ANTONNETTE Haughton-Cardenas, the lawyer and radio talk show host, yesterday advised complainers to “back off” after comments on her HOT 102 FM show, Disclosure, which critics say bordered on being racist and offensive to the island’s Chinese community.

“Back off, you don’t pay my salary,” Haughton-Cardenas told an Observer reporter. “Goodbye!”

At the same time, though, Haughton-Cardenas, defended the disparaging remarks she made about a letter writer to the Gleaner newspaper with a Chinese surname, who she said couldn’t appreciate the suffering of black Jamaicans who were descendants of slaves.

The letter writer, Richard Kong Quee, earned Haughton-Cardenas’s ire for his criticisms of Prime Minister P J Patterson’s decision not to attend a breakfast US President George W Bush hosted in New York last month for Caribbean leaders. She used several minutes in the opening section of the show to berate Kong Quee for his admonition of the prime minister and a warning that Americans may well blacklist Jamaica for the perceived lack of support of US policies.

At one point she suggested that Kong Quee represented the kind of persons who go about with their “lips puckered” to kiss “any part of the anatomy of those who had power”.

Haughton-Cardenas, a critic of Bush’s policies, especially in Iraq and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, argued that Kong Quee wanted Patterson and other regional leaders to run off “like bwoy” at the beckon of the US leader and placed the issue in the context of self-assertion by black Jamaicans who had the legacy of slavery. Black Jamaicans have suffered, she said, since the day the first slave ship arrived in the island.

“But your name is Kong Quee,” Haughton-Cardenas said. “So you wouldn’t appreciate the first slave ship.”

Complainers to the Observer protested the substance and tone of Haughton-Cardenas’s remarks, arguing that they ran counter to the spirit of Jamaica’s national motto: “Out of many, one people”.

They also pointed to the several Jamaicans of Chinese descent who contribute to the country’s development and those, like Jesuit priest, Father Richard Holung, who have dedicated their lives to working for the betterment of poor, mainly black, Jamaicans.

But asked about the appropriateness of her remarks after her show, a bridling Haughton-Cardenas said that Richard Kong Quee, who gave his address as Jacksonville, Florida, had not experienced the suffering of black Jamaicans who came to the island on slave ships.

“He is Chinese and not had the experience of being on the slave ship,” she said. “He has no part of the slave experience.

“What am I being questioned for? I don’t have to do this programme.

“I am entitled to make that statement. It is not slanderous.”