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Reply to "Dr Bato on a Rage..."

1.  Creole Guyanese (African, mixed and Portuguese) do not define their ethnic identity outside of a "Guyanese" context.  They also see themselves as part of a Caribbean creole culture, with all the multi cultural aspects that this embraces.

 

2.  Creole culture is celebrated by them as it is a creation of the many peoples who live in the Caribbean and/or who embrace a primarily Caribbean identity.  It is not regarded as a singular culture, but as a composite of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the indigenous cultures of the Americas.  Do not tell a Jamaican that curry goat isnt Jamaican.

 

3. Indocentrics like this man reject creole cultural as being mongrelized and degenerate.  They do NOT embrace a multicultural vision of Guyana, where there are numerous pathways for the various ethnicities to embrace each other, to identify with one another, and to even absorb aspects of each culture as it suits their needs.   

 

Locating themselves out of this cultural continuum, they then wail when they are seen as interlopers, clannish, racist, unpatriotic, and not to be trusted. 

 

4.  There are also foolish as an Indo Carib creole culture does exist. Indo Caribbean people are easily recognized as being a Caribbean peoples as their almost 200 years existence in the Caribbean means that they have contributed to what being Caribbean is about, and similarly have absorbed cultures, styles and values from the other drivers of Caribbean identity.

 

Indocentrics like this man scream that those Indo Carib people who recognize this fact are "self hating", "love blackman", or are participating in "Indian genocide". India of 2015 isnt the India of 1838, so why do these folks wish to pretend that Indo Caribbean people have remain untransformed even after almost 170 years away from India?

 

 

THIS is the reason why people like him are seen as racist.

 

1. They locate their Indian identity OUTSIDE of a national construct.

 

2. They locate their Indian identity as superior to that of the more creolised groups, with myths of hard work, etc., even as Indians are the POOREST group of indentures, and maybe not much better off than are the much abused, and stigmatized descendants of slaves.

 

3. Whereas as the African intellectual talked much about African abuse of non Africans, as they spoke of the abuse of Africans by non African groups, the Indian "intellectuals" instead construct a myth of the weak and much abused Indian, and refuse to engage in conversations about the role that Indians THEMSELVES have played constructing this ethnic tension that exists in Trinidad, Suriname and ESPECIALLY Guyana.

 

We are still waiting for the Indian intellectual who can speak about the full gamut of the role of the Indian in our ethnic tensions as Africans like Eusi, Andaiye, David Hinds, and Walter Rodney have done for the Afro Guyanese. ALL of them condemned African racism, even as all of them also condemned the racism directed towards Africans.

FM
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