There are three points I wish to raise about last Wednesday’s Daboma Jack incident. The first is that it was not a simple case of racial abuse and assault. Rather, it was a spectacle of racism of a kind which we had seldom seen on local camera before. Jack was assaulted in a public place. He was then humiliated as people clapped and jeered while the forces of public law and order finished the job that someone else had started. The racist tones were so heavy that Ms Jack was forced to scream to the police that her husband was not African but an EU citizen.
The events were caught on camera, but only to an extent. The focus was on Jack throughout. We never got to see the person who apparently started it all, nor did we see any of the people who clapped and egged on the police. While Jack’s humiliation was filmed, the people who started it had their dignity preserved by being held off-camera at all times.
I am not remotely accusing the PBS crew of intentional deception, let alone racism. I’m absolutely sure that they acted in good faith and tried to do their job as best they could. But, as is often the case, it is the unintentional that matters most. Certainly the kind of folk who get their kicks from harassing black people should not be rewarded with the comfort of facelessness.
My second point is that Wednesday’s events were a dismal failure by the police. We know that at least one officer stood by and nursed an existential crisis as Jack was repeatedly spat on and insulted. That officer failed to protect Jack, and to identify and book the offender. His preferred strategy was to call in the Rapid Intervention Unit (RIU) and then to watch as they assaulted the wrong person. Splendid.
I’m also very reliably told that black people often find themselves in similar, if not so high-profile, situations as Jack did. Buses and queues seem to enjoy more than their fair share of racial abuse incidents of the ‘go back to your jungle’ kind. For the most part, the offenders get away with it.
What that means is that the police are systematically failing to protect the public. Racial abuse is no different from many other kinds of abuse and intimidation. It is legitimate to expect the police to act, in a reasonable and civilised manner, to prevent it from happening.
Which leaves me with the RIU and their intriguing style of ‘policing’. At the risk of having to pick my brains off the tarmac next time I come across a road block: I don’t like those officers one bit.
I dislike the vulgar threat of their muscles. I dislike their uniforms, which look like something out of a 1980s film starring cyborg Schwarzenegger. I dislike the stench of testosterone that wafts through my computer screen every time I watch the Daboma Jack video. I especially disliked the way they ganged up on an unarmed man and shoved his face into the dirt.
I suppose the RIU fancy themselves to be some kind of elite SWAT team. If that’s the case, they should stick to training for the unlikely event of a terrorist attack. Certainly they had no business swooping in on a student whose weapon of mass murder was a pair of sunglasses and whose axis of evil was a wife and a baby.
The last time I witnessed that sort of policing was in Istanbul a few years ago. It is not a model to aspire to
The president of the Police Officers Union has said that everything the RIU did was according to normal procedure. That, I would say to the dear and dapper president, is the really worrying bit. I have no wish to be protected by his boys in black and their normal procedures. The last time I witnessed that sort of policing was in Istanbul a few years ago. It is not a model to aspire to.
Third, what exactly to do about it. Since I haven’t yet been appointed (on trust, of course) a consultant to the general public good, I’ll concentrate instead on what not to do. Two things, to be precise.
First, sackcloth-and-ashes rhetoric is of no practical use whatsoever. The only thing that soul-searching and all the other motions of public repentance will produce is a couple of reports on inclusion and embracing diversity, to consign to some dusty corner of the internet.
What we really need is faces, followed by prosecutions. The people who screamed racial invective at Jack, and in particular the woman who spat on him, committed a crime in full public view. It can’t possibly be too difficult to find and charge them.
I also hope that the RIU officers who savaged Jack will get their due. I won’t say “pending the results of the inquiry first, because I have no time for internal inquiries in which the police quiz the police; second, because there is absolutely no doubt that the RIU’s reaction was unacceptable. I am not prepared to pay taxes to fund a black-shirted police unit that protects the public order by humiliating harmless people.
The second thing not to do is to think of ourselves as ‘a people’. I was physically sick as I read the “ashamed to be Maltese” comments. I also have to distance myself from Helena Dalli’s apology to Jack “on behalf of the Maltese”. I have never assaulted black people, nor do I intend to do so. The fact that I share a passport design with the people who did is entirely irrelevant.
The argument cuts deeper than that. The people who told Jack to go back to his country were simply regurgitating a bit of undigested cultural nationalism. In other words, an idea of who properly belongs and who doesn’t, mixed in (as almost always) with some notion of the ‘right’ skin colour.
Nasty, but no different a mindset from the more digestible brand of cultural nationalism that teaches us that ‘we Maltese’ are not all racist, that ‘we Maltese’ are the most generous people on the planet (pace President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca), and such. They are simply two sides of very much the same coin.
There is no such thing as a benign nationalism. It’s one small step from believing that we are unique and great and good, to planting the faces of the rest into the tarmac.
mafalzon@hotmail.com