BO­BIE-LEE DIXON

bo­bie-lee.dixon@guardian.co.tt

“It is im­por­tant that each group be first of all hon­est with it­self and its re­la­tion­ship with oth­ers.”

This was the ad­vice from re­tired Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ (UWI) lec­tur­er Dr Olabisi Kuboni as she weighed in on the lo­cal dis­cus­sion of racism, dis­crim­i­na­tion, and prej­u­dice, sparked by on­go­ing protests in the US over the po­lice mur­der of un­armed African-Amer­i­can George Floyd in Min­neapo­lis, Min­neso­ta on May 25.

Floyd killing was streamed live on so­cial me­dia by by­standers who made re­peat­ed ap­peals for the now charged of­fi­cer, Derek Chau­vin to re­move his knee from be­ing pressed in­to the neck of Floyd for near­ly nine min­utes.

“An im­por­tant ques­tion to be asked is, how is my self-in­ter­est served in my re­la­tion­ship with oth­er groups?” Kuboni said.

Asked why she felt the killing of Floyd and the sub­se­quent protests in the US were hav­ing a do­mes­tic im­pact, even at the risk of racial ten­sion ris­ing, Kuboni ex­plained, among most African-Trinida­di­ans, there was a nat­ur­al ten­den­cy to iden­ti­fy with and feel a con­nec­tion to Africans in North Amer­i­ca. This sense of one­ness, she said, can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of black con­scious­ness and the call for black pow­er among Africans in the USA at that time.

She said, “Even though the lead­ers of the move­ment in T&T, at that time, did not re­strict the no­tion of be­ing black to peo­ple of African ori­gin ex­clu­sive­ly, on the whole, T&T In­di­ans did not grav­i­tate to the new wave of black con­scious­ness in any sig­nif­i­cant ex­tent. Even more so now In­di­ans may tend to re­sist what they per­ceive as an at­tempt by African Trin­bag­o­ni­ans to in­volve the pop­u­la­tion as a whole in a ral­ly­ing call to sup­port and iden­ti­fy with a race strug­gle in the USA.”

With a mul­tira­cial so­ci­ety such as T&T’s, Kuboni was al­so asked if it were time the coun­try be­gan a na­tion­al dis­cus­sion on these is­sues. In re­sponse, she said speak­ing of T&T as a mul­ti­cul­tur­al so­ci­ety, while cor­rect in a sense, tends to mask the re­al­i­ty that the re­la­tion­ships be­tween and among dif­fer­ent eth­nic groups in the so­ci­ety may not be of a sin­gle, ho­moge­nous type.

She not­ed, how­ev­er, at the same time, one couldn’t ig­nore the grow­ing per­cep­tion that In­di­ans as a group were do­ing bet­ter than Africans in re­cent times.