15 July 1999, 803 words
Those with an ethnic agenda often pose this false dilemma: that either people must cleave their ancestral culture or risk being acculturated by the modern Western one. The dilemma is false because there is, of course, a third option: that we can simply be Trinidadians.
This alternative never occurs to the ethnocentrists because, as far as they are concerned, there is no such thing as a valid Trinidadian culture. To them, the Trinidadian culture, insofar as it exists, is inferior to the ancestral one. They also see the Trinidadian culture as incomplete - lacking in tested beliefs, set values, established rituals and a truthful interpretation of reality. Nor, in their view, can Trinidadian culture - and by implication, Trinidadians - become valid until our society is informed or, better yet, shaped by these ancestral cultures.
I think such views are a weighty load of crap. The fundamental contradiction of those groups and individuals who push an ethnic agenda is a simple but telling one: that although they claim to be battling the brainwashed colonial mind, they are themselves stereotypes of that selfsame mind. That is, they try to get their identity from a culture that does not exist where they are. What is even worse, they are trying to create their identity from a culture that does not really exist at all.
In the first place, ethnocentrists always speak as though the ancestral cultures were ideal and homogenous. But the Golden Age never existed anywhere in the world and, although the ethnocentrists must know this, they pretend otherwise. Second, and more pertinently, to say that one is African or Indian or European is a meaningless assertion. That is because there is too much cultural diversity in each of those geographical regions, and real Africans or Indians or Europeans do not describe themselves as such in ordinary conversation. The tendency of persons anywhere in the world is to refer to themselves in terms of their territory. Even the Caribbean's original inhabitants, who shared the same culture and language, called themselves Lucayans (from one of the Bahamas islands) and Ciguayaons (from a region in Haiti) and so on.
Ethnocentrists argue, however, that the accident of geography does not define a person. "If a cat has kittens in an oven, you don't call them hops," they say, which is the only sample of humour I have ever heard from these oh-so-serious people. But, witty as the aphorism is, the argument does not hold. We don't call the kittens hops because, in normal categorization, the biological category supersedes the geographical. But the only biological category human beings can be grouped into is just that - human.
Racial categories, however, are socially constructed. Black people were never Black until white people called them so. In the United States, if you're seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, you're Black, whereas in Haiti if you're seven-eighths black and one-eighth white, you're White. All ethnocentrists , however, believe that racial categories have a fundamental biological cause and that the genetic differences which define racial characteristics also define differences in attitude. This is nonsense.
The other contradiction is a subjective one. A basic premise of the ethnocentrists is that, without knowledge of our ancestral roots, a person can never have a true sense of identity. Yet the first thing that caused me to doubt these people was the observation that all of them seemed to lack a strong sense of self: their insecurity, bitterness and rage did not reflect persons who had any psychological advantage over those individuals who couldn't give two figs about their ancestral culture.
Certainly, a person should be sufficiently intelligent and interested to know something about their ancestors' culture. But the exercise can only be an intellectual one - i.e. it cannot confer emotional succour. Indeed, when it becomes obsessive, it further damages the individual's psyche. So when the Afrocentrists assert that Triniafricans are ashamed of being African and the Indocentrists assert that every Trinindian (I'll make up my own categories, thank you) is really Indian, they are merely projecting their own massive inferiority complexes on to the people they say they speak for.
Thus, though they claim they're concerned about the welfare of their ethnic group, all these ethnocentrists display an inherent contempt for the average person. That is why Pearl Eintou Springer feels constrained to write her Emancipation Day columns in stilted dialect, and why the Maha Sabha columns promote blatant falsehoods. And, because they have no concern for Trinidadians, and because their ideology precludes the possibility of a paradigm that includes both ethnic groups, by their lights no such thing as a Trinidadian culture can ever exist without the sidelining or domination of one group. Which, of course, was the poisoned root of the colonial attitude. (Continued next week)
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh