For the past several years, the Liberal party has sent out greetings on “Black History Month” to our readers through The Caribbean Camera.

Its half-page message was, of course, endorsed by several Liberal Members of Parliament representing constituencies with large Black and Caribbean communities.

We have been serving these communities for the past 34 years, and have always looked forward to receiving these “Black History Month” messages from the Liberal Party for publication in our paper.

So it came as a complete surprise to us that the Liberal party did not put its usual “Black History Month” message in our paper this year.

And we were left wondering whether we had offended someone from on high.

We are certainly not aware that we have done so.

As the largest Caribbean newspaper in the country, delivering print and digital editions to our community and read by over 100,000 people each week, we have come to the conclusion that the Liberal Party, by not placing its message in the Caribbean Camera might be showing total disregard for our Black community.

Is the Black community is no longer worthy of receiving the “Black History Month” greeting?

Or was it simply an oversight ?

We would like to believe that it was an oversight because we have done absolutely nothing to deserve the snub we have received,

We have always given due consideration to all press release that the government has issued for the Black community, including Prime Minister Trudeau’s message for “Black History Month.”

We have not failed to report on funding provided by the government to various Black organizations. That, after all, is certainly news.

We had to seriously examine what we might have done to earn this disparagement, and realized that the only issue that resulted in calls from members of the Liberal Party, were articles concerning Israel’s war in Gaza.

One Jewish person accused The Caribbean Camera of being antisemitic, which we are not, and suggested that the government should force The Caribbean Camera to pay back the $14,000 we received for COVID relief.

We understand that some Liberals may have been concerned about recent accusations levelled against our paper.

But on closer examination our accusers may discover that their accusations were not only baseless but constituted acts of anti-Black racism and discrimination against Black businesses.

We also received a few calls from concerned readers of the paper requesting that we do something about this matter and we did. We vigorously defended the paper’s reputation and explained that the views of the authors in our commentary pages are not necessarily the views of The Caribbean Camera.

We still believe in freedom of the press.

Although we have identified a potential issue, we still hope that our mistreatment is an oversight and we wish to thank the MPs and MPPs from the Liberal, Progressive Conservative and Provincial New Democratic Party for placing their “Black History Month” messages in The Caribbean Camera spite of the false allegations levelled against us.

The support of individual MPs from various parties has enabled us to publish over 130 stories that relate to Black people’s history and to cover events related to “Black History Month.”

The Caribbean Camera is a responsible paper and has not failed to report news – real news, that is.

We wish all our readers all the best for “Black History Month.”