This is as good a time as any to discuss the logical and political consequences of eating cake particularly as it deals with the nature and content of ethnic discourse, complaints and possible action by a regulatory agency in the imminent election year.
Dr. Terrence Campbell in a letter to the press claimed that Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo ‘has a genetic predisposition to eating his cake and having it. As president, he was the ‘Champion of the Earth’ and today he is a ‘Champion of Fossil Fuels’. As opposition leader, he was the ‘Champion of Renegotiation’ and today he is ‘Champion of Contract Sanctity’. In response, during one of his press conferences Jagdeo is reported to have said, ‘I think more broadly he is talking about Indo-Guyanese’.
Dr. Campbell complained to the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) claiming that he is not a racist; that by ‘genetic’ he meant behaviour developed from long practise or association and suggesting that the vice president is either unable to think outside of racial terms or intended to provoke racial hostility and ill-will.
Perhaps it is the former, for the proverb ‘you cannot simultaneously retain possession of a cake and eat it too’ will forever be applicable to the entire human race; not only Indians. And while it is logically true, if you are fond of cake the solution to the predicament is to get more cake, i.e., make cake available whenever it is required, and I would say that, taken as a group, Indian Guyanese are better at accumulating wealth i.e., cake, than African Guyanese. I do not believe that many, including the vice president, will quarrel with this conclusion, but this kind of ‘positive’ comes with the negative and opens the broader discourse about how, in the context of Guyana, one should do cultural analysis if every perceived negative ethnic comment is likely to lead to accusations of racism.
Culture is a social construction defined as the norms, values and beliefs of a people. Such a wide remit must contain positive and negative traits, and it is the duty of individuals, particularly citizens of the same country, to identify, discourse and use the good and discard or find solutions to the bad. Identifying negative ethnic contributions or behaviour in a culture does not make one a racist. What makes one a racist is one’s intent: seeking to or using that finding to discriminate or cause animosity. Indeed, the genes of a people may not be perceived as the deciding factor in how negative or positive traits develop.
For instance, the first ethnologic scientific scholar in the world, Ṣāʿid al‐Andalusī, a Muslim who served as a judge in the Spanish city of Toledo in the 11th century, wrote a short work setting out the contributions the various people of his world made to the development of science. According to him, ‘scientific achievement was a characteristic of the peoples of temperate latitudes: Indians, Persians, Chaldeans/Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Arabs and Hebrews.
The other people of the world had not contributed to the development of science. To the north of the temperate zone ‘the rays of the sun were too feeble, with the result that people’s living in high latitudes were blond and stupid. To the South of the temperate band the sun was too strong, so that the people living in low latitudes were black and foolish.’ Those in between were just right, hence their glorious role in the history of science. Note, his discrimination was based largely on the physical environment and not on genes, religion, etc (Michael Cook (2003) A Brief History of the Human Race).
I suggested above that in our context the capacity to accumulate wealth is considered a positive trait, but this not a universal belief and the following suggests that it can depend upon your view of the human condition and its future, and is also a good example of the critical discourse that should be conducted on such cultural/ethical issues.
Jews are even better known for their capacity to accumulate wealth and when they began to request greater freedoms in 19th century Germany, Bruno Bauer, a German philosopher and theologian, wrote a critical thesis arguing that they are egoists for demanding political emancipation when, in his ‘radical’ view, no one in Germany was politically emancipated. By its very nature, he argued, the Christian state is incapable of emancipating the Jew and by their very nature the Jews cannot be emancipated. So long as the state is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, the one is as incapable of granting emancipation as the other is of receiving it.
Karl Marx, a former student of Bauer, whose parents had relinquished Judaism, broke ranks with him, arguing that his focus was wrong. ‘Let us consider the real worldly Jews, not the Sabbath Jews, as Bauer does, but the every-day Jews. We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we will look for the secret of religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical needs, egoism. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstering (capitalism). What is his secular God? Money. Very well.
Emancipation from huckstering and from money, and therefore from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our epoch. ….. This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in Jewish fashion, not only by taking to himself financial power, but by virtue of the fact that with and without his co-operation, money has become a world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as Christians have become Jews’ (On The Jewish Question, 1844)!
Given this kind of fluid context, I hope that Campbell does not take Jagdeo’s behaviour too personally. The ethnic and political configuration of Guyana, means that ‘race/ethnicity’ has always been and in the foreseeable future will be a central feature in Guyanese politics. What Campbell called ‘race baiting’ the PPP has been sensibly calling politicking since the days of aapan jaat in the 1950s. The PPP will continue to use every opportunity to solidify its ethnic support and undermine the ethnic support of the other parties.
Happy New Year.