We could safely assume that if the Prime Minister ever discovered that ethnicity was the factor in selecting sleek hostesses at glitzy events in her honour, she would promptly put her slippered foot down and say "Not under my watch!" As, indeed, we would have expected Eric Williams to do after 1970, when the tables turned, dramatically transforming the national palette.

In 2012, when a woman could rise to the highest political office in the land, the idea of pandering to power by dividing the sisterhood along ethnic lines should be laughed out of town. But old habits die hard and old insecurities die harder still, prompting people to make peace with power on whatever terms may be required or even suspected. In this country, where ethnicity is the choice weapon of political mobilisers, the need to appease power in protecting self-interest finds a quick response in the business and professional classes as a weapon of self-defence and self-interest.

Ethnic coding has long been the dirty little secret of this country's image industry whose key weapon is invariably the female. Sister is pitted against sister as the unseen hand of message manipulators mess with our deepest, most illogical fears and need to advance to material security by any means necessary. Even when we know better, we believe we can't afford the high price of doing better. And so all of us, from captain to cook, from CEO to security guard join the game on the cynical basis that the ends justify the means.

For as long as we've been here, we have been making our peace with power, feeling our way to the right side on which to walk with it, dangerously deluding ourselves that joining those we can't beat is a form of triumph, even as we step into the trap of co-habiting with the beast of ethnic discrimination.

It is not the loud-mouth to be feared but the unseen force of discrimination that spreads its poison into the bloodstream of the land among a people yet to find the confidence in their ability to stand up to power and survive.

As we discovered about ourselves during the State of Emergency, for all our bravado, the idea of entitlement to rights is still, for us, a rather nebulous concept. The alacrity with which so many of us were willing to surrender our rights in exchange for some unclear, imprecise outcome, was a lesson in how unworthy of rights we still believe we are. And the speed with which the entire country voluntarily put itself under curfew where none was declared, showed how easy it might be to bring this country to heel one of these days. In a land with tomes of laws, we are prepared to live in the jungle outside the law, keeping the peace out of our fear of arbitrary power. Who among us would feel protected by due process in standing up for our rights without the comfort of a deep bank account?

Surely not the young woman turned away, always wondering but never quite sure, that she had been passed over for being of the wrong tribe, or the wrong size, or the wrong age, or the wrong sexual orientation, or the wrong religion, or simply the wrong address. Where does she take her pain, except to her heart, dying a little, crying a lot with every rejection for which there is no just basis.

There is a yawning space in the landscape for the protection of rights for big and small, but particularly for small, where unresolved hurt has nowhere to go but inside, fuelling pain and feeding the anger that can erupt at a drop of a hat on any given day. Arbitrary power finds its response in arbitrary defiance.

This is the breach into which strides the elephant of unbridled power, trampling on the values of fairness, justice and plain human decency. In this country, you can't walk two steps without encountering it. It is there in the arbitrariness that marks the judging of every competition, in the illogical award of honours and contracts, in the irrational selection of people for jobs or promotion, in the non-transparent intake of students in any given school, in the uneven treatment of people in hospitals, in the erratic service in banks and in the disparities in treatment before the law.

In this kingdom of the arbitrary and land of the walking wounded, we take our licks and lick our wounds, confirmed in the view that the justice system, whoever it might be serving, wasn't invented for us. The widespread and systematic failure to define, anchor and protect our right to fairness and justice in even the most routine of affairs, sucks the life out of the justice system and invalidates it in the eyes of those who consider themselves oppressed and unserved by it.

Any wonder then, that in our impotence before such all-pervasive injustice, we exact our revenge wherever we can, and however we can. This is the mother lode of the vein of criminality running through the society and the resort to mauvais langue, as people feel entitled to seize their justice by any means necessary and to seek their own interest in the absence of anyone, or any institution, doing so.

If we could find the courage to break away from the stereotypes and easy answers, we might give ourselves the chance to discover the truth about why we are who we are and to explore rational explanations for why so much money is achieving so little change. Discrimination, ethnic and otherwise, is the handmaiden of the corrupt concept of power that has bedeviled this land from the very conception of today's society. We were born in injustice and continue to dwell in its arms.

The issue of discrimination is an important conversation but hardly one to begin by establishing some commission. The first place to start is by opening up the channels of communication so people can connect with each other and see with their own eyes and then begin to talk about their own experience. We might discover that we are not at all different from each other.

Alongside this is the urgent need for review and introspection within the image industry, starting with the advertising industry whose stock-in-trade is the stereotype of make-believe reality.

Sunity Maharaj is the editor of the T&T Review and Director of the Lloyd Best Institute of the West Indies

sunity.maharaj@gmail.com