Divide and Conquer -To make a group of people disagree and fight with one another, so that they will not join together, allowing them to be ruled over.
The narrative that there must be representation in our House of Assembly for other nationalities and ethnic groups living amongst us, in particular those from our neighboring Caribbean islands is as much misleading as it is false.
In 2021, following our General Elections, the Governor as mandated appointed two members to the Twelfth Legislature of the House of Assembly of the Turks and Caicos Islands; One of Dominican birth and the other of Haitian birth. While both Honorable members are more than cable of functioning in the position, they have been given strong representation on national issues; one is also my cousin. Appointments made along these Ethnic lines, comes as a slap in the face, not only to myself, but also to the majority of the Turks & Caicos Islanders. The appointment of any member to our House of Assembly, with ethnicity and or place of birth being one of the major factors was completely wrong and perhaps a cause for great concern given our current social context.
The Turks and Caicos in its very existence is representative of the phrase “out of many One”. As a people, we stood from very early in our history as a group integrated with our Caribbean brothers and sisters. All one has to do, is to ask any Turks and Caicos Islander “where your family from,” and you will get a wide variety of responses. “My grandmother is from the Dominican Republic, my grandfather is from Haiti, my parents are from the Bahamas, my father is from the Barbados, my mother is from St. Lucia, my great-grand parents are Jamaicans, I have uncles that are from Haiti, or my aunts are from Guyana.
All these are typical answers identifying our deep family ties and relationships with all our Caribbean neighbors.
Similarly, if you ask persons where their family name originated from, the list of countries would widen still, going beyond our Caribbean neighbors, into North and South America.
Should one pose the very question to past and present Members of the House of Assembly, and to many top government officials – where your family roots are from? You would get similar answers, naming many regional countries as their family origins. Therefore, it is quite evident that many of our close neighbors like Jamaica, Haiti, and Dominican Republic are already represented and have been represented for years by our very own presence in the House of Assembly.
The Turks & Caicos Islands is, and has been, a melting pot of nations for a long time and our Caribbean neighbors are certainly represented in our citizen population. However, this representation has never been called into question until recent time. Particularly, through the intentional appointment of members who the British Government identifies as representing the people in our country that are from Haiti and Dominican Republic.
Why is there a need for such types of ethnic appointments? Are we to expect appointment form the Philippines and Jamaica next? This can only seek to create further polarization of these individual nationalities within our already fragile social fabric. In so doing, divisions will be created and further separation of our people may occur.
When I see Turks and Caicos Islanders, and hear their family name, I see “our people forge and blend with multiplicity, of race and kind and creed and tongue, united by our goals,” as stated so eloquently in our national song, written by Dr. Rev. Conrad Howell. This is the truth about our Turks and Caicos Islands. Therefore, our Caribbean neighbours, and others, are already represented in our House of Assembly, and already represented in top positions of our government. Hence there is absolutely no need to directly focus on appointing members of certain ethnic origin to the House.
I am already representing them, if they are citizens of the Turks & Caicos Islands. Other parliamentarians are representing them as Turks and Caicos Islands, past Parliamentarians have been representing them as Turks and Caicos Islanders. The “they” are us, and we are the “them”, they are our families, we have been blended as one in past years. There should not be a direct action taken that separates us further as a people, and to put our people into different ethnic groups. We must continue to be seen as one people.
It is our democratic choice that we allow ourselves to be divided by political affiliation, religious denominations, and to a lesser extent island district division. I would not want to see a them versus us country, where persons vote in elections, and make other national decisions, solely based on which racial, ethnic, or national groups individuals identify with.
Let us go forward as one people, not allowing us to be divided into ethnic or racial groups, and not having any civic and statutory appointments made solely based on ethnicity, but based on one’s knowledge, skills and abilities of our people, and their concerns of the needs and interest of the citizens of Turks and Caicos Islands. Knowing that, rising to eminence by merit, we should live respected – and die regretted.
