‘Critic’ attacks and offends black community with racial remarks; ERC to investigate

A generally unkept Mikhail Rodrigues  aka ‘Guyanese Critic’

The black community in Guyana is outraged by comments made on social media by Mikhail Rodrigues who goes by the alias ‘Guyanese Critic’.

In his comments Monday morning, he berated the black community across the board by stating that they cannot read, hate reading, are afraid of knowledge and that if they need to know something, they have to resort to people reading and explaining it for them as they are afraid of even opening a book.

The outrage saw the local black community taking to social media calling for the Facebook Page of Rodrigues to be canceled but that is yet to be seen. It should be noted that the page amas a following of more than one hundred thousand persons, many of who are from the black community. While some persons including those of other ethnicities have been unfriending and unfollowing the page, there some blacks have already come to his defense.

As the outrage grew, the offender scrambled an apology and slapped it onto his Facebook Page but the poorly string together words riddled with incorrect spelling and numerous subject and verb agreement completely out of sync did very little to appease the angry community.

It should be noted that Rodrigues during his live video on Monday morning made it clear that he meant everything he said about the black community irrespective of some people thinking that it was a joke.

“They ain’t got nothing about what I talk is a joke you understand, it might come over like a joke”– Guyanese Critic stated in his live video.

By late on Monday evening, the Ethnic Relations Commission went public to state that they are reviewing the video. We were told that Mikhail Rodrigues was also invited to a meeting with the Commission.

What should be noted is that the Ethnic Relations Commission has been giving persons slaps on their risks for racially charged l comments on social media by just calling them into meetings, and then forcing them to issue apologies. The Commission has failed to grab the bull by the horn and send offenders to the court. The law gives the Commission that authority but the commission has not been utilizing this to the benefit of any ethnicity offended by acts committed by Mikhail Rodrigues of late, Kester Dean in the past other persons who offended another race with their utterances.

On Tuesday morning a small group of persons including journalists gathered at the Cane View Avenue, South Georgetown home of Rodrigues where they picketed him.  He first hid in his house engaging the picketers from his window and veranda before eventually coming down to entertain questions that were posed by the media operatives.