Ian Ramjohn's blog

Are you racist? Maybe a little...(take the test)

November 3, 2009 by Ian Ramjohn

According to Harvard's Project Implicit I have a slight preference for Arab/Muslim names over "others", a slight preference for darker skin colour over light skin colour, and a moderate preference for white faces over African faces.  OK...so tell me something I don't know.  Most of the people I grew up around were Indo-Trinis, many of them Muslim.  And while we were not Muslim, the extended family was, and there was clear subtext that south Trinidadian Indian Muslims were good people (and mostly were "pumpkin vine" relatives of some sort).

Had I simply taken the black-white face test, I might have been a bit less impressed.  Despite the fact that both my mother and my wife are white, white people - at least American and European ones - are still less familiar to me than are darker-skinned people. {Read more}

A Ghost Story

November 1, 2009 by Ian Ramjohn

My grandmother grew up on a cocoa estate in Piparo.  Even today, Piparo is still distant - in the second and third decade of the twentieth century, it was truly remote.  Her father had come from India as a child, worked as an indentured labourer, and eventually bought a cocoa estate from a Spanish family.  He was well enough off that he sent at least three of his sons to attend Howard University.  Her mother, his third wife, was Trinidadian-born, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants.

As the story goes, she was sitting in the gallery with her baby brother when an older Indian woman, all dressed in white with bangles to her elbows, came up to her and asked to have the baby.  My grandmother refused to give her the baby, but she was insistenty, and even tried to take the baby away from her.  There was no one else in the house - the nearest adults were in the kitchen, which was a separate buliding, detached from the main house.

Eventually the woman relented, and left.  I'm not too clear about that part of the story.  But when she later related the story, the woman fit the description of a childless aunt* to whom my great-grandmother had always promised "the next baby".  The aunt had died, and the story was that she had come to claim "her" baby.

That night, my grandmother related, she came down with a high fever.  She may have imagined the whole thing.  But that's really the key to a good ghost story - not a bold claim, but rather, a story that asks the question "what is imagination?" {Read more}

From POPPG to COP - evolution of a third party

October 30, 2009 by Ian Ramjohn

I have voted only four times in my life¹ - one local government and three national elections.  And 100% of my voting pattern can be explained by a single factor - I voted for the Muslim candidate.²  Combine that bit of information with my surname and it's easy to conclude that my vote is driven simply by identity politics.³

It would be easy.  But while it would prodict my voting patterns fairly well, but it wouldn't do much to explain why I voted the way I did, nor would it be a useful predictor of future scenarios.  

As I mentioned on Monday, saying that "corruption, on its own, does not decide elections in Trinidad: Race does" (as Selwyn Ryan did) turns correlation into causation.  Voting patterns and election victories can be explained in terms of race, but saying that "race decides elections" is an oversimplification.  Electoral victory depends on a combination of building coalitions and motivating your base.  Add to that the fact that we don't have national elections, we have a series of local elections that are won constituency-by-constituency.  More to the point, if race decided elections, one would expect that we had experienced substantial demographic shifts over the last 40 years, an expectation that's not supported by the facts. {Read more}

The third race

October 26, 2009 by Ian Ramjohn

In the Sunday Express, Selwyn Ryan wrote

...Mr Panday is also correct when he notes that corruption, on its own, does not decide elections in Trinidad: Race does...

Taran questioned whether this assumption about Trinidadian politics remains valid, pointing out that

If COP support is an indicator, they don't follow their parents. Sure, they didn't win a seat - but they did cast a wide net on Election Day because something about COP was appealing. It wasn't Winston Dookeran's charismatic speeches. What was it?

If you're interested in predicting outcomes, phenomonological models are good enough.  Race, coupled with a few other factors, can explain the outcome of every election since 1956 with the possible exception of 1986.  If you consider mixed people as a "swing" constituency, caught between the two races, you've got your model.  Figure out how they'll vote/how they voted, and you've predicted or explained your election.  It works, it's simple...it's what they call an elegant solution.

The problem with phenomonological models is that they are only interested in emergent patterns, not in the mechanisms that generate those patterns.  Correlation, they tell you, does not imply causation.  If you want to study the underlying mechanics that create those patterns you need to dig deeper, and look for more complicated models. {Read more}

On finding new ideas

October 24, 2009 by Ian Ramjohn

Trinidadians have a habit of going abroad for a little while, taking in the outside world, turning around and coming home with the belief that they now know more than all the poor people who stayed behind. In their return they became the new colonialists, taking upon themselves the “white man's burden” to educate and civilise the the ignorant natives.

Trinidadians also have a habit of accepting things the way they are. Taran has written about his disdain for the phrase “this is Trinidad”. But fatalism aside, most people who search for solutions are constrained by their experience. It's really difficult to imagine something that's outside of your experience. The search for solutions requires an understanding of alternatives. And we are badly in need of solutions.

I think there's a useful path that lies somewhere between those two options. I don't believe that I know better than others. I'm old enough to have gotten over that arrogance. (OK, maybe age isn't the issue – Eric Williams was older than I am when he came home and “put down his bucket”. But I don't think he ever outgrew his arrogance.)

I don't presume to have answers. I've been out of Trinidad long enough that I don't presume to fully understand the questions any more. I'm not a historian, I'm not a political scientist. My observations and interpretations may be entirely incorrect. But if I'm lucky, I've made a few observations that someone will find useful, or at least in my wrongness I may help someone clarify their own ideas about one issue or another.