Why race doesn’t matter

(Originally published in Guyana’s Stabroek News on 11 August 2012)

I am writing on racism today because I have seen it in all its cruelty and ugliness too often in recent weeks. Some of the comments I have seen Guyanese make about other Guyanese are so abominable that it makes my stomach lurch. I have never had a tolerance for racism and quickly remove racists from my life if even one sentence of race hate is muttered.

What purpose does race hate serve in a society? No good purpose, that is for sure. It highlights an insignificant difference in the population in an attempt to make one race appear superior or inferior to another – much like sexism does with gender. I am writing this column to show that such differences are irrelevant to humanity and that racism is counterproductive to the positive development of the nation.

A few years ago, I read something about race that has long stuck with me. It was a passage from “When God Was A Woman” by Merlin Stone. The book is not about race, but one sentence caught me and I’ve always remembered it.

Speaking of the aggressive northern Aryan invaders, who felt themselves superior to the more civil and developed Near East inhabitants, the author said, “But historical, mythological and archaeological evidence suggest that it was these northern people who brought with them the concepts of light as good and dark as evil (very possibly the symbolism of their racial attitudes toward the darker people of the southern areas) and of a supreme male deity.”

When I read that passage, I stopped reading and chewed over the notion that perhaps it was at that point in history when racism started and subsequently continued to spread to the extent that in much of the world, a person’s skin colour became a determining factor in how much respect and freedom that person should be afforded.

Corporal punishment is ineffective and counterproductive

(Originally published in Guyana’s Stabroek News on 7 July 2012)

The ongoing conversation on corporal punishment is of particular interest to me because I am a survivor of domestic violence at the hands of my own mother. I comprehend that in some minds there is a difference between spanking your child and beating your child, but because of my abusive background I see things a bit differently.

Though it was years ago, I have written before on the abuse I suffered at the hands of my mother who abused me verbally, emotionally and physically, day after day, year after year, until I moved out of her house and married. In fact, the fervour that burns deep inside me against violence of any sort is ensconced in the brutal memories of a defenceless little girl.

Growing up in my mother’s house, there was not a time when I do not remember being abused. There was a time when I must have been around three or four years old and my mother, angry at something other than me, grabbed me and knocked my head into the knob of a door until my white-blonde hair turned red. This was not discipline – it was abuse.

Likewise, although packaged a bit differently, it was also abuse when a father recently told his wayward 14-year-old daughter “…to pack her clothes but as she was doing so, he dealt her several cuffs about her body. He then beat her with a belt and thereafter an electric wire, telling her ‘the belt isn’t working.’ After the thrashing, he then ordered her to take a bath.”

Thanks to a magistrate, the father will serve six weeks in jail for what he did to his daughter. I wish someone had given my mother six weeks in jail when I was young so she would have understood that beating her daughter was wrong.

How on earth can anyone think that using violence against a child will give her/him the necessary tools to make rational decisions about his/her life? Yes, that young girl was looking in all the wrong places for love and acceptance already. But how could any sane parent believe that beating her would solve the problem?