A badge of honour

Daphne Caruana Galizia and Saviour Balzan should be proud to have been targeted. It means they're writing and saying the right things or, as we would say in the southern United States, where I grew up, the righteous things.

Equally proud should be the Jesuits, the young lawyer and her family, and all here who work on behalf of social justice, despite the threats.

It's so important to face down bigotry and ignorance particularly now, particularly here, as it is just beginning to emerge and there's no clear leadership consensus.

Some 50, 60 and more years ago in the US, lynch mobs hanged Black men from the limbs of trees. "Strange Fruit," sang Billie Holiday in the 1930s, "blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black body swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." "Rough justice," claimed the Ku Klux Klan.

In the early days of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, we didn't think to call it fascism or neo-Nazism, most of us just knew it was wrong.

Arguably, I was lucky to grow up in a family who believed strongly in racial justice and civil rights for all minorities.

Nonetheless, believing is one thing, acting publicly on those beliefs is another. As the horrors of violence, physical abuse and even deaths of civil rights workers spread across our land, more and more of us knew we had to speak out... and act.

When Martin Luther King Jr led the March On Washington in 1963, my father and I were there. Returning home, we proudly stuck the Freedom placard we had carried in the march on our front lawn. Someone torched it in the dark of night. Sounds familiar?

Years pass and here I am now living in Malta and, as a guy given to malapropisms once said, "it's déjà vu all over again".

Of course, the US is huge and Malta is small but each American community is small, too. And, in those small towns and neighbourhoods, playing on racial fears, real estate agents would come in and spread the word that the "first Black family" was about to move in. That meant "white" families would sell their homes cheap and flee, generating more business and big profits for the agents. Racist educators set up profit-making private "academies" for white kids when integration brought children of colour into formerly all white public schools.

Whenever close knit communities feel uncomfortable about the stirrings of social change, there's someone around to take advantage of it. Don't let that happen here. Don't even consider taking that road back to the past. It only leads to heartbreak and destruction. I know, I've been there, I can testify.

What to do? Allow me to make a few suggestions. First, clean up your thinking and your language, especially in front of children. No more considering refugees inadvertently washed up here as "illegal". Besides, Malta was generally not their destination in any case. No more disparaging remarks about Turks or Arabs or people of colour. If parents and grandparents and adults watch their language, kids will begin to think differently.

Second, get past the stereotypes by making acquaintances. Embarrassingly condescending as it now sounds in retrospect, in the 1960s in the States, white churches of goodwill began programmes like "take a Negro to lunch". Priests and preachers from the white churches would invite parishioners from the black churches to church suppers and enforce a seating pattern of one White, one Black, one White, and so on.

Parishes here could consider ways of inviting groups of refugees to high tea or other church events with similar arrangements. Or they could invite their parishioners to hear the new musical group of refugees formed recently and have a reception afterwards.

The point is to help people get to know each other, to get past the skin colour and preconceived notions and find, for the sake of polite conversations, points of mutual interest.

My final suggestion echoes what Ms Caruana Galizia and Mr Balzan suggest, disagree pointedly with any friend, colleague or acquaintance who says racists "have a point". Stop people in conversations with you from making racist, sexist or homophobic comments in front of you.

Remember, as Christians, we are taught to love our neighbours as ourselves. There's no place for hate in Christianity, there's no place for hate in Malta.