You might have missed it, but this week Ambassador Neil Parsan, a man who was appointed to represent all of Trinidad and Tobago decided that he was only batting for Indians…..but not to worry, his wife is a black woman….he says….so that makes it ok. We can trust him to do his job. I wish I could direct you to the speech that he made, but it’s been removed from the embassy’s website. But in it he referred to Indians as being the most well to do and progressive ethnic group in Trinidad and Tobago.
Indians make up roughly 40% of our population, so in one fell swoop Parsan managed to paint every other group as a bunch of ketch ass parasites. The argument put forward by some supporters of the UNC is that the Ambassador pulled a Romney and was speaking to a specific interest group made up of a specific ethnicity and so tailored his speech to suit…..my response after my semi choked Bullshit is this: Parsan is a diplomat, not a candidate for a political post; he is supposed to represent every group in this space; and playing the race card in front of an audience is extremely undiplomatic. That’s not his job. Romney’s 47% speech was bad enough for all its undertones and stereotyping of Liberal America as a bunch of freeloaders, but how dare Neil Parsan decide to stereotype citizens of this country in this way. So no other group has achieved anything?
Every single ethnic group here has contributed in some way or the other to the country’s development. The much maligned urban depressed areas are where much of the culture that has made us internationally known comes from. The Chinese, Africans, Amerindians, Arabs, Portuguese, Europeans have all contributed. So how on earth can Parsan decide that the most well to do and progressive group is the Indians? Is he implying that the other 60% have done fuck all? And what about other Indian activists that just this week claimed that Indians are the most oppressed group here. How do you get to be the most well to do and the most oppressed at the same time?
Do we really want to go down the road here of discussing who contributes and how?
If we were to just look at which group pays the most taxes in this country something tells me the results going to paint a very disturbing picture about who contributes and how. If we were to trace where and how the drugs and arms trade starts and where it ends up, something tells me that we are going to have a very interesting picture of Trinidad and Tobago, crime and contributions.
But let’s stay away from hypotheticals for now and just consider what Parsan’s comments mean.
Because you see, if Parsan had an appreciative audience for this speech it means there are Trinbagonians among us who agree that Indians are the most progressive group in the country. And yes they have made huge strides, moving from being immigrant peasants to the driving force behind the local business and finance sector. But the country is not just made up of business and finance.
For Trinidad and Tobago to be what it is everyone had to contribute in multiple ways. And every group here still has a long way to go.
For Parsan to decide to single out one group is one thing, to pass on erroneous unsubstantiated information just for the sake of stroking the egos of his audience is quite another….and GOPIO? Really? In a multi ethnic space we still supporting and humoring groups that representing the interests of only one ethnicity? When will we learn that a nation is more than the sum of its…..it is its sum total….period.
This ethnic thinking is getting us no where. We still stuck thinking in percentages, and shares, and pieces and parts. That is the new politics promised to the nayshun, I guess.
De Vice Cyah Done!
If the people of African Descent do not speak for and represent the Afro Trinis, how then can we expect the people of Indian Descent to speak for Afro Trinis. It would be too far-fetched a notion to ecpect this. The Prime Minister does not speak for Afro Trinis, the Minister of National Security does not speak for Afro Trinis, the Attorney General does not speak for Afro Trinis, the Minister of Multi Culturalism does not speak for Afro Trinis, and when the few remaining brave Afro Trinis dare to speak on behalf of the Forgotten Race, they are brought before the Privilege Committee, the Integrity Commission, the Speaker of the House, and anybody else who has a whip and a chain. The Afro Trini will soon be extinct. People will be able to read about us in history books and in Museums. We understand, under this Regime, we are invisible.
There has been talk about certain races being discriminated under the PNM but look and see who gets the most gov’t contracts when the PNM is in power. It is not white people,not afro-trinis, not chinese,not sryians, not any one else but indo-Trinidadian businessmen and women.
This gov’t is obviously pushing a tribal and not a national agenda, with loads of silly mis-information that only fools would swallow. A good example would be this Calder hart/sunway thing. Sunway is a huge billion dollar revenue conglomerate they do not need to bribe any one to get a few piddling contracts in Trinidad, as far as I am concerned that was a big bowl of spin soup that we were fed, and because we do not have balanced reported we swallowed that swill.
Unfortunately this GOPIO Gov’t is not even serving the members of their own tribe adequately by delivering good governance that is all anyone with a shred of national pride wants.
‘How do you get to be the most well to do and the most oppressed at the same time?’ This is the situation that the East Indian population who cry woe and victimization always find themselves in….are you oppressed or well to do? It is a narrative that I have long grown tired of…I am fed up and quite frankly blasted mad…on a daily basis you hear how insignificant EVERYBODY else is in Trinidad and Tobago…the question I have to ask…. if you have been marginalized all this time how did we function, grow and develop? What did we do before you came to our rescue? But this and other statements and actions are just revealing what I have always suspected that some East Indians in Trinidad and Tobago do not see themselves as Trinbagonians therefore they do not celebrate Trinidad and Tobago’s victories and once it does not directly affect them they do not hurt at our defeat….there is continued call within the community to stay separate and a cry outside (by the same people) that they are not included (when it suits them)…and I repeat until prominent members of this community begin to distance themselves from these statements and actions the PERCEPTION is that they are complicit with these mindsets!