I am baffled at Colin Bascom’s article in the Kaieteur News, ‘Bottom of the social ladder.’ What is ‘beating me’ is the reason behind it. I guess he wants to say that no one should stereotype. Well with this position, I fully agree. I can also ask him to see what obtains in India. Quite a significant number of Indians (I really do not care about the caste and skin colour) are characterized by the ‘ghetto’ culture. The same is true in any part of the world and for any group of people. The important thing to note is that ‘bottom of the ladder’ occupancy is not peculiar to a people nor a country.
These pockets are quite universal, and have always been with societies. As a relevant foot note, ‘ghetto’ is not a recent English word. So now back to your article.
Mr. Bascom, the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan, just like you, made an observation. He did not utter (at that time) a disparaging statement about the African Diaspora. Here, you are stating a social situation that was in existence in Malaysia in 2001.
I firmly iterate that you are not casting aspersions at any Indo-Guyanese. As an anecdotal comment, the late LFS Burnham once said that Dr. Jagan was too good and magnanimous to be racial. Yet the incident you are referring to was used to incite all kinds of attacks on Dr. Jagan.
He however, did apologise. Remember Sir Vivian Richards once said that he wished for an all-African West Indian team.
He was in all kinds of contortions, when he sought to extricate himself from the racially charged statement. Yet he was exonerated by John Public.
Enough said about that incident and back to some observations which transcend race, since I will limit them to Guyana.

It is woefully wrong to say that Africans are being marginalised in Guyana. The same opportunities are being afforded every single individual, irrespective of race, religion and region. Here, under the PPP/C, a Guyanese is a Guyanese is a Guyanese. Those who are ghettoised are those who walk away from the basic disciplines of life that guarantee success. Just check and see, and count too.
I have Amerindian,  Indo and Afro-Guyanese friends, and the successful ones (from all three groups) manifest positive traits: hard work, education and training, discipline, sexual temperance, little night life, family planning, single partners, frugality of spending, prioritised budgeting, etc.
On the contrary, the ‘boomers’ of the land, irrespective of race (again), are those who are the opposite.
They embody the negative traits: lazy and without a desire for  education and training, indiscipline, sexual promiscuity and intemperance, a lot of night life, no family planning, simultaneous multiple partners, prodigality of spending, no prioritized budgeting-spending on the wrong things, etc.
So Mr. Bascom, I urge that you go around Guyana, and do the survey. If it so happens that a particular group is in the abyss, then it is not because of that group being eugenically deficient. It comes down to collective personality. In my street alone, there are four Indians and three Rastafarians (Afro) who are unmarried but with children, whom they care little for. None of them works, and they all, many times tried to siphon ‘cigarette money’ from me.
I close by asking that the entire nation read what Professor Loncke explained in Monday’s Stabroek News. The article (addressed to mainly Afro-Guyanese, but with a universal message) is titled: ‘Quit Wasting Time and Focusing on Quick Money’. (NB. The ‘quit’ governs both participles: wasting and focusing).
In other words, just live an austere life. Also, when people live a ‘committed to a cause’ and ‘goal oriented life’ and reap the benefits from such a lifestyle, I sincerely hope that they never ever be hated or begrudged.
After all, “as one makes his/her bed, so must he/she lie in it.” And before I go, Mr. Bascom, see what you make of the following USA statistics, and I hope for some kind of statistical survey to be released here in Guyana.
Only in this way, will proper ameliorative work be done.

“Black Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for over 50 percent of all new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That infection rate is eight times the rate of whites. Among women, the numbers are even more shocking – almost 70 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV-positive women in the United States are black women.
Black women are 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS than white women, with heterosexual contact being the overwhelming method of infection in black America.”

“838 of 14-to-19-year-old girls were tested for a handful of common sexually transmitted infections — chlamydia, herpes, trichomoniasis and human papilloma virus, or HPV. More than a quarter of the girls had at least one of the infections, as did 48 percent of Black girls. Twenty percent of both white and Mexican American girls (the only Latino group CDC broke down the numbers on) had one of the infections.”

“The rate of bacterial vaginosis was 26.2 percent among white women and 45.3 percent among black women. Women from couples in which one or both partners are black were roughly twice as likely to develop bacterial vaginosis than do women from couples in which both partners are white.”
So it is lifestyle that really matters.