The Church has taken the time, trouble and interest to collate and communicate its views on the Sant’ Antnin waste recycling plant to the government, the waste corporation, and the public at large. Yet it hasn’t taken any steps at all to guide its meandering flock as to the ills and immorality of racism, apart from a weak and half-hearted statement some months ago about how all men are born equal, or words to that effect. One would have thought that something more specific and forceful would be in order, in the aftermath of the shocking survey results published in The Sunday Times a few weeks back, and the torrent of hideous letters to the newspapers that publicised without shame the unacceptable views of their authors. That the Church takes an interest in environmental matters, and that it has an environmental commission to guide it in this purpose, are good things. Yet to do this to the exclusion of matters with which it is more directly concerned – like the fact that 97 per cent of its flock expresses profound distaste for others purely on the basis of country of origin – is more than a little bit perplexing. There is no room for equivocation in a situation like this, and the Church should not be standing in a corner and pretending not to notice, when if the matter of divorce were to be raised at a political level, for example, it would jump immediately into the arena, sabre bared. That’s just the official Church. What bothers me, too, is that in all the published letters to the newspapers I have read, there has been only one from a priest, reminding the brown “white supremacists” of Malta that their views are not just unchristian, but also morally unacceptable in a civil and social context. It is a pity that nobody wrote in to remind those who write of a “Maltese race” that there is no such thing as an indigenous Maltese, and that we are all without exception the descendents of immigrants to the islands, something that was made possible because there was no distinction between legal and illegal immigration until relatively recently in history. People just went where the money, or the prospect of a fairly decent living, took them.

The little light I can see at the end of this rather dark tunnel is that the infamous letter sent to The Times by one Vincent Raimondo (possibly the descendent of an Iberian immigrant to Malta) was so repulsive that it has galvanised the thoughts of several people who previously held no particular opinion on the matter. His “let’s get together and send millions of pairs of shoes to Africa so that they can all remain there working as shoe-shine boys and leave us alone” gist got people talking all right, but not in the way he must have hoped it would. He pushed things just that much too far, and it rebounded on him and his cause. Few people are amused by cruelty or by cruel jokes at the expense of the highly vulnerable.

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I am reading a book by the psychotherapist Stephanie Dowrick, called Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love. It’s really not like me to pick up this kind of work, but this one is particularly lacking in bunkum and touchy-feely language, so I haven’t felt the urge to throw it down in irritation after the first few pages. More to the point, I have just read the following paragraph, which is so useful in reflecting on the current stream of racist views expressed by otherwise ordinary people, as well as by the seemingly disturbed exponents of Imperium (more brown white supremacists), that I feel I have to quote it to you. It is exactly what I believe to be the situation, but of course, it has more authority coming from the pen of a practising psychotherapist.

“Weak, intolerant people need to hold unusually strong and narrow views. They may also be unusually insistent on broadcasting them, and condemning of people who object or disagree. They may be excited and gratified when their racism, sexism or homophobia allows similar bile to be released in others; when the ‘fence-sitters’ get the permission they were waiting for to attack and denigrate those they perceive as different and somehow enviable or disgusting in that difference. Weak, intolerant people always seek an enemy on whom to project their own negative or destructive feelings. This is the only way they can keep their own illusions of ‘purity’ and ‘righteousness’ intact and prop up a flimsy, unreliable sense of self. History is littered with tragic examples of this psychological and moral failing. Contemporary media offer even more. Men who turn on other men because they fear their power, their weakness, their sexuality, their colour; men who feel justified in controlling the lives of women; women who arouse race or gender hatred, especially in their own children; white people who turn on black people; heterosexuals who condemn and seek to control gay people; political groups that murder those whom they believe stand in their way; religious groups who revile or kill other religious groups: these are just a few of the gravest examples that arise when people disown some of their own fears or feelings and project them in extreme and degraded forms onto other human beings, with tragic consequences. Within communities, there are tremendous dangers when political, social or religious leaders collude with the unconsciousness of those who believe themselves to be injured and unheard and are righteously blaming. Such leaders most profoundly betray the privilege of leadership, as well as every woman, man and child who is directly or indirectly affected, when they give tacit or explicit permission to any section of the population to unleash its latest feelings of intolerance, to bring those feelings out from the private places of shame and guilt into the open and express them through acts of verbal or physical abuse.”

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The link Ms Dowrick makes between intolerance of other races and intolerance of women is an apt one. We forget that the way so many are now speaking about black people is the very way that earlier generations once spoke and thought about women. Indeed, those who believe dark people to be inferior often hold precisely the same views about women. A typical example is our very own home-bred Imperium. It is not a coincidence that many men who hate and fear black people also hate and fear women, though the strictures of modern society have made them realise that this hatred and fear is unacceptable, and so they conceal it, while still feeling perfectly free to express their racism. I’ve noticed parallels between the way some Maltese men speak about blacks and the way they speak about women. “They’re taking over” or “We mustn’t let them take over” are the two most common such expressions used in respect of both blacks and women in Malta, by Maltese men of a certain age and mentality. This diseased way of thinking is fed by the well-meaning, who don’t realise the deeper implications of how they express themselves. Recently, The Times ran a story about the selection of candidates for the post of head of the European Union delegation in Malta. The story was headed ‘Woman to head EU Delegation’ or some such, and it spoke of how “three women” had been selected as finalists. I wrote a letter to the newspaper, to object (we can’t let the correspondence columns be taken over by the rampant racists, can we?), and shortly afterwards, I ran into Ivan Camilleri, the author of the piece, outside the supermarket. He couldn’t understand why I was so annoyed. I told him: “Ivan, just replace the words ‘woman’ and ‘women’ with ‘black’ and ‘blacks’, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.” The simple rule of thumb is this: where you would never think to specify the gender of a man, you should never specify the gender of a woman. We would never have a story headed ‘Man to head EU delegation’ or a sentence specifying that three men have been selected as finalists. Similarly, just as we never specify the colouring of Caucasian people (white man to head EU delegation), so we should never specify the colouring of a black person (black woman to head EU delegation). Surely it’s not that difficult to understand.