For too long, Afro-Guyanese have endured systemic racism under the PPP government, discrimination in contracts, land dispossession, extrajudicial killings, and the jailing of political opponents, only to be told that speaking out against this oppression makes *us* the racists. This is a perverse and calculated distortion of truth, designed to silence resistance while maintaining a status quo of racial subjugation.
Africans were brought to Guyana in chains more than 200 years before many others arrived. Our ancestors cleared the jungles, dug the canals by hand, built the sea defenses, and laid the foundation of this nation, all under the brutal lash of slavery and later, indentured exploitation. When emancipation came, it was not reparations or justice we received, but more struggle, struggle for land, for dignity, for political voice.
Yet today, when Afro-Guyanese leaders demand fairness, when we expose how state resources are funneled to one group while our communities are neglected, when we decry the hundreds of Black men gunned down without trial, when we resist the theft of ancestral lands, we are accused of “playing the race card.” Since when is demanding equality an act of bigotry?
The evidence is undeniable; Government contracts disproportionately awarded to one ethnic group, locking Afro-Guyanese out of economic mobility, land seizures under the guise of “development,” stripping Black communities of property held for generations, state-sanctioned violence, the infamous “Black Clothes” police killings, where hundreds of Afro-Guyanese men were executed without due process, political persecution, where dissent is criminalized, and opposition voices are jailed on flimsy pretenses.
Yet when we name these injustices, we are gaslit into believing *we* are the problem.
To our East Indian brothers and sisters who claim to oppose racism, your silence is complicity. If you are truly offended by injustice, then you must be louder in condemning the PPP’s discrimination against Afro-Guyanese. You do not get to demand our patience while benefiting from a system that oppresses us.
True solidarity is not conditional. It does not require us to suffer in silence to make others comfortable. If you believe in justice, then stand with us, not against us, when we speak truth to power.
Afro-Guyanese will no longer accept the lie that resisting oppression is racism. We will not be lectured on “unity” by those who benefit from division. We will not bow to the false narrative that our pain is an inconvenience rather than a call to action.
This is not about hatred, it is about justice. And until justice comes, we will rise, we will resist, and we will never be silent again.
