The truth in denial

The issue of racial discrimination has finally penetrated the Maltese consciousness. The most obvious evidence of this is the denials spewing forth regularly on the following lines: a) Maltese people are not racist; b) speaking out against illegal immigration is not racist; c) Maltese people are good Catholics and good Catholics cannot be racist; d) the racists among us are just a small minority of disturbed people; e) the term racist is used too loosely.

There is some truth in all these statements which is why they can sound so convincing but the reality is that Maltese people discriminate as easily as the next group. Racism is frequently apparent in its denial, especially in the initial stages of its visibility. The literature professor Alessandro Portelli, writing about Italy's "colour-blind" problem, has said that this attitude is the main prop of Italian discourse on race "in which denial plays an essential role". It is also the main prop of the current discourse on race here in Malta, one I hope this country will eventually accept because the problem can only be tackled after it is acknowledged.

My personal favourite remains the "I am not racist, but..." argument, which I heard and read time and time again in 2004 when I was going around asking Maltese people whether they considered themselves racist. If you start a sentence with those words then the claim you are about to make is, of course, at best, discriminatory. The only way you can finish it convincingly is if you say "I am not racist, but then again, maybe I am" which, to their credit, many of the people I interviewed did eventually concede.

There are many definitions of racism, depending on how widely you want to characterise discrimination between groups. I personally like the definition given by the historian George Fredrickson as racism being in existence "when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable". Racism is not just about skin colour, and most people nowadays appreciate that racist claims made on the basis of biological difference are no longer credible.

The discourse has in fact shifted from biological racism to ethno-cultural discrimination, the idea that different ethnicities have different cultures which do not assimilate. Hostility to immigrants is in fact based on the mistaken notion that the new culture is so different to the existing mainstream culture that they cannot coexist. The assumption, of course, is that cultures are fixed and cannot find a point of communication.

What Fredrickson describes as "functionally racist cultural determinism" is not unprecedented and is in fact "a reversion" to the time before the appearance of biological racism when discrimination was based on religious differences. Fredrickson, who has written a book on the history of racism, has suggested that it was the attitudes of European Christians towards Jews in the 12th and 13th centuries which "laid a foundation for the racism that later developed". The discrimination originally had its basis in religious differences but "became racism when the belief took hold that Jews were intrinsically and organically evil".

Once this fact sinks in, it becomes a matter of little effort to identify the antecedents of contemporary Maltese racism. I know that I can trace mine back to doctrine and history lessons. Young minds are not tuned in to the subtleties of adult discourse. So if you tell a child not to have anything to do with non-believers, then you foster the idea that non-believers are bad and to be feared and avoided. And if you portray Turks as the evil players in Maltese history, then, well, you are really asking for the emerging tensions of 2005 which work on the same parallel, that is, Maltese good, Turk bad, Maltese good, Arab bad, Maltese good, Muslim bad. For some people the words Turk, Arab and Muslim are actually synonymous!

I am actually being kind here because reality was much, much harsher. I was to love my neighbour, but respect boundaries and do it from afar and only if she was "good". Good people were your parents, teachers and the people your parents approved of. Everyone else was bad. There were uncles who were too crude, bus drivers who swore indiscriminately and made gentle folk wince, greengrocers who were too careless at giving change ("thieves") - the list was interminable.

The good/bad dualism was so central to my upbringing as the child of "good" Catholic parents sent to a "good" Catholic school (at a time, the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Church was good and state was bad) that the notion of equality got lost in the mess. It is understandably hard for a child to understand the notion of Christian equality (God loves us all equally) at the same time as you are called upon to discriminate between good and bad for your own good. I don't think I have to belabour the point, we have all been there and some of us still are.

(The second part of this three-part article appears on April 15 and the third on April 22.)

Ms Spiteri is a journalist and a researcher in media and identity based at the University of Sussex.

S.Spiteri@sussex.ac.uk