Raising justiceseekers

Colin Robinson

The traffic jams are back.

Our 11- and 12-year-olds just completed their first week at the vastly differently performing institutions to which they’ve been sentenced for their next five formative years, which will fundamentally determine their futures and access to opportunity—all on the basis of one exam. Like elsewhere in life, some will defy the odds; most won’t.

They will, similarly, grow up into a world that is not justly ordered, one where the legacy of plantation lingers in administrative systems and structures designed to create unequal access, to inhibit productivity. Into ways of doing and thinking buttressed by a deep, cultural love affair with authority and rules we think are so critical to social order; a sense that that is the way things are, and a lack of imagination or faith that there are ways within our reach to do things differently, more justly, more efficiently.

It is so hard for us to imagine that freedom is good and not wotlessness; that shared ownership of the nation could lead to productivity; that ownership of ourselves could lead to responsible and ethical behaviour; that any sacrifice for national good wouldn’t simply give opportunity to someone else to advantage us.

Some people among us must be controlled, denied full autonomy, for things to run smoothly.

That is what our teenagers will likely learn: Either that they are the ones who will be controlled: and they deserve it, or must futilely resist it. Or that they must become the ones destined to be in charge, and to ensure authority and order persist.

It took me a while to puzzle out our national psyche back in April, following the local court judgement striking down the sodomy laws. It was a brief moment of moral panic, evident in conversations in public transportation, a fear we’d suddenly pulled out a critical plank from the social order. And since we lack the self-confidence or a history as a nation at creating a lot of new ideas about justice and freedom together, folks went a bit tootoolbay.

We aren’t afraid of justice. But we are pretty afraid of our own freedom. Unconvinced that one follows the other.

In early 1994, Indians filed the first legal challenge to the colonially-imposed sodomy law. This Thursday, almost 25 years, and a series of halts, wins and setbacks over multiple cases later, the justices on the Indian Supreme Court, in a cluster of lofty opinions, established compellingly the equality of LGBT people. It’s been a long, winding journey to freedom. A lawyer in one of those cases, brought by the Naz Foundation, Arvind Narrain, spent a week here in 2009 during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, along with leading LGBTI activists from Botswana, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria and Singapore, who sat eye-to-eye and swapped ideas with each other—and a couple Trinbagonians who hadn’t been invited to the party, but decided to insert ourselves—about what makes change and creates justice.

One evening three weeks ago, a couple dozen Caribbean lawyers, mostly bright young people embarking on promising careers, plus a few seasoned advocates, gathered at my office. It was fascinating watching young women sing raucous dancehall tunes in chorus into the karaoke microphones. The Caribono group had spent two days in Port of Spain putting their brains together around strategic cases that are using the courts our Independence constitutions created as tools to deliver social justice in a range of areas. The UWI organisers and I contemplated some topical focus to the lime, but none of the meeting focused on sexuality; in the end it turned into an entirely social affair, an opportunity for a local NGO to celebrate work a group of changemakers are doing with the law.

Some of this week’s fresh-faced first formers will hopefully turn into lawyers like them. Even if as 11-year-olds they’ve been sentenced, as Independent Senator Hugh Ian Roach and deputy law dean at UWI Cave Hill Westmin James once were (whose stories I’ve told before), to our lowest-achieving schools.

Whether they do might hinge on how curriculum or play or parenting instils a sense in them that justice is important, that changing the status quo is something valuable, and worthy of them. Learning justice is interactive.

As much as I want you to support your children who started secondary school this week to become successful plumbers and technical and service professionals, to invest those occupations with dignity and recognise their income-earning potential, and to ensure their schools prepare them to do so, I urge you as eagerly to make them into justiceseekers. People invested in making change, in building a different future, whether they use the law or politics or simple acts of citizenship.

Justice takes a long time. We hasten it if we teach children to find dignity in freedom, and not authority. My generation’s schooling failed to.

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