The host, the guest and the rest

Much has been said about the recent spate of arson attacks against those men and women who have made it their business to defend the rights of asylum-seekers and refugees in Malta and, undoubtedly, more will be said in the coming weeks because the likelihood is that more hate crimes will be committed "in the interest of the nation".

This is not just a one-off episode in history; it is the beginning of a long struggle. I say it with an uncharacteristic certainty, but the signs have been apparent for years. Immigration may have served as the catalyst for this particularly visible bout of racist paranoia but the emergence of the new racism in Malta has been in the making for quite some time.

Much as I feel for the victims of these recent arson attacks - I have become adept at dealing with the anger and shame such events inculcate - I remain concerned that the more insidious type of discrimination, the everyday racism which fans the flame of the torchbearers, is still being ignored. As I maintained last week, the new racists profess to be democratic and patriotic and begin by denying they are racist.

Everyday racism is insidious because, unlike the work of the arsonists, it is considered acceptable and tends to be overlooked. The assumptions and beliefs are so embedded in the way we see the world that one can find evidence of racist thought and talk in the most well-meaning dialogue. For example, this paper's editorial writer on March 18 held that "it is difficult to support the case that the Maltese are intrinsically xenophobic [because of] our history and circumstances", and "it would be difficult empirically (sic) to show that we suffer from an intense dislike of foreigners".

I would have thought that it is because of our history and circumstances that one could begin to understand why Maltese people exhibit signs of xenophobia at times of "crisis" or moral panics. In 2004 I wrote of Malta: "Fear of the foreigner is an essential characteristic of the Mediterranean island state. [It has a] long, chequered history as a pawn in the hands of bigger, stronger powers and an inward-looking mindset hemmed in by the fixed confines of a land surrounded by sea... The language of a people says a lot about how they view the world and Maltese is no exception. The Maltese word for foreigner is il-barrani (the outsider) and it sums up the Maltese attitude perfectly". I see no reason to change my mind.

The truth is that statistics are notoriously expensive to collate and research coffers in this country are practically empty. But there have been small studies which are extremely indicative of what the results of such empirical evidence would be; so much so that I have opted to look further into this area for my own research.

For example, the European Values Survey, conducted by the recently late Anthony M. Abela, provided telling examples of xenophobia; The Sunday Times has published small studies on racism conducted by Mario Vassallo; the television programme Xarabank has polled small samples on both racism and xenophobia; and there exists some qualitative research which makes excellent bedtime reading.

What I can provide in this short piece is clear examples of contemporary everyday racism. For example, in the same editorial I cited earlier, that of March 18, the writer defines a racist as

"a person who hates those who are not of his or her own race".

But the idea of race as an objective measurable label of physical and social characteristics is a social construct and it would have been much more beneficial to the writer's argument to point this out than to use the word "race", whose meaning is highly contested, as if it were an obvious fact. Racism is not about "race" but about relationships of domination and subordination.

More importantly, "there is no single racism but multiple racisms: colour racism must be examined together with cultural racism, which includes ethnicity, religion and language," according to Sandra Fredman, a law professor and barrister who specialises in discrimination and human rights. This is worth bearing in mind as we go through some examples of statements made in the past few weeks.

On March 24, an article appearing under the heading Malta Has Nothing To Be Ashamed Of set the defensive tone of most of the statements made by the authorities. In it, asylum seekers' self-descriptions were reported thus: one "claimed to be a civilian rights activist from Sierra Leone", another "claimed his entire family were wiped out by the rebels" and yet another "claimed he was a teacher". The implication is that asylum seekers lie; and yet in my world, nobody asks to see my credentials when I introduce myself as a journalist.

This is subtle racism; in the article there were much more serious claims made by people in authority. For example, a lieutenant colonel claimed that "inmates were refusing to comply with the most basic hygienic standards"; in other words he called them dirty prisoners. The government's advisor on immigration called asylum seekers disruptive. On the same day, in another article an anonymous army officer claimed soldiers were exposed to diseases, not considering, obviously, that the detained asylum seekers were in exactly the same position as his men.

The idea was taken up as fact by the editorial writer of The Sunday Times on March 26, who went much further and suggested that asylum seekers should be put to cleaning their own toilets, public areas and generally sprucing up the island. This is a standard racial discourse which suggests that certain groups are only fit for a particular type of work. This is racism at its most insidious, reproduced in everyday thought and talk and completely overlooked because it has become so acceptable as to be totally unremarkable.

(The first part of this article appeared on April 8. The third and final part appears 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