Staring Down the Year 2017

The amazing photograph of young Birmingham resident Saffiyah Khan facing down racists in her city last weekend appeared in the UK press at the same time the Brixton-based Black Cultural Archives was preparing for a special tribute to Trinidad-born social activist, Darcus Howe, who died on April 1.

There are emotional chords struck by the young lady’s defiance and Howe’s tenacity that are not easily recognisable, but they exist and resonate in similar ways.

In the Birmingham picture, shot by Press Association photographer Joe Giddens, Khan is standing sideways in a denim jacket with her right hand in her pocket and bearing an ironic smile. She is a bit taller than the guy in the black cap and “English Defence League” t-shirt who is right up to her face with a threatening scowl. But she stands there, looking slightly downward … smiling. Her hair pulled back in a disorderly “bun” and eyes locked onto his.

Between them is a seemingly less than hassled police officer wearing a pale blue “Liaison Officer” workers’ vest, his attention on someone else out of the picture. It might have been someone joining in hurling insults at the young lady who had intervened when she thought that the police had not responded promptly to possible violence against a hijab-wearing counter-protester.

The pictorial metaphor for staring down the year 2017, and all this period has brought us politically, appears to have emerged from an unlikely source – a young female, punk rock loving, brown “Brummie” with a nose ring; staring unflinchingly at an agitated demonstrator with a racist message.

It was the stare of rebellion, different in objective context but not dissimilar in essence to Howe’s eloquently framed 2011 injunction to a BBC presenter to “have some respect for an old West Indian negro.” Through a television monitor, Howe was staring down a bigotry for which the otherwise respected broadcaster eventually apologised.

Young Khan is, of course, no Howe. The presumed invincibility of youth is nothing like rebellion fashioned on the fiery anvil of painful experience, but the light in their eyes appears the same. Do not dare touch me, they seem to say. Have respect.

Darcus Howe (Twitter photo)

We are as people from this part of the world, in 2017, staring down the barrel of these new times, yet to find our voices, much less the steely gaze of defiance we once knew.

Let’s add another name to the mix. There, would have been no mobile phone paparazzi to capture the moment, no roving Instagram or Facebook Live dispatches to report the look on her face in 1937 when the police came for Elma Francois – sedition being the charge. But we can imagine the clash of eyes when they came for her.

It took 50 years to secure her rehabilitation and it’s now 30 years hence, but look at her eyes in the old photo retouched for Rhoda Reddock’s biography on the late activist. We can imagine them, as she stood at the witness stand in her sedition trial, like young Khan’s upon the EDL-inflamed eyes, only this time upon a tribunal in a life and death case. “I don’t know that my speeches create disaffection, I know that my speeches create a fire in the minds of the people so as to change the conditions which now exist,” Francois said in her defence.

Today, “they have not rioted yet” and the mutinous refrain is garbled, disunited and cacophonous. Eyes blunted by the lights and cameras and set upon the House of Representatives and, through it, a slowly disappearing treasure trove.

Through the eyes of Khan and Howe and Francois – different people in different places at different times – we can set the angle and intensity of the staring down of 2017 and all it has brought. For, what currently prevails is not encouraging.

Elma Francois

We are shrinking away from the true challenges. Our situation is not as much about what others have done to us, as what we have done to ourselves.

Violence and murderous crime are not the function of criminal deportees or undocumented immigrants. These seeds were sown right here in our backyards. My friend and colleague, development expert Steve Maximay, describes the phenomenon as “internal deportation”, but that’s another story.

Caricom-exit existed long before Brexit and we have been speaking about and attempting to install a figurative immigration wall based on racist and discriminatory stereotypes long before November 2016. Look and see who are the “expats” and who are the “immigrants” among us, as a start.

Our eyes have surveyed everywhere except straight ahead and through the souls of the things that have confronted us.

I have been looking at that Birmingham photograph again and again in recent days and was able to view the Howe photos at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton last weekend. Then there is Ms Francois’ picture. Something about the eyes.

 

*First published in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian on April 13, 2017

Calling Out the Online Fakes

As an information free marketeer, I am instinctively not as panicked about what is currently being described as “fake news/information” in the public sphere as many of my colleagues in the free expression and press freedom communities, because I think there are paths to addressing some of its worst effects.

It is understandably concerning to bona fide professional journalists that one of the core functions of the fake news phenomenon is the deliberate undermining of otherwise legitimate sources of news and information in order to command political or corporate market space.

For instance, one of the paths to the sources of this category of public information would be an easily recognisable and explicit campaign to diminish the value of old or legacy media, and their operatives, in the eyes of the consumers of news and information. This includes personal smear campaigns against journalists, among other strategies.

Keep your eyes on the people clearly engaged in achieving this objective, and not far away you would more likely than not find a “new” or emerging outlet offering the “real” news, presumably unfiltered by political or corporate interests. If you barely scratch the surface of these “alternative” sources of opinion, news and analysis you recognise the raw backbone of campaigns conceived to prop up the agendas of sectional interests.

These activities also ride on the backs of legitimate programmes to widen access to public information, protect informal and unauthorised sources of such information and provide platforms for the expression of people and interests otherwise marginalised by traditionally skewed, oligarchic mass media environments.

Exponents employ the techniques of traditional news coverage to offer deliberately misleading information by integrating opinion with fact and verifiable data with false statistics.

Investments in such operations span a variety of business models though, more often than not, they tend to be lacking in easily recognisable operational viability and must be sustained by non-core sources of revenue. Ask then the question. Who is paying for this?

For the consumer, there are some other simple, basic questions to ask. Who are the proprietors of the enterprises offering not only “alternative” perspectives but “alternative” facts and information?

In most instances, nowadays, we are speaking of shady online operations. Traditional “mainstream” media don’t usually have such a challenge. Some are publicly-listed and have boards of directors whose members are well-known to everyone. In other instances, there are private companies whose owners are known and whose business records are, by statute, capable of being assessed.

Legacy media operations also have editorial hierarchies, small and large, and liabilities for professional and other misconduct are clearly established. There are teams of journalists who are known to everyone and routinely operate under guidelines that have implications for their continued employment.

Newer, credible online-only operations offer a similarly transparent corporate profile and we usually have a clear idea of ownership and professional responsibility.

The “fake news” strategists are also usually easily found behind the dissemination of salacious content to bolster other assertions. In Jamaica, where I am currently, some of the content being circulated via WhatsApp, Facebook and other platforms about the systematic harvesting of human organs for international trade is known to be the same material being distributed among T&T audiences.

The ensuing heightening of public concern about this new form of criminal behaviour fits easily into the frame of politically-motivated actions to establish the failure of politicians in power to conquer the undeniable plague of criminal violence.

Human trafficking as an area of legitimate and serious regional concern is also gaining prominence as a similar source of material for the strategists involved in the “fake news” business.

In Jamaica, where some of the features of cyber-crime legislation being considered in T&T are already in place, the difficulty with policing such provisions has come to the fore well ahead of justifiable concerns about their constitutionality. It is my view, by the way, that imposing laws that criminalise an expanded variety of public expression, in this case online content, is a blatant contravention of the guarantee of free expression.

Additionally, only last weekend, Jamaican police spokesperson, Supt Stephanie Lindsay, bemoaned the fact that having a law against online information leading to “annoyance, distress or anxiety” was “overwhelming the police services” by causing a diversion of resources that can be otherwise employed.

The “fake news” phenomenon, fuelled by voyeuristic online audiences and functional media illiteracy is of understandable concern to legislators but their official interventions should not be solely a response to the political damage such material is capable of inflicting.

This situation should instead provide the impetus behind more stringent application of existing civil and criminal law, the validating and strengthening of legitimate new and old media operations and a concerted programme to promote higher levels of media literacy.

At a workshop I attended on the subject in Jakarta last year there was insertion of concern that media literacy could not be reasonably advocated in an environment in which “old-fashioned” illiteracy prevailed. But media literacy is a huge part of the solution to the bigger issues.

For the moment, discerning consumers of public news and information can begin by asking the questions I have proposed in order to determine the bona fides of their sources on information.

Enemies of the free press are not all proponents of the new “alternative” forms but are wont to favour the demise of legacy media, in the process affirming their complicity in undermining one of the more important pillars of the democratic process.

All of this places an additional onus on trusted sources of news to try to always get it right and to set higher standards for professional performance. This is not always easy to achieve but its pursuit is vitally important, especially under current circumstances.

Facing 2017

January 1 - Today, we reflect on a year that presented to the media some of the sternest challenges of the modern era. It was a period during which, internationally, the forces against press freedom gained oppressive and, occasionally murderous ground.

At the regional level, though we escaped the worst effects of growing violence and grievous attack, a combination of internal and exogenous factors led to serious challenges to the flourishing of independent, professional journalism and media practice generally.

In response, we have seemingly failed to convince all stakeholders that the best route to development through information and enlightened action is the viability of an industry founded on a commitment to fair, balanced and professional journalistic performance.

This, to me, represents the most critical challenge to the formal media industry, and associated structures for professional practice based on longstanding principles and instruction. The ensuing conundrum offers up a variety of emerging options that have contributed, more than anything else, to the discussion on post-truth output and the dominance of opinion and propaganda over fact.

It remains our belief that journalism presents to our societies the best available opportunity to capture the truth of our Caribbean existence and that by strengthening the media’s institutional structures and enhancing its stock of professional resources, the region will be better equipped to engage the critical development questions.

This in no way devalues the impact of other, informal sources of information flows, but represents the consolidation of an indispensable pillar of civil society. There is no reason why these two streams cannot reside alongside each other and to intersect, whatever their essential differences in purpose, structure and eventual aspiration.

Media owners and managers need at this time to create better conditions for the continued growth of professionalism. Representative media and media worker organisations also need to pursue more enlightened paths to development. There is, as well, the imperative of personal, professional development.

Issues related to the advent of cyber-crime legislation and other related laws will continue to engage our close attention and a network of hemispheric and international support has already been activated to provide critical legal and other assistance. There also continue to be concerns related to recent broadcasting legislation.

In 2016, the ACM attempted to play its part through efforts involving our national affiliates and collaborators and our international partners. This occurred at the level of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), a seat on whose Steering Committee we currently occupy, and through the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) on whose Councils we sit both at the international and wider regional levels. We were also elected to serve on the inaugural executive board of the recently established African, Caribbean and Pacific Press Clubs Federation (ACP-PCF).

We have also collaborated with the United Nations system, through the Caribbean Broadcasting Union and UNICEF and with UNESCO to execute two important projects to first develop and launch a guide to coverage of Children and their issues in the Caribbean and also to continue our work on building a regional framework for Media Self-Regulation.

Among our ongoing concerns are the shortcomings of national representative organisations in the 10 countries represented by the ACM, in addition to our national Focal Points. For 2017, our priority list must pay greater attention to the building of a more supportive institutional infrastructure, both as a regional organisation and as individual national associations, to achieve greater viability on the ground.

(Excerpt from my statement as President of the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers)

   

Evil and the Faces of Death in Trinidad & Tobago

There in the Deaths and Memorials section of the newspaper was the face of someone I had known. At 25, a newspaper reader tends to spend less time on that page than Grandma and Grandpa who would spread the Guardian out wide on the dining room table and read each line: “Son of so and so … Brother of so and so.”

The picture was the kind you took for your passport at the time. Pretentiously officious specifications – no glasses, eyes fixed on the camera lens, face occupying between 25 and 35 mm within a frame of 51 by 51mm. Do not show your teeth, please.

I remembered him. He was a short guy, very churchy. He liked cricket and bowled impressive right-handed off-breaks. We met at church camp and, thereafter, occasionally along the parade of life as young men. We hugged and routinely related the same anecdotes – he had clipped the bail between the off and middle stumps, zooming at 90 degrees around my bat. Hahahahaha …

But there he was; in the Deaths and Memorials section, looking past the camera straight at us. I still don’t know how he found himself there. Since then, I rarely skip that page and I look more carefully at the pictures that tell stories.

Last week, I had occasion to piece together the stories behind a few faces I had not seen before. Never met these folks, but there was something in those faces.

Page One and there was picture number one. Mark Lyndersay and Andrea De Silva would have noted the heavy re-touching on her beaming face, hands wrapped around her neck as on a cup of hot Chinese tea. Facebook perfect. Or was it for a mantle piece at home? An interested suitor? A smile held a second away from being lost as the photographer maddeningly fiddled for control. Klatak! Klatak! Steups.

That day, she would have fretted with her hair – a friend, mom, an old aunt, the lady at the beauty salon drawing gratuitously from the numerous gels and other hair products. She had bagged the job and this was her moment away from the facelessness of the congregation.

On Page Five, a more mature woman in black and white. The smile of the proud. Someone had taken that shot perhaps at a family gathering, a party, some get-together valued as highly as her carefully plotted curls and big, looped earrings and measured smile. The kind of smile that blots the sad curve of your eyes. Look at the picture long enough, though, and you cannot quite capture the precise emotion.

Back to Page One and inset, two guys. One younger than the next. Keep your eyes on the camera. Don’t move. A drivers licence, no doubt. The next one the kind of shot that goes behind a laminated workers ID. The one you display proudly to family having bagged the job. Klatak! Klatak!

The day before, Page Three and grief. Sleepless eyes, bloodshot from tears. Hair pulled back hurriedly, grey strands like sun-flares around her head. Is that a tear on her cheek? A mole? An imperfection captured by the camera in her house some unwelcome hour of the day?

Same page. Three faces near the crumpled car. Two wore chains. The cock-eyed one had a silver chain his mother probably did not like and the other young fellow wore beads, his eyes brimming with the confidence of youth. A struggling goatie for effect and what looked like a cigarette-stained lower lip. Below him a defiant face. I bet he played football and was good at it.

Pages One and Five tell stories that have invoked, in the public domain, use of the word “evil” – a moral rather than a legal construct, thereby requiring, for some, a response beyond the realm of human responsibility and accountable society. Yet, there is seamless resort to such a description in the context of pervasive violence and death and grief and a dichotomy that contrasts “evil” with “good”.

The late (great) author/poet, Wayne Brown, once wrote many years ago in a newspaper column headlined ‘The Child of the Sea’ that he had known people “so evil that, when they hated, a literal stench would come from them.”

Then, Page Three and the crumpled shell of metal, glass, rubber and speed – lots of it. The end probably came loud and quick. About 15 years ago, there was the slow, crunching sound of car on asphalt and my grip on the steering as if turning wheels in the air brought direction and control and … life.

In this case, those faces were the faces of death. There is a deep sadness in all of this that yields as much paralytic anger as it does tears. The kind of emotion that spins the steering wheel even in mid-flight.

In my country, there are faces of death and we witness the passing parade even in the noise and the haze of revelry and mindless strife. Turning the pages has thus become an even more arduous task.

First published in the T&T Guardian on December 15, 2016

Public Broadcasting: Agenda for the Future

Kingston, Jamaica

October 19, 2016

During consultations almost a year ago on the future of state owned and operated media in Trinidad & Tobago, we had to engage the difficult question of determining the pace and direction of reform in a sector that had, since our independence in 1962, been relied upon to provide a service we often referred to as public service broadcasting but were never quite able to put our fingers on what exactly we meant by the term.

All we knew back then was that the BBC in the UK and CBC in Canada offered some kind of operational and fiscal model to be emulated and that a social compact of sorts was required to ensure both financial viability and an inalienable public stake in the enterprise established to meet what was thought to be a public service mandate.

Instead, what we have had has basically been a co-opting of state-financed broadcasting systems, albeit to varying degrees, by partisan political elements over the years and a perennially contentious drain on state financing, even as there has been a recurring and parallel insistence on financial sustainability. 

There are sufficient tales of bans on content, politically-inspired staff recruitment and costly administrative adventures in order to secure political favour to paint a quite grim picture of the condition we were left to address last year when the country was forced to confront an economic reality check.

Let me remind you that the reality check I am talking about is an economy whose primary income generator declined in price by 70% in just about two years.

In my view, the debate we engaged last year in Trinidad & Tobago compelled us to pay as much attention to institutional models as to the content to drive the aspirations of a public service broadcaster. This might not have been such a bad thing after all.

In the process, we confronted the main requirements of public service broadcasting from the vantage point of a longstanding state broadcaster purporting to embark on a process of reform and transformation inspired not only by acknowledging its programmatic shortcomings but also by assessing the prospects for financial viability.

The pillars that kept emerging time and again included a capacity to satisfactorily engage the hopes, fears and aspirations of the entire society, to display a high level of editorial independence, to promote and facilitate social dialogue and democratic participation and to meet the financial requirements of engaging these tasks on a sustainable financial basis in the midst even of economic turmoil.

As we have been mandated to do here on this occasion, we need to pay attention to the challenges of 2016 and beyond and to seek out the possibilities. For one, the advent of new mass media has presented us with a media environment that is on the one hand becoming increasingly fragmented and siloed while on the other presenting to media eyes and ears much greater potential for moving beyond longstanding boundaries.

James Deane of BBC Media Action argues in a recent essay on the subject that we also need to insert into the discussion a notion of social fragility – the fact, as he puts it, that “in many fragile and divided societies, media landscapes (are) becoming increasingly co-opted and polarised, often along factional lines.”

This point is expressed another way by media development expert, Susan Abbot, who suggests that current resistance to promoting public service broadcasting as part of media development globally owes much to two phenomena. I would suggest these phenomena are intimately familiar to us in the Caribbean.

As Abbot puts it: “First is a traditional distrust - and plenty of examples to feed that distrust - of governments that refuse to allow the independence of PSB operations and content. Second is the history in developing countries of weak institutions that are incapable of protecting the independence of publicly funded media, even when the government is ostensibly committed to do so.”

Of course, we would need to make the distinction between publicly funded media and state-owned media and everything in-between that relies on direct state or public financing, subscriptions and license fees and revenue generated through the sale of advertising – and any combination of all of the above.

The Caribbean does not present us with the best examples of where reformed and transformed state media have been able to meet the standard of public service broadcasting best practice, bearing in mind the multi-pronged menu of aspirations I outlined earlier.

Let’s take them one by one: It has not been the case in the media systems I have had the opportunity to look at in the Caribbean that sufficient efforts have been made, as I put it earlier to “satisfactorily engage the hopes, fears and aspirations of the entire society” – everyone.

This is reflected in programming cycles that pointedly ignore many minority voices and interests and what I consider to be a complex relationship between governmental objectives and the absolute requirements of the development process. Development, as I have said many times before, is not a politically neutral concept. This conundrum is highlighted in many instances whenever there is a change in administration.

Then, what about editorial independence? The proof of the pudding is very often in the eating. In almost every instance, we find that the ratings for news and current affairs programming by state media lag behind the popularity of private and independent media if only because of the substantially supported perception that the news and current affairs programming of the state media does not routinely represent the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Now, because of the many new avenues through which people now get their information there is a growing marginalising of official information, news and views. Enlightened state media also now need to understand that governments no longer need their own media to get their messages out and that the loss of control over the means of dissemination means that these messages are now even more in competition in a growing marketplace.

In essence, the democratising role expected to be played by public media is also being supplanted by far more open conditions that permit all ideas to contend albeit in wildly uncoordinated, unmediated ways. Attempts by regional governments to wrest control of the means of and platforms for communicating from the grasp of citizens have consequently become the norm.

There is also something to be said about the mandate to portray more images and to tell more stories about our national and regional realities. In some instances, this is reflected through commitments, either through regulation or moral suasion, to increase the share of local programming.

I know in Jamaica there is a lobby to have as much as 80% programming time devoted to local content – a goal expressed by CBC in Barbados about 12 years ago for television, with 60% local content for radio. In my own country, Trinidad and Tobago, there are repeated calls for at least a 50% share and one administration went as far as threatening to legislate a 65% requirement for radio and television.

Of course, the passage of time has proven that such a strategy, particularly with respect to private media will not only not succeed but makes absolutely no sense. You cannot legislate taste or expect intrusions into private business space not to go unchallenged. 

Additionally, choice has so broadened the contest for eyes and ears that regulated intrusions will only serve to push people further and further away from media they would typically trust the most. Let’s see where the surveys put state media enterprises in most Caribbean countries.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the Board of state-owned Caribbean New Media Group is actively pursuing a 75% local content quota on television broadcasts and is developing an innovative path to achieving such an objective in the face of declining transfers from the state, low and falling advertising revenues and recovery from a period of neglect during which the popularity of the television operations of the company fell to a distant last place in the ratings. It’s much more uneven throughout its three radio frequencies.

I had argued some time ago that we indeed, as media professionals, have an obligation to reflect a Caribbean aesthetic in much more effective ways. Except that the difficulties we have had in bringing indigenous media outputs to the broadcasting mainstream owes as much to questions of production values as to an underdeveloped sense of self.

To cite one challenge, there appears to have been a willingness to dismiss notions of a Caribbean paradigm. For example, during recent discussions with government officials in Trinidad and Tobago recently I raised the question that the attempt to regulate taste in favour of local production had the effect of placing the music of Bob Marley in the category of foreign content. 

There was even an interpretation of this mandate that positioned outside the cultural wall the work of externally-located musicians that would include people such as Sean Paul and Heather Headley and filmmakers such as Horace Ove, Menelik Shabazz and Isaac Julien.

There are other mandates we can also spend some time look at including the challenge of promoting higher levels of media literacy and the impact of media self-regulation as a function of the public service broadcasting mandate. 

The Privacy Question in Trinidad & Tobago

One of the more striking things about the public discourse that accompanied the amendment to the Strategic Services Agency (SSA) Act was the absence of enlightened, independent civil society advocacy on some key, associated human rights issues.

With few exceptions - in specific areas such as press freedom, the rights of women and children, the disabled and advocacy on behalf of the LGBT community - this country has not had a tradition of credible, sustained endeavour in the area of civil and political rights and even less so when it comes to economic, social and cultural rights.

It has thus been easy to oppose the death penalty one day and call for the popping of necks the following week – usually after a general election when statuses change. Immigration regulations are discussed in the absence of a human rights perspective.

Our Equal Opportunity Act has also long entrenched systemic discrimination against people based on “sexual orientation”, yet there has been no groundswell of political or public opinion opposed to the clear anomaly.

Walking the advocacy road to press freedom and freedom of expression has not earned some of us any new friends and I have heard the snarls and the howls on both sides of the street along the way.

Enter now an amended SSA Act and the usual partisan posturing that belies the fact that there has been no philosophical distinction between the chief combatants on the dispensability of rights in the face of what are expressed by the political elite as public interest/security concerns.

It was therefore easy for attorney general Faris Al-Rawi to suggest that there exists legislative room for manoeuvre on the question of the right to privacy in May 2016 when, in November 2010 as an Opposition senator, he asserted that “unlike other jurisdictions, and in particular I speak to England where there is an unwritten Constitution—there are conventions which they observe—we have a clear, defined, enshrined right which can definitely be put to mean a right to privacy.”

The debate at the time was over the Interception of Communications Act – in many respects the law that ought to have invoked much more critical scrutiny than it did but instead remained relatively unchallenged in the public domain as a result of eventual bipartisan support. That the SSA amendment extends areas of coverage definitely needed to be vigorously flagged, but the challenge could have actually been engaged at a much more fundamental level both inside and outside of parliament in 2010 and even before.

The implicit terms of engagement between the state and private individuals that facilitated the well-known pre-2010 abuses predated the startling post-election revelations but without serious consideration by anyone. Whose phone is tapped, in the midst of intimate exchanges of one kind or the other, is an old, old joke we have all cracked.

Instead, and yet again, we left the debate up to the least qualified to address the spirit, as opposed to the letter, of the law – politicians and lawyers.

The intersection of the right to privacy and other rights and obligations appears not to have forcefully entered the debate either in 2010 or 2016. There is also a strong connection between freedom of expression and the right to privacy and a debate to be engaged on the extent to which a requirement of transparency and privacy rights may collide.

The ‘Panama Papers’ revelations have forcefully raised the latter question and invoked the absolutely relevant concern of whether laws and conventions on such matters are not in fact skewed to comply with prevailing social status and power arrangements – in which event the issue of privacy, as opposed to the requirements of transparency, is a supremely political debate to be openly engaged.

No, people will not and should not trust you on this. The administration of 2010-2015 derived much of its standing on the issue both from the fact that some key operatives had been victimised in the past and that it was somehow more trustworthy to legislate on the subject – though some essential elements of the ensuing law now form the basis of its concerns in 2016 because someone else is now made to administrate them.

To what extent, some might ask, does the threat that one’s privacy might be breached not impose a chilling effect on one’s freedom to express oneself? In the face of intense scrutiny, George Orwell’s Winston Smith, in the book 1984, is forced to keep an illicit diary even as the Party and Big Brother maintain a high level of official opacity.

In one memorable passage, Winston concedes that “if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.”

The Orwellian scenario paints a rather complete picture of the privacy problématique which mature nations have found it fit to comprehensively explore. Some otherwise exemplary countries have certainly not got it right but this is a question for all of us. Not only for the Bar Association here but for civil society organisations, civic-minded citizens in all spheres and political parties from whose ranks emerge people who will at some stage be empowered to consider actions related to the interplay of important rights.

Black Lives Matter in the Caribbean Too

Do black lives matter? Of course they do. But don’t all lives also matter? Yes, but that is not what we are talking about at this time. There is a sometimes lethal crisis that has existed for too long now and a focused intervention is now necessary to address it in the United States and everywhere else some of its less evident features appear, including right here. It is not that other causes are to be side-lined or denied by this.

The BLM standoff at the Pride rally in Toronto recently stressed the point that none of the current struggles against prejudice, discrimination and lethal official posturing is mutually exclusive and that in too many instances there is a siloed approach to the question of human rights, the universality of which is not often grasped.

The debate is nothing new in our neck of the woods, even though we had our own “Obama” moment back in 1956 and the question of a statistical minority is irrelevant. I only have space to focus on a narrow set of anecdotes and circumstances that have led me to believe that the BLM movement has everything to do with us in the Caribbean, albeit under conditions that are somewhat different from what obtains in the United States and other countries of the Americas where the millions of Afro-descendants have been the subject of systemic discrimination and violence in all its forms.

I employ the term “Afro-descendants” with a pretty good level of awareness of its linguistic implications. It became my preferred language over time when I considered how degrading it might be for someone to constantly be referred to by the colour of his/her skin. Just a personal quirk, I suppose, because many enlightened people continue to speak about “white” and “black” people – almost as if two geometric poles are required to define everything and everyone along a spectrum within which I am required to locate myself and my family.

As a person of mixed heritage, my curiosity about this was first aroused during my early QRC days - having moved on from my primary school in Caroni - on the heels of the 1970 Black Power protests. It was further awoken by a former teacher who openly declared that as part East Indian I was obliged to describe myself as “Indian” and to not associate with people of the “N” persuasion. Thankfully, such encounters have been very few and far between and we have moved forward somewhat.

I was even more challenged by the fact that around 1986/87, as a newspaper columnist producing two pages of commentary every Saturday, I was asked by my then editor-in-chief (who once wrote a column that used the term “old nigger”) to write about the controversy generated by tourism minister Ken Gordon’s pronouncement overseas that T&T was a “black country.” The column rather simplistically found debaters prepared to argue the “two sides” of the argument both of which I found great difficulty associating with.

By then I had long discovered CLR James and his classist arguments which, while ceding some ground to the Pan-Africanists, contended that the struggle was actually much deeper and wider than many had thought in his day.

But there always was this suspicion that with Afro-descendants - “black people”- we were facing something clearly distinguishable from almost everything else.

For one, there exists a political narrative in our country which asserts that ethno-linguistic coding by early politicians, accompanied by a gratuitous programme of targeted social services support in the early years of independence had rendered one group of people hopelessly and terminally injured – damaged cultural goods requiring political subservience, economic tutoring, the intervention of others purportedly better equipped to run the show and the strongest arms of the law.

You won’t know how pervasive this narrative has become until you apply such a lens to political messaging and action over the years. The diagnosis of terminal damage has been there through all of the political administrations I have observed, from the notion of urgent affirmative action to targeted abuse of state security resources, including what I continue to assert to be the unlawful State of Emergency of 2011.

It’s not us alone. In 2005 at the Fourth Summit of the Americas in Argentina, Article 32 of the Mar del Plata Declaration, for the first time in the summits process, introduced the challenges of this group of people in the hemisphere, following mellow hints that had journeyed from the First Summit in Miami which addressed the problem of discrimination.

But, in Argentina, the leaders were prepared to declare a commitment “to respect the rights of Afro-descendants and to ensuring their full access to educational opportunities at all levels, and to decent work that will help them overcome poverty and social exclusion and contribute to their increased participation in all sectors of our societies.”

By the time the Summit approached its Fifth edition right here in T&T in 2009, Article 32 had been dropped as was any mention of the commitment made only a few years before. All lives clearly mattered, but the imperatives of a focused, magnanimous effort to end this undeniable travesty was for that moment set aside, of all places, in Port of Spain. Today, it is going to be much more difficult to get away with doing so, however packed the change agenda.