In my first column for the Chronicle last Monday, I traced the class demands and class yearnings of the Mulatto/Creole petty bourgeoisie from the 1940s. I stopped at the point where the MCC decided to team up with Forbes Burnham, although there were inherent problems in such a marriage because of class and race.
The League of Coloured People that was instrumental in getting the MCC to form their own political party saw the PNC as a working-class entity that rests within the bosom of the darker-skinned sections of Guyana.

The MCC folks do not consider themselves Africans, although they have African genes genetically. They used the typology of Mulatto/Creole to describe themselves. They consider the ethnic makeup of the Mulatto/Creole class not part of the African race.
This thinking forms an integral part of their psyche for two reasons. They know that they have Caucasian blood, which they contemptuously and conveniently use to ingratiate themselves in a post-colonial society. This happens in Guyana even to this day.

For example, formidable historian Professor Clem Seecharran (a dark-skinned non-Christian) told me on the Gildarie-Freddie Kissoon Show that he knows UG would never consider him for the Walter Rodney Chair. But the quintessential MCC personality, Dr. Alissa Trotz is on the consideration list.

A few months ago, Professor Percy Hintzen, a sociologist that I once knew when I was a student at UG, wrote a commentary edited by Dr. Trotz in which he openly exclaimed, “When people ask me what I am, I reply that I am a Guyanese creole. This is how my identity was forged, and where my interactions have been, and continue to be, most intense.”
I got to know how the mind of the MCC personality is shaped through my long friendship with the great women activist, Andaiye (deceased). I would use Freudian analysis on her to understand her psyche. My exercise proved invaluable.

Andaiye as Sandra Williams was born into middle-class luxury. But she was very dark-skinned, which had a troubling psychic effect on her. She felt deep down in the prison walls of her mind that she may never be accepted into a class that she wanted to be an essential part of.
So to find acceptance, she married a White UG lecturer, Bill Carr (deceased) and her best friend was a White woman, Mrs. Jackson, the wife of Guyana’s then Foreign Minister, Rashleigh Jackson. Andaiye went out of her way to court the friendship of prominent MCC personalities.

In fact, Andaiye’s relationship with the MCC mirrors that of another very dark-complexioned, prominent, middle-class citizen, Hugh Cholmondeley (deceased). Both Andaiye and Cholmondeley hardly cultivated any friendships with dark-complexioned Afro-Guyanese and dark-complexioned Indians. I honestly do not know, up to this day, why Andaiye appreciated me.
I cite these two examples because they give an insight into the nature of the MCC in relation to race and culture. We are now seeing how contemptuous of Indians and dark skinned Africans is the MCC and this explains their attitude toward the PPP and Cheddi Jagan since the late 1940s. This will lead us to a discussion of the role of the MCC from March 2020.
The second reason in understanding the mind of the MCC is the house slave world they descended from. The descendants of the house slaves carry the profound Freudian underpinning that colonial society saw them as special and educated them for the takeover of power.

For two good sources describing and analysing the house-slave mentality, see the following two books edited by David Lowenthal and Lambros Comitas, “Slaves, Citizens, and Free Men” and “Consequences of Class and Colour.”

Out of this mentality was born the instinct of entitlement. From the formation of the League of Coloured People and the National Democratic Party right through to the founding of the WPA and AFC by the MCC, this class wants to have power. This instinct obtains in all the French and British islands in the West Indies and Guyana. They feel a natural entitlement.
When the layperson hears about the MCC, they naturally ask where that class is today since Guyana has changed considerably from the 1940s. The MCC is very much alive in Guyana. Today’s MCC personalities are the descendants from the 1970 and 1980 generations. The high schools of School of the Nations, Mae’s, Marian Academy, and the American School in Prashad Nagar are the breeding ground. Their meeting spot is Moray House.
I attended a general meeting of the School of the Nations to decide on the school switching from CXC to Cambridge GCE. The MCC parents were quite barefaced in their contempt for the Caribbean examination. To be continued.