‘Low quality’ ‘rubbish collectors’

The pervasive, rampant, bloody-minded racism of this country is breathtaking and it is led from the very top.

Joseph Muscat knew that remark he made yesterday during his debate with Adrian Delia about foreigners picking up rubbish while native Maltese work as doctors in air-conditioned rooms (having their rubbish picked up by the foreigners) was racist. Adrian Delia’s inverse view that “low quality” foreigners should not be allowed in because ‘they’re taking our jobs’ is just as callously prejudiced.

These two behave like they have not had an iota of education about race relations in an urban community. I say ‘like’. Maybe they haven’t and maybe they have. I’m not sure any more. It’s the consequences that count.

The Prime Minister recently defended himself and racists like him by saying that it is not necessarily the case that anyone speaking about foreigners is a racist. Talk of the bleeding obvious.

But, Mr Prime Minister, anyone who speaks about sticking a collective group of people, irrespective of their individual skills, ambitions, capabilities, desires and abilities inside an invisible but inescapable box is, if that group of people is defined by race, a racist.

Allow me to explain. Last week I joined the few stragglers and, as they would call us if they had the vocabulary, lily-livered, bolshie, tree-hugging, petit bourgeois, champagne commie Sizwe-wannabes, who were bothered enough by the drive-by shooting of a man in Birżebbuġa to lay some flowers in his memory and profess to the scared people of his race that not all of us want to shoot them on sight.

It was not a very encouraging scene from their point of view. There can’t have been more than 200 white people in that crowd which leaves several other hundred thousands whose views on the matter of shooting black people on sight are at best ambiguous or undetermined.

I had a few conversations with the few scared young men in their mid-twenties who showed up at that protest hoping there would be enough cover from random bullets to see the day through.

One was an engineer who worked for a telecom company in his native Ghana. The other was a mechanical technician, licensed in Nigeria to work on car engines with several years of experience working on repairing heavy trucks and buses. And others with skills in this vein.

In Libya they slaved for food and water on farms and construction sites until they escaped on a dinghy at night and landed on Malta. They needed to leave Libya because they heard stories of friends that would vanish never to be heard from again. They could not be sure if their friends drowned in the Mediterranean or in cement on the construction site, thrown there by a boss annoyed by their demand to be paid.

They hoped Europe would be the civilised city on the hill they heard stories of. Instead they work, illegally, on construction sites, struggle to get paid the pittance they need to avoid starvation and now they find people of their type can meet the same random fate they risked in Libya.

Now we have two party leaders with the responsibility to lead this community in understanding it is part of the rest of the world where all are born equal. We should be holding these truths to be self-evident and yet our leaders propose policies of exploitative apartheid expecting nothing but applause. And that is what they mostly get.

One part leader’s policies say their existence, for eternity, should be capped at picking up our rubbish. The other’s policies say their existence, here, should not persist at all.

One says that people who are not quite like ‘us’ should only be allowed in if their presence signifies increased wealth: for ‘us’. The other proposes his alternative view as more liberal and says foreigners should be allowed in so that ‘we’ do not have to work in the sun or suffer indignities like the smell of rubbish or, of course the unspoken prospect of the risk to life and limb to sub-standard health and safety standards in a construction industry that would be unaccaptable if the risk was to the more valuable lives of Maltese employees.

Both leaders rank the value of a human being’s life according to their race. Some apologists insist it is not racism if the leaders do not use terms such as ‘black’ or ‘white’. That is a groundless apology on two counts. Firstly, because we know exactly what they mean when they speak of rubbish collectors. Secondly, because the classification of humanity into two circles that never meet on a Venn Diagram where one is either ‘Maltese’ or ‘foreign’ is no less racist for being so utterly indiscriminating in its prejudice.

My wife gets bristly when she hears our political leaders speak about foreigners being undesirable unless they’re paying a small fortune in monthly rent and driving around in sports cars or, that other alternative, collecting rubbish.

Either prospect rules her out. She’s foreign, always will be, in spite of her fluent Maltese. She wouldn’t have it any other way because she is not going to give up her inherent French identity as if she needed to apologise for being who she is in exchange for permission to live here.

Both leaders would likely say they did not have her in mind when they spoke of rubbish collectors or foreigners that need excluding because of their low quality. For one that would be an admission that the rubbish-collecting argument does not apply to her because she’s not black. For the other, he would say she’s now married to a Maltese and is the mother of Maltese children so surely no one would want to throw her out now.

But you see, she’s not here because of me. I didn’t find my wife marooned on some coconut island waiting to be saved, kissing some curse away and saving her from her incomplete existence ‘abroad’ with the ultimate privilege granted to someone not born here: marriage.

She came here of her own accord almost two decades before I had the privilege of meeting her. She made a life for herself working in what one of our political leaders would call a “low quality” job though she was not quite collecting rubbish. I say that not with any disdain for rubbish collection but because that appears to be the line that Joseph Muscat thinks natives of this island should no longer have the indignity of crossing.

In any event both leaders make someone like my wife feel unwanted not because of her politics, her personality, her attitude or her lifestyle. She’s unwanted because of her race, it being that inferior race known to us as ‘mhux Maltija’.

Faced with that the last thing anyone with any self-respect would want is to be adopted by that club and be recognised as an honorary Maltija. Even if you’re white, if you live on the comfortable side of apartheid, complaining about it is no relief from your guilt by association.

Because you know what? There’s one other thing that these racist leaders are not understanding. Their blanket collectivisation of “low quality” “rubbish collectors” means that they not only make my wife unwanted. They make my children, half-blood, mulatto Zamboes unwanted too. I doubt they’ll flinch about what Adrian Delia and Joseph Muscat think of them.

But these leaders are clumsily but not unwittingly leading the charge of racial prejudice and hatred. Before we know it, we’ll have achieved our worst nightmare: that this place will become unbearable to live in unless you’re what some people would agree fits into their understanding of ‘us’.

And that is so hopelessly vague that you’re likely to be left out of the right side of that Venn Diagram.