On Indo-Caribbean post-graduates, ABDs, PhDs and professors

Dear Editor,
In all Caribbean academic conferences, seminars, webinars, panel presentations and roundtables, there are few Indo-Caribbean researchers, scholars and intellectuals. Given that they are a numerical minority in the region, they are still almost invisible because they just do not appear in the audience or on the stage.
But you do see these university “educated” people from the Humanities and Social Sciences in all-Indian Facebook, WhatsApp and email chat groups and communal blogs. They speak in safe spaces such as private gatherings and in Indian Diaspora Conferences usually held in communal venues such as the NCIC Divali Nagar, rather than in university auditoriums.
They hardly appear in large multi-ethnic fora dominated by non-Indians, and are incapable or too scared to debate with Afro intellectuals on race and ethnicity. Perhaps they have taken a decision to self-surrender into silence and invisibility because they have been shouted down too many times. Their gravest mortal fear is to be called “racist”, so they avoid any semblance of researching, writing or talking in public spaces about Indian identity. Not unexpected, they fear talking or writing about institutionalised discrimination and systemic racism against their own Indian group, even when they themselves are victims.
If these post-graduates, ABDs (All but dissertation), PhDs and professors do appear in multi-racial gatherings, they are apologetic about being Indo-Caribbean, assume a Black persona, and viciously attack fellow Indians and Indian identity to prove to others that “I am not one of them Indian” or “I am not one like them Indian”. If they do appear in multi-ethnic conferences, it is to talk about their research on the past (indentureship, 1838-1917), not the present; talk about past oppression by Whites, not about present institutionalised discrimination by Blacks.
It is a type of Saheb Babu or Uncle Tom personality, the latter drawn from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in which the title character is an enslaved African American. In an attempt to cope with threats, Tom becomes passive, submissive, subservient and appeasing to his master. This type of Indian academic, teaching in Black-dominated (community) colleges and universities, give up or hide their ethnic outlook, traits and practices in order to be accepted into the mainstream.
The theory of multicultural psychology explains ethnic minority behaviour as a means of coping with threats, hostility and subjugation by dominant individuals and groups. [Multicultural psychology explains all aspects of human behaviour as they occur in settings where people of different racial and cultural backgrounds encounter each other (Peony Elyn Fhagen, 2010)].
As ethnic minorities, Saheb Babus and Uncle Toms even identify with hegemonic group members and adopt their thoughts, views, expressions and behaviour. They become docile, non-assertive and non-interrogative as a survival technique for recruitment, permanent employment (tenure), promotion, peace and self-preservation as well as to maintain good, friendly relations with their aggressors and superiors to avoid retaliation.

Sincerely,
Dr Kumar Mohabir (Anthropologist)