Hous­ing Min­is­ter David Lee wants cit­i­zens to stand firm in the face of at­tempts by peo­ple to cre­ate a racial di­vide in the coun­try, in­sist­ing, “We are one peo­ple.”

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia at the Cur­ry Duck and Car Show host­ed by the T&T Prison Ser­vice (TTPrS) in Pi­ar­co yes­ter­day, he ap­pealed to in­di­vid­u­als not to get caught up in the cur­rent rhetoric.

In­stead, he urged them to em­brace one an­oth­er.

Ref­er­enc­ing his own unique her­itage, he said, “I am a Tri­ni to the bone and if you look at me, I might look Chi­nese, but I have In­di­an. I have some African in me and I have Chi­nese, so I am a true Tri­ni to the bone.”

De­nounc­ing the cur­rent talk pit­ting Africans and In­di­ans against one an­oth­er, he im­plored, “Let us stop all this race talk and let us con­tin­ue in love be­cause Trinida­di­ans love peo­ple.”

“We all know how to love. When you look at car­ni­val time and you look at any fes­tiv­i­ty, we are one.”

Re­veal­ing he had grown up in the heart of Diego Mar­tin and had not known what race was, he urged, “I im­plore every­one, let us love one an­oth­er and as our na­tion­al an­them says, every creed and race finds an equal place.”

—An­na- Lisa Paul