Dr. Walter Rodney on the “Myth of Race”: Time and time again it has been our undoing.

You see, we have had too much of the foolishness of race. I'm not going to attempt to allocate the blame one way or another. I think more than one political party has been responsible for the crisis of race relations in. this country. I think our leadership has failed us on that score. I think external intervention was important in bringing the races against each other from the fifties and particularly in the early 1960's. But I'm concerned with the present. If we made that mistake once, we cannot afford to be misled on that score today.

No ordinary Afro- Guyanese, no ordinary Indo-Guyanese can afford to be misled by the myth of race. Time and time again it has been our undoing. Does it have anything to do with race that the cost of living far out-strips the increase in wages? Does it have anything to do with race that there are no goods in the shops? Does it have anything to do with race when the original lack of democracy as exemplified in the national elections is reproduced at the level of local government elections? Does it have anything to do with race when the bauxite workers cannot elect their own union leadership? Does it have anything to do with race when, day after day, whether one is Indian or African, without the appropriate party credentials, one either gets no employment, loses one's employment, or is subject to lack of promotion It is clear that we must get beyond that red herring and recognize that it is intended to divide, that it is not intended in the interest of the common. African and Indian people in this country.

Those who manipulated in the 1960's, on both sides, were not the sufferers, they were not the losers. The losers were those who participated, who shared blows alit" who got blows, and yet they're: the losers today. And it is time that we understand that those in power are still attempting to maintain us in that mentality, maintain us captive in. that mentality where we are afraid to act, or we act injudiciously, because we believe that our racial interests are at stake. Surely we have to transcend the racial problems. Surely we have to find ways and means of ensuring that there is racial justice in this society.