The Masque of Race

A post on someone's wall went this way:

"I wonder what would happen to the economy if someone came up with a way to teach suffering black people enough self respect to leave the cocaine and the KFC right there?

To save and buy instead of rent forever?

To stay home and raise their children instead of letting them grow up to be grist for the Magistrate's Court, what would happen... to all them lawyers?

I need to stop wondering them things yes"

This post angered me for several reasons. The main reason being that it sought to explain certain social ills from the perspective of ethnicity. This post treated with symptoms of dysfunction rather than with the root cause of dysfunction in our society. So, if a person had no understanding of Trinidad and Tobago's society, it could be easily construed that the ills mentioned in the post are experienced only by the Afro-descended community.

This also implies that Trinidad and Tobago is a nation divvied up into distinctive ethno-centric communities. So there is an Indian community, African community, Syrian, Chinese, European etc. And these communities do not interact and impact on each other. In short, the writer's version of Trinidad and Tobago sounded very much like anthropologist MG Smith's description of a model for a "plural society": separate groups that only interact for trade purposes.

However, Trinidad and Tobago is built differently. Some of our high crime areas, according to our 2000 census are also some of our most ethnically mixed areas (Diego Martin, Port of Spain, Arima to name a few). So then, where are these black communities? And if these high crime areas also have some of the criminals, then how do we target just the black criminals? In fact, do we target the black criminals or do we instead target the social conditions that lead to crime such as: poor/inadequate education systems, weakened family structures, inequitable wealth distribution, inadequate social and support systems.

So the writer's suggestions are:

teach black people self respect....you don't teach self respect, self respect is an awareness that is achieved through becoming knowledgeable in many other areas.... it don't have a 12-step plan to self respect...or self respect made easy. And you really want to dig up far, who helped to undermine black people self respect here and undermine black culture, black hair, black skin, black music, black dance? I will leave that alone for now...because it is not about laying blame but coming to terms with the truth of a matter.

Another suggestion is to have black people save and buy instead of rent forever...i guess is only black people does rent...there are historical references I can make to land dispossession in this country. People landed here and were given 32 acres of land per enslaved person they brought with them. After Emancipation the former enslaved people got no land, while their former owners kept the land ceded to them and still in their possession and also received money in the form of compensation for the labour they were about to lose...so much so that an estate was bought with said money and called La Compensation by a former owner....that's the root of African land dispossession and it has only been further compounded by newer administrative systems. Yet in all of that there are afro-descended people here who employed sound financial practices and now own homes, own properties; so it cannot be said that all blacks aren't home owners as this post implies.

The suggestion about staying home to mind their children is beyond offensive. Only Afro-descended people go out and work and leave their children at home? Other groups don't have dual income homes? There are reasons that people have to go out and work...to support the children. All groups have delinquent mothers/parents,...Just as all groups have good mothers/parents. Yet this post seems to imply that delinquent mothers belong to the black group.

While I am willing to agree that Afro-descended people suffer from all of these symptoms, it is not the entire group...and these social ills are certainly not specific to one ethnic group but plagues all of society.

When I responded to this post, I was accused of deflecting from the issue, "ponging" the writer, focusing on his ethnic differences (though at no point did I raise the issue of his ethnicity) and told that I was offering no solutions to the problem and only prolonging an argument. I have worked in education too long to take the comment about offering no solutions seriously.

If part of what is plaguing afro-descended people today is low self esteem, is dealing in stereotypes really helping them? Would it not make sense to start discussing the issues from the case of cause and not just the side of effects. It was also disturbing to see how members of the "black" community jumped on the bandwagon and started talking about "suffering black people" as if they were a separate and distinct group from them. It is so easy to distance ourselves from that which disgusts us eh?

We all know the problems plaguing our society....can we start honestly discussing the cause of these problems? Where the drugs coming from? Where is our money going? Why can't it be distributed more equitably and better systems for education et al put into place?

I guess it's sooo much easier to sit in one's armchair and pronounce on issues from a simplistic level, without doing the necessary analysis or research. Me, I make a living from education and research; so I have no choice but to get off my armchair and treat it seriously.