By GHK Lall- Whatever else it is, may have deteriorated to, America is still exceptional. There is Senator-elect Scott Colom. A Black man now a senator from a State that showed the a horrified world that disfigured side of America: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner mauled, maimed, and murdered. Three freedom riders buried in the savage marshes of the Mississippi Delta.
It was a killing ground over there in Neshoba County in 1964. In 2026, 62 years later, a dark meteor of light streaks across a benighted stretch of earth sowed with the blood of martyrs both Black and White, Jewish and courageous. It’s why I keep saying, despite the racists, segregationists, and anti-abolitionists, America is still exceptional.
Robert Kennedy had it right in the aftermath of the assassination of that great American: Martin Luther King, a preacher and a healer; a gamechanger and an includer. And for that America killed him. Said RFK: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man, and to make gentle the life of this world”. It was April, 1968 and the death of Dr. King. It is November 2026, 58 years later, and the savageness has begun to pale, started to ease, with a new age determined to find its place.
Will it hold? Can it hold? If the restraints of power, limited as they are, can be wrapped around the hands and neck of Donald Trump, then there is ground for hope that some sliver of that gentleness may take hold. Only the possibilities of America could make a Black American soar to its presidency, and another Black man rise to the heights in what was formerly, maybe still is, Ku Klux Klan Mississippi. The arc of justice does right itself, if only momentarily.
Scott Colom, senator-elect, senator from the gritty, blues world of Mississippi. A world at once harsh and unyielding for slaves and the descendants of slaves. A part of America groping to find its footing. A time when the majority could say, there’s been enough of the old way, the failed way. It’s time to show the world that Mississippi has essayed, etched out, energized itself towards a hard, inspired forward step after all those lost centuries of backwardness, and self-retardation.
If the coneheads and cross-bearers, in their white costumes, their burning poles of hate, their murderous midnight forays can crawl reluctantly, but crawling there is, why not the same prospect for Guyana and Guyanese? Surely, the blinding, bitter, racial strains of Guyanese cannot be so broad, so deep, so strong that they are greater than those that prevailed and persisted for hundreds of years in the belly of Mississippi? Now I read that it is more of wealth and less of race in Guyana.
There is some truth to that, but it is only one part of the incomplete Guyana story. I turn to Dr. Eric Williams: did racism beget slavery? Or did slavery beget racism? Those feelings of superiority, that tendency to hegemony. Office of the President in Guyana should reflect. Office of the Prime Minister in Guyana, led by a Black Guyanese, should contemplate deeply. A figurehead of a Black man, like so many Black Guyanese, or one seen as human and, therefore, possessing of some redeeming substance? Other than using for dirty jobs. Other than presenting as a parable that speaks to the perversities that reign so triumphantly in Guyana.
Scott Colom had his touch of Guyana. It’s part of the inspiration that catapulted him to Washington. A real man in a demanding world, but one now graced with his brief insights of Guyana, and his countless ones from Mississippi. He has had the best of proving grounds, that priceless learning about the savageness of man that needs to be tamed, that must be given all by all, if it is to be tamed. America has made a start to getting there. Guyana gives every impression of being stuck a hundred years back in the swamps.
