race

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.

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

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

Yesterday, Selwyn Ryan wrote, 'The UDeCOTT election: round 1' - and within it he wrote something that should be apparent to anyone who isn't in Parliament: