Outcasts on the inside – Manuel Joseph Ellul

The story of Jaiteh Lamin, the 32-year-old black man who was unceremoniously dumped on the roadside by a contractor after slipping from a height of two floors at a building site, created a lot of clamour and outrage throughout the country.

From initial court proceedings against the contractor responsible, it results that Lamin has fractured his spine. It has also been reported in the media that the man has two children and a wife back home in Gambia. His father is dead and he also needs to financially support his mother.

Laudably, NGO Victim Support Malta has launched a fundraiser in support of Lamin. He has also been offered a job by an air conditioning company. Such a strong demonstration of Maltese solidarity is very positive.   

Yet, as an educator with a special interest in social justice, I see in the building contractor’s alleged behaviour an unfortunate reflection of socially endemic black reality in Malta and one which is undoubtedly the result of pressures brought about by the steady influx of immigration, particularly from North Africa, as Carmel Borg and Peter Mayo noted in 2006 in ‘Learning and Social Difference’.

I note, and not without a sense of tragic irony, that the Maltese do not like to think of themselves as racists. Usually, the argument goes along the lines of: “Jien m’iniex razzist, imma s-suwed...” (“I am not racist but the blacks…”)

From personal experience and what research has shown, I believe that, to improve matters, the first thing we have to do is to accept the fact that we are a nation of racists, that most of us have developed an antagonistic disposition towards black people and that we have practices which are fundamentally conditioned to offer blackness no way in.

A simple look at the racial and anti-black discourse which typically litters Facebook posts should suffice.

Even more preoccupying is the presence of racial and ethnic bias during court proceedings in Malta, according to a study by Maria Pisani and Jean-Pierre Gauci in 2012 entitled ‘Enar Shadow Report. Racism and Related Discriminatory Practices in Malta’. In the same year this report was published, a bouncer accused of the accidental death of a Sudanese male migrant was acquitted by a Maltese court. And, two years ago, two members of the Armed Forces of Malta facing charges for racially motivated murder had been granted bail.

It, thus, came quite as a surprise that the court did not grant bail to the contractor who, according to Times of Malta, abandoned his employee on the wayside mainly because he was working without a permit.

Research shows black workers are offered “dirty, dangerous and degrading jobs” (Gauci and Pisani 2012, p. 17), usually jobs the Maltese refuse (Emmy Bezzina 2009, vii). These jobs come with “unpaid wages, long working hours, irregular work, unsafe working conditions and unemployment in the underground economy” (Gauci and Pisani 2012, p. 17), aspects of precarious employment present in Lamin’s case.

Black people in Malta are not middle-class people; they are outcasts in society and, therefore, forgotten and neglected- Manuel Joseph Ellul

It is interesting to note that, before working with this contractor in Mellieħa, Lamin held another job for which he was not paid. The situation is exacerbated when it comes to the housing and rental market in Malta, with “sky high” rents (Massimo Costa, MaltaToday 2018) over the past years making the situation markedly difficult for those of Arab or Muslim denomination, according to Gauci and Pisani (2012, p. 27).

The unsavoury truth and one that must be reiterated is that we Maltese are biased against black people. Whether we speak of crime, prisons, joblessness or education, black people in Malta occupy a significantly visible role, usually as one of the ‘problems’. In a certain sense, they are “outcasts on the inside”, a term that Pierre Bourdieu in The Weight of the World uses to refer to students who are part of the educational system, yet simultaneously not recognised and marginalised by it.

It is the same with black people in Malta. They are part of our society and contributors to a growing economy, yet we do not recognise them or their value and invent strategic ways how to marginalise them. 

While black people have been immersed into our reality now, blackness inhabits an invisible role, a lack of specificity of what the conditions and measures of improvement might be. There is an institutional disregard for the needs of black people, in the sense there is not a single institution in Malta that takes as foundational that black people are a necessary element of that which might make a more hopeful future. It is a known fact that education always reproduces the middle class. Black people in Malta are not middle-class people; they are outcasts in our society and, therefore, forgotten and neglected. As a consequence, they have no, or very little, probability of succeeding.

Additionally, although schools have become quite multicultural, our public school education still silences black histories, as evident in the ways these histories remain absent from the broader Maltese national imaginary. Black knowledge is not part of the teaching of our faculties and departments; it has been simply smuggled into the university under the guise of topics such as ethnic studies, multicultural studies and anti-racism.

Admittedly, the generosity and condemnation for what Lamin has gone through is not really typical of us Maltese. We treat black people as outcasts on the inside and we are, somehow, comfortable with this.

I think the time has arrived to move beyond the political rhetoric that necessarily accompanies cases like Lamin’s and accept the fact that we have a problem with our bias towards black people and that we need to do something about it. As a nation. All of us. Starting from our educational institutions.

Manuel Joseph Ellul is specialising in the Sociology of Education, at the Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto.