I boxed myself into talking about race this Sunday. I really want to write about banking and feminism. Our banks, their inefficient practices, illogical rules, and the zealots they hire to guard our money from us, are special creatures, likely key contributors to our fourth-to-last ranking on the 2015 Global Competitiveness Index scale for customer orientation.
I have so many stories to tell about these essential service providers which, like so many of our institutions, have an ethos unmistakeably rooted in the colonial culture of gatekeeping and social compliance.
What troubles me this week is the draconian fashion in which banks are imposing money-laundering provisions on non-profit companies that are or seek to become customers. In some cases, every director of an NGO seeking to open or maintain an account (crucial for accessing donations and grants for our work) is being asked to submit paperwork parallel to an Integrity Commission filing. One of those I work with has had volunteer directors resign. I don’t know if “big” customers are being squeezed, similarly, but I haven’t heard complaints.
Enforcement, consistent with the ethos I cited, seems far in excess of what is needed to meet regulatory requirements. Foreign provenance of the rules might explain overeagerness to enforce them against small customers.
Terrorism! is one explanation. Radical Islamists use NGOs as fronts to fund international jihad. Okay: Which local ones? And why would that affect my group, trying to legitimise some unIslamic sexualities, or our Christian, Hindu and atheist directors?
I serve in the leadership of a new alliance of civil society organisations, and am eager to find the bank willing to champion NGO customers, which we can in turn champion to our sector.
I’ve learned not to argue with my fellow columnist Kevin Baldeosingh—a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a history textbook, as an unnamed group of women lampoon him by repeating nine times in a vigorous 4,000-word response to what seems an unrelenting sequence of broadsides by him against what he calls feminism.
What I do want to do is say how important and generative feminism is to me as a man, as a set of values, and the basis of kinship with a group of Caribbean women and men who want to change the societies we have inherited into ones that serve young men better. Traditional masculinities have failed too. My experience of Caribbean feminism, quite different from his, is of a thoughtful community committed to social justice as a principle, which stems from seeking it around gender. I have always welcomed Kevin’s parodies of homophobia by public officials. But in terms of who I look to to build a world with, or trust as champions for the future one I want created, it is the women he finds himself committed to parodying. Who now are satirising back.
Their response raises what is the duty of columnists like us and newspapers like ours on issues like feminism, Islam or race. What can and should our words and pages provoke? When is the discussion necessarily messy? Can the provocations Kevin and BC Pires engage in as stock-in-trade apply equally to race, or only gender and religion?
So, to open up the box—we certainly rally incredible, shared nationalism around sports achievements. But my observation, in circles I move in, is an entrenched cynicism about governance, a shutting down of political vision of any depth, a resignation that undoing national dysfunction is not within our grasp. People seem interested in pursuing little other than personal or family opportunity, often willing to do so by whatever means necessary, with a corresponding eagerness to migrate. (I’ve asked Baldeosingh about this, whether in his eagerness for data he’s encountered any that show any racial trends toward migration.)
My provocation on race is the question of (dis)ownership. I’ve noticed a profound way in which Indians own the country. Emotionally. Watching people on the ferry to Tobago; or demonstrating to support “we prime minister” on the pavement outside Parliament. A kind of aspirationalism that seems distinct from other groups.
That Indians “own” a country in which they are the largest ethnic group shouldn’t be surprising. But it’s something I know was not always so. Certainly something my parents’ generation of Africans didn’t quite acknowledge, whose own dominance of public institutions and national culture was something they never imagined needed questioning.
This idea of ownership is precisely what explains the racist post-election toting on social media—evidence of a profound sense of loss and mourning which comes from a real investment—and the tabanca of the election petition.
Caribbean multiracial nations are touted as models of plural democracy, with a good record of resilience to violence and ethnic conflict. Not because we’ve devised innovative social or institutional mechanisms or radical practices of ethnic politics. Theories about cricket and Carnival don’t convince me, either. I think our success has simply come from our aloofness, our historical disownership of a nation that hasn’t been worthwhile enough to fight each other over.
Does owning your own nation now threaten that peace?