27 August 1998, 943 words
I had been talking regularly to Debra, a 20-year-old redgirl, for about three months before she happened to mention that her boyfriend, Dylan, was indian.
"How come you never told me that?" I asked (for she had told me everything else about their relationship - and I do mean everything.)
"I dunno," she said. "It wasn't important."
This view accords with that of most of the young, middle-class people I know ("young" being between 15 and 22 years) and quite a few who are not so young. For Debra and her friends, the concept of race is completely irrelevant. In her liming group are a white, a black, a chinese, a dougla and another redgirl. There used to be two indian girls, a Hindu and a Muslim, but they never got to go out much and dropped out of the group after they left school. Except for the chinese girl, Sue, all of them have had relationships with boys of different races. (Sue has never had a romantic relationship.) The only one in the group who has had the same boyfriend since schooldays is the other redgirl, Aisha. Her boyfriend is indian.
"Race doesn't matter," says Debra. "Cute matters." A recent letter to the editor signed by five youths of varying ethnicities asserts, "We do not term ourselves as African youths or Indian youths. We are simply Trinidadian youths."
Of those young people who do not think like this, it is worth noting that most have a political axe to grind (or are not considered cute.) But Romney, an attractive 18-year-old browning who lives in Chaguanas, admits that she has become more aware of the race of other people in the past few years. However, the idea that there exists Trinidadians who can be totally free of racial bias is completely mystifying to the older generation (i.e. persons above 40, and quite a few in their mid- to late 30s.)
Barbadian novelist George Lamming sums up the older people's perspective exactly: "There is no Trinidadian of African or Asian descent who is free from the nurturing influence of a racial consciousness," he writes.
Well, Lamming is wrong, and I can say so definitely from my own consciousness. Lamming's comment merely shows that, in Trinidad, the generation gap is nowhere more widely defined than by the differing attitudes towards race between older and younger people.
The obvious question is, if the older people are so race-conscious, how have the younger people managed to avoid absorbing their parents' bias? After all, many Trinidadian adults find it completely appalling that young people, including their own children, can consider having romantic relationships with persons of a different race and the parents do all in their power to prevent this happening. Yet it does happen. Developmental psychologist Judith Rich Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption has a theory that, though not directly about this issue, seems pertinent: "The strategies children work out at home for getting along with their parents and siblings are likely to be useless in the world outside their home," she says. "That is why children's behavior differs systematically in different social contexts."
This would explain why even young Hindu boys are walking around these days with their jeans around their knees listening to Buju Banton, and why the mothers of youthful killers always talk about what a 'good child' the boy was. "When you ask people to assess the personality of their children or siblings, what you get is a description of how the subjects behave at home," says Harris. "This doesn't tell you much about how they behave at other times and in other places."
What widens the gap between Trinidadian adults and youths is the contemptuous attitude the former often display towards the latter. Express columnist Rajnie Ramlakhan, writing in response to the letter cited above, described the writers as revealing "their own laziness, lack of initiative and disinterest in their culture." Emancipation Support Committee member Pearl Eintou Springer, writing some months ago in defence of Winnie Mandela, asserted that the African woman "would prefer to kill her children than let him betray the revolution."
So it is hardly any cause for wonder that young people have little interest in the opinions of their elders. What one also has to understand is that nearly all young people have one dominant motive: to get a mate. That is why even the revelations of race bias at Club Coconuts and the Base did not cause the demise of those two clubs: what do sociopolitical issues matter compared to finding true love?
As adults, we learn to defy our hormones for more long-terms interests, but that may well be because as adults we no longer have so many hormones to defy. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker suggests, "As far as reproduction is concerned, the home is a dead end. The child will have to compete for mates, and before that the status necessary to find and keep them, in other arenas which play by different rules." So when the Maha Sabha insists that the best form of marriage is one where the father chooses a husband for the daughter, this alone gives significant motivation to young Hindus to turn away from Hinduism.
For all these reasons, the young Trinidadian culture has less and less space for racial and ethnic bigotry. I don't think anyone with sense could deny that this is a step forward, although all our ethnocentric intellectuals certainly try their best to do so. But what the youths do now determines the future, and that future is clearly one where racial prejudice, and its flip side of racial pride, will simply not exist.
Copyright ©1998, Kevin Baldeosingh