DINESH RAMBALLY
''WHO CONTROLS the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'' This is from George Orwell's 1984, about a totalitarian state that controls its citizens through many means including the rewriting of history to suit the purposes of the Party.
Prof Theodore Lewis' article ('Constitutional rights of black children") which started featuring online over Indian Arrival Day weekend and can be found in Tuesday's print Newsday, offers a window into the mind of the man whom the ruling PNM has entrusted with an Orwellian level of control over our country's past and, thus, its future, through his controlling influence in the content of future school curricula and textbooks.
And what's in that mind? Ignorance and disconnection from reality.
Lewis has shown that he lives in a fantasy world where TT is a mini-America in which the East Indians, an underclass of field labourers for most of their history, have somehow taken the place of white Americans as the holders of unsurpassed privilege and perpetrators of institutional racism. A world, therefore, in which an aging American-based academic can write papers on TT by the cut-and-paste application of USA-centric critical racial theory to our culturally complex Caribbean island.
The African intellectual tradition in TT predates the arrival of East Indians and had grown from strength to strength from Jean-Baptiste Philip in the 1820s through Michel Maxwell Phillip, JJ Thomas, Emmanuel Mzumbo Lazare, the McShines, Henry Sylvester Williams, our first prime minister Dr Eric Williams, Prof Ken Julien and Lewis himself, to name just a few.
Through much of this period, the East Indians languished in illiteracy in the fields and barrack yards, with virtually no educational opportunities until the arrival of Dr John Morton's Presbyterian mission in the 1860s. Even then, opportunities were limited, and it was not until the mid-20th century that the first Hindu and Muslim denominational schools came into being - yes, these included the 'cowshed' schools that were ridiculed by the supercilious Williams in the 1960s.
Let us not forget the context of the alleged control and manipulation of the education system by East Indians: this country has been self-governing for 65 years and independent for 59 and has had East Indian prime ministers for a mere 11 years, a ridiculously short time to establish the pro-Indian institutional racism alleged by the professor.
The professor claims, bombastically, that black children are 'excluded from the best schools,' that they 'cannot get into first-choice schools' and are 'locked out' and that it is 'a kind of apartheid,' and that 'the SEA system violates our laws.' These accusations are hurled without supporting evidence in the first half of his article. He, at one point, conflates his racial issue with class and even caste, making reference to 'working class' and non-'Brahmin' Indians being disadvantaged. It escapes the professor that the SEA marking system does not in
