here is the propensity of human beings to classify themselves and each other in different ways for different purposes. In the short term, people have been labeled in different ways often in pursuit of ignoble ends.
People have to respect the rights of others to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness.