in describing the assassination of President John Kennedy (November, 1962), Malcolm X, the (in)famous African-American leader, said it was a case of “…the chickens coming home to roost.” It’s an expression akin to “what goes around, comes around,” as he was alluding to how America’s proclivity for violence, both at home and abroad, had been visited upon its foremost citizen. True to his reputation for being controversial, he went on to add that “…being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.”
I thought about this quote in light of the events that occurred throughout last week. Granted, we’ve seen some it before––a police-involved shooting in a “hot spot” community and the angry residents who come out to protest. But what took us by surprise was when those protests spilt onto the streets of the capital.
Smoke from fires and the sounds of sporadic gunfire filled the air. Businesses were forced to close and innocent bystanders were sent scampering for safety. Both the Minister of National Security and the Commissioner of Police reassured the public that order would be restored. They also disclosed that this was part of a carefully coordinated plan by “criminal elements” to cause chaos and destabilise the country.
Whether you choose to believe those claims, or that the actions of the protesters were justified, our nation needs to ask if what’s happening is a case of our “chickens coming home to roost.”
It has been suggested that these protests are the result of what’s taking place in the United States. In my June 16 column, I criticised the local appropriation of America’s Black Lives Matter movement, asserting that it doesn’t apply to Afro-Trinidadians because the social conditions here are different.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s refine the cause to promote that “the lives of Afro-Trinidadians living in impoverished communities matter.” Even then that’s not necessarily true. Most Afro-Trinidadians are murdered by other Afro-Trinidadians.
And, in the vast majority of these incidents, the murderers live in the same communities. Yet no one makes a peep. No one protested the murder of two-year-old Aniah Jaggernauth. And she’s just the most recent example in a long list of victims.
The same silence followed the death of 14-year-old Naomi Nelson (Carenage, 2019), 16-year-old Akil Phillips (Laventille, 2019), 15-year-old Joshua Andrews (Laventille, 2018), and 17-year-old De-Neil Smith and 15-year-old Mark Richards (Laventille, 2016).
This isn’t about delegitimising the (alleged) killing of unarmed residents by the police. But the lack of furore over the murder of innocents sends the message that the residents have tacitly accepted that those lives don’t matter.
Unfortunately, a similar sentiment is felt by the rest of the nation. In the before-mentioned column, I wrote that the public has become unsympathetic to the internecine warfare and the living conditions in the communities along the East-West corridor.
We see the men as unemployed thugs and bandits, and the women as single mothers with multiple children all living off welfare. We don’t care how they live and whether die, just as long as they leave law-abiding citizens alone. This negative perception has widened the societal divide, creating an “us versus them” mentality.
That’s why it was so easy for us to condemn what happened last week––to see the chaos and not hear the cause. It’s ironic how some locals can support the BLM protests and be indignant about the prejudice experienced by African-Americans, but care little about their own people living in “hot spot” communities.
Furthermore, there is a lack of understanding about the circumstances that trap many of them in a cycle of poverty and why that leads to a life of crime.
Finally, there’s the failure of the political class. The protests started on Tuesday morning. The Prime Minister didn’t comment on it until Thursday afternoon. He spoke for about an hour, resorting to the tried and true “blame the Opposition” rhetoric and announcing the formation of a committee (yes, another one) to address the needs of these troubled communities. His response––the politicising of crime and the imposing of needless bureaucracy––sums up everything that’s wrong with our government’s handling of the issue.
And both the PNM and the UNC are guilty of this. The make-work programmes have done nothing to elevate or alleviate the socio-economic status of the residents of these communities. It’s all about securing their votes and placating them.
Worse yet, the government’s complicity in awarding suspected gang leaders lucrative contracts has indirectly supported criminal activity and gang warfare. So when the National Security Minister claimed that some of the protesters were being “paid” to participate, he’s not entirely wrong––because it’s taxpayer money that’s being used.
The reality is that there’s a lot of blame to go around. Politician, proletariat, and impoverished alike, we have allowed these problems to persist and to worsen.
For whatever reason, we have never sought to come together as a nation to work on and implement a solution.
The chickens that we’ve sent out, those of indifference, mistrust, ignorance, assumptions, and compliancy, are coming home to roost. Of course, no one claims that this makes them feel glad, but what it should make us feel…is sad.