Eliminating historic racial discrimination

The observation of “International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” last Saturday, should remind us that racial discrimination has been the foundational element of the Guyanese state. As such, no efforts should be spared to eliminate its insidious effects in our quest to create a good life for all Guyanese citizens. Back on 26 October 1966, five months after we became independent from Britain, the UNGA had adopted resolution 2142 (XXI), proclaiming 21st March for the Day’s annual commemoration. On that day in 1960, police opened fire and killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration in Sharpeville, South Africa, against the apartheid “pass laws”. The General Assembly exhorted the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination.
In our own country, racial discrimination by the European colonial state – first the Dutch and then the British – against the peoples it had dragged from across the world to labour on their plantations was the order of the day. Class – defined by Weberian or Marxian criteria – was coincident with race, with Whites automatically occupying the highest strata. The fight for independence was as much a fight to eliminate racial discrimination as anything else. It was our greatest tragedy when the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) – which was consciously crafted as a vehicle for all races to vie for political power in 1950 – was opportunistically split in 1955. This was engineered by Forbes Burnham, who supported the colonial machinations to remove Cheddi Jagan who was accused of being a communist.
By independence, accusations of racial discrimination by the colonial state to create a racially skewed Public Service and Police/Volunteer Force rose to the fore in the midst of violent racial clashes between 1962 and 1964. This led to an ICJ Inquiry in 1965 into the composition of these institutions with recommendations for rectification. The Armed Forces, for instance, composed of the Police and Volunteer Force along with a newly-created, racially balanced Special Services Unit, overall, still had 73.5% African Guyanese, 19.9% Indian Guyanese, 4.2% Mixed and 0.3% Portuguese. They recommended that for the next 5 years, 75% of all new recruits be Indian Guyanese to bring them up to their 48% proportion of the population. This was not done by the PNC that rigged elections until 1992 and remained a contentious point.
In 2004, a Disciplined Forces Commission, after extensive hearings, made a more nuanced recommendation with the same goal to rectify historical racial discrimination: “With regard to manpower, the Commission recommended that recruitment procedures should have a particular focus on the Indian-Guyanese community because of its general disinclination to join the Force; this should not be done to the neglect or exclusion of other ethnic groups. The Force should adopt recruitment procedures which must take into consideration cultural, sociological and psychological imperatives, designed to attract Indian-Guyanese in particular to the GDF.” While there has been some measure of balance, the composition remains skewed and illustrates the importance of institutional and systemic racially discriminatory practices.
While most attention focuses on discriminatory actions based on the race of individuals – for which our legal system offers explicit redress – institutional and systemic racism act at another level in all areas of national life and might not even be “intentional”. Institutional racism involves policies, practices, and procedures of institutions that have a disproportionately negative effect on a particular racial group’s access to and quality of goods, services, and opportunities. Systemic racism is the basis of individual and institutional racism; it is the value system that is embedded in a society that supports and allows discrimination.
For most of our post-independence history, our strained economic conditions often created a seemingly win-lose situation for our racial groups – which tended to vote along that marker – in the distribution of benefits by incumbent governments. With the inflow of oil revenues since 2019, the PPP governments since 2020 have explicitly acknowledged the need for equitable spending in the various racial communities and there is evidence that institutional racism is decreasing rapidly.