The habits of exclusion

A combination of seemingly unrelated developments helped frame today’s conversation.

Often, when we aren’t keeping our eyes on development prospects for our tiny Caribbean countries, we miss important connections that help plot the coordinates of our condition.

Wait for a meeting of hemispheric leaders, a new media development agency to address the needs of the Americas, and a steelpan competition featuring outstanding international talent to provide lessons.

Let’s use Summit of the Americas 2022 as a key trigger. In Los Angeles, the US hosts proposed a highly aspirational theme: “Building a Sustainable, Resilient, and Equitable Future.”

These areas of focus can help contextualise multi-dimensional relationships – the “equitable” bit as urgent and as relevant as issues of sustainability and resilience.

There are both internal and external dynamics attached to equity as an indispensable component of development.

It has been clear, for instance, that in the face of the global climate crisis, a notion of "justice” emerges as geo-political challenge, even as it presents issues of equity between sectors, communities, and intra-regionally.

Throughout the course of the Summit, I paid close attention to the equity dimension of the main theme and to when “inclusivity” earned mention as a key ingredient of the prescriptions.

The Caricom countries had taken “exclusivity” to the table from early. The main contention being that a meeting of countries of the Americas ought to have been open to everyone. It was later flagged by several leaders including PM Rowley.

It is no mistake that we had taken the early lead on this subject. Yet, most of us withdrew earlier passions, leaving St Vincent and the Grenadines a lone Caribbean absentee on the grounds of exclusivity. St Kitts and Nevis and Grenada stayed away for other reasons.

In some circles, the SOA therefore earned the moniker of being an “exclusionary summit.” A function not only of who were not invited, but those who stayed away. Add Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia, and El Salvador.

In the Caribbean, we know what all this means. For instance, the very week the Summit was launched, a new media development institution emerged.

Described as being “nested within the Organization of American States (OAS)”, the Center for Media Integrity of the Americas was launched to incentivise “the practice of independent, non-interest affiliated journalism and social media production.”

Its Board of Advisors comprises twenty-eight outstanding media development and human rights practitioners from the US and Latin America. I know and have worked with some of them. They are people of principle and integrity. Yet, the Caribbean is nowhere to be found.

It clearly never occurred to either the OAS, the folks at Fundación Gabo (Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation), or the Washington Post that Caribbean media exist and are important pillars of our democracy and development.

Over the years I have found it highly problematic to ensure discrete mention of “the Caribbean” as a unique space, within the context of those countries south of Florida on this side of the Atlantic.

Many have heard me say that we have neighbouring cousins, comrades, and friends – but we are not all the same person. For, whenever we yield to other formulations, our experience is that we tend to be excluded, especially when benefits are being allocated.

Some, even within inter-governmental hemispheric bodies, would - if they could - testify to this habit of exclusion. It does not undermine any cause to speak openly about this, for it’s not baseless paranoia or some persecution complex.

Then came Panograma. Pan, in my view, remains the greatest thing we do in T&T. The world’s best makers, tuners, arrangers, and players can be found right here. But it is now an international instrument whose cause is not assisted by parochialism and xenophobia.

So, Frenchman Mathieu Borgne won this year’s virtual competition. And true, after every pan competition, people cry “t’ief, t’ief.” But it was embarrassing to see some online comments about the Borgne victory and how, according to one writer, “allyuh go put France on top of a Trini competition?”

After he performed, I had Borgne at the top of my amateur tabulation. He played a beautiful, free-flowing interpretation of Charlie Parker’s ‘Donna Lee’ (how dare he!).

This week also marks three years since the sadistic “close the borders” demonstration outside the Queen’s Park Oval even as desperate Venezuelan men, women, and children lined up nervously at night for the start of the migrant regularisation programme.

There has thus been much to remind us of the habits of exclusion and how, even as perpetual victims, we have often displayed a mastery of them at the expense of the assets of inclusion.