DOMINION

Chief among the myth makers for the past four or so hundred years have been those who have held dominion over the North Atlantic, i.e. those in Western Europe and its extension, Caucasian North America (especially the United States of America), and their offspring tenanting not only parts of the hemisphere (especially in the Southern Cone of Latin America), but also the settler highlands of Africa South of the Sahara (from colonial Kenya and the former Rhodesia's down to Apartheid South Africa), as well as the Antipodes better known as Australia and New Zealand.

So there was up until the 1970s an active 'White Australia Policy' leaving on the margin of Australian society, if not rendering invisible, the indigenous Aborigines as the Maoris virtually had been in New Zealand.

In South Africa 'honorary whites', admittedly of varying hues when visiting, were placed, along with coloureds, higher up the racial/social totem pole than the Black Africans who constituted a numerical majority but were called upon to function as a cultural and political minority.

That is after they were left with the Bible by the Europeans after expropriating their land, according to Bishop Desmond Tutu in one of his more whimsical moments.

MAJORITY VS MINORITIES

The United States has remained since Reconstruction in a class by itself, resplendent in its WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture accom-modating hyphenated 'others', with the Negroes equal in theory but separate in practice.

They (the Negroes) were later to hyphenate themselves into 'African-Americans' presumably to belong, but remained permanently categorised among the 'minorities'.

Another myth emerged assuming equality between majority and minorities swimming in a melting-pot stew.

The resistance on the part of minority blacks to such defiance not only of common-sense but of reality, was to bring about pictures of strange fruit, long, hot summers, ethnic profiling and all the attendant racist repugnancies that need not delay us here.

For, despite the transgressions, the society could not be less than true to itself. The diverse and textured reality of this hemisphere of all us migrants has always been too powerful to ignore.

It is this diversity and texture that have produced for humankind great art, great science, great literature, great music out of the irreversible mix of arrivant-cultures over time.

These have in turn given dynamic energy to a discourse that has taken on greater significance in our newly globalised world by forcing on all who tenant planet Earth the realisation that to ignore the cultural specificities of this or that corner of the planet while relating meaningfully to the global whole, is to invite a fate worse than death ­ a fate agonisingly manifest in a living state of chronic dehumanisation of hordes of humanity.

The challenge will not go away, as nature's retributive justice, Hurricane Katrina, served to remind us all.

To say that the delays in the official response to the agony of victims of the disastrous hurricane were blatantly racist would be too simple for serious discussion.

But to ignore the fact that too many have lived in denial about the humane demands of the cultural diversity of an ex-slave society, is to rob ourselves of the possibility of rehumanising the polity bequeathed us out of slavery.

This is now in dire need of the tolerance, understanding, mutual respect, compassion and caring expected of any civilised society, especially when it dares to boast about its commitment to equality and equity as landmarks of democratic governance, not to mention its missionary zeal in making the world safe for democracy even via regime change and pre-emptive strike, and with the fearlessness of the righteous.

ENGAGING THE INTELLECT

It is that diversity and what it ought to mean in praxis that should still engage the intellect, imagination and policy vision of people throughout the Americas.

Only so will we be able to deal with a proposition someone like myself has often made to persons of Caucasian stock in the Americas ­ namely, that until they are able to accept the notion (or fact) that they are as 'negrified' as I am Europeanised, there can be no peace in the land and certainly no less cause for the self-contempt and guilt complex that flourish on either side of the divide.

SHADOW OF HISTORY

History may not repeat itself but it often casts a long shadow on posterity.

And those of us descended from European, African, Asian migrant ancestors occupying since 1492 the real estate of the Native Americans who have tenanted the Americas but have long been made to function from the margin, need to code-switch to the new reality of an intercultural, complexly textured, spiritually enriched hemisphere, the continuing denial of which reality is arguably the most un-American activity so many of us have come to embrace.

Western Europe (and especially the United Kingdom, once the modern world's greatest imperial power) is now discovering the full implications of the agonising presence of 'alien souls' on their own soil as a result of what one of our Caribbean poets once described as 'colonisation in reverse' and the latest response to which, a Guyanese-born Brit living in London has had reason to describe as Britain 'sleepwalking its way to segregation'.

For a number of Britons, it would appear that the current problem condition is the rapidly changing ethnic profile of their blessed verdant isles.

Those green and blessed isles are now full of noises in response to the perceived threat of Caliban in Prospero's domains.

Crassly put, there is the articulated fear of what a Member of Parliament referred in 2001 to the 'mongrelisation' of a refined and purified race in the wake of unrestricted migration into Britain of persons of darker hue and lesser mien.

EXCLUSION POLICY

Such a position is by no means new to British experience, at least not since the 16th century if not earlier.

A student of slavery studies, Dieudonne Gnammankou, not so long ago reminded readers that "hostility towards black people was at such a level that Elizabeth [the First] (1533-1603) ordered their expulsion from the country in 1601. The policy of exclusion of Africans from Europe is therefore not a 20th century invention," he takes pains to emphasise.

Such a position has been prompted and informed by notions of ethnic purity and of homogeneity as the primary principle of social organisation and a basis for the now well-known exaggerated claims to cultural certitude and racial superiority.