We cannot wait. Malta needs to begin a courageous and public conversation about race. Over the past few years, with increasing intensity, elements in Maltese civil society have highlighted the abuse being experienced by black women, men, and children in Malta.

Whether on the level of daily micro-aggressions at the local shop or the cold-blooded murder of a migrant, the experiences of black people in Malta are an inventory of humiliation and dehumanisation.

By way of example, last January, the police escorted a group of arrested migrants to court in Valletta. They were tied together in pairs with cable ties, and some were reported to have missing shoes. Children walked shoulder to shoulder with grown men, in a public parade of humiliation.

The year before, in 2019, Lassana Cisse Souleymane was returning home after a football game. Two soldiers have been charged with ending his life that very night, for no reason other than the colour of his skin.

Their irrational hatred was directed not at the individual, whom they never really knew, but the man whose body so threatened their own self-image

Their irrational hatred was directed not at the individual, whom they never really knew, but the man whose body so threatened their own self-image.

There are countless other cases, examples of mental health and homelessness leading to black lives lost in isolation; black tourists bearing the brunt of racist slurs while attempting to navigate the shopping centres of Sliema and Valletta; black children subjected to various levels of abuse in schools which, while paying lip service to the concept of ‘equality’… We must do more to support deeper discussion on social equity and racial justice.

Dehumanisation does not occur overnight. It is a slow and insidious process that requires constant reinforcement, as a disadvantaged group is successively scapegoated for the socio-economic ills of society at large. Paradoxically, such narratives of hatred make it almost impossible to learn from the experiences of racial discrimination experienced by the Maltese themselves over a long history of occupation and foreign rule. For a long time, it seems like race was allowed to become ‘somebody else’s problem’, festering in the shadows of the Maltese psyche.

However, the ‘problem’ has always been ours. When PN leader Adrian Delia called on Maltese people to “stand up for your Christian values, show who you are and declare you are Maltese and Gozitan”, his ham-fisted rhetoric made it crystal clear that, so far as the party under his leadership were concerned, non-Christians have no part in Maltese/Gozitan identity.

Former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat revealed a similar subconscious bias when he claimed that only foreigners should work as garbage collectors. The outrageous implications of this remark were that some kinds of work, considered menial or foul, are beneath the dignity of ‘the Maltese’.

The current prime minister has already shown himself to be lagging behind the Zeitgeist for racial justice, currently taking the world by storm. Robert Abela’s delay in supporting stranded migrants at sea, and his reluctance to really take on the racist discourse which has become normalised in recent months is worrying.

Unless this government makes responding to race a cornerstone of its agenda, then the mental category of ‘Malteseness’, presently held in public perception, will never be allowed to evolve. Without such an evolution, Maltese identity will continue to stagnate. It will continue to be caged in and dangerously confined, along lines drawn by nationalism, racial division, and religious exclusivism.

If being Maltese is to mean anything anymore, then it must be an identity held in common by the mutual responsibility to pursue sustainable opportunities for our communities, ecosystems, and heritage. It must be familiar enough to bring us together while wide enough to celebrate a sense of Malteseness that comfortably holds, without obliterating, a diversity of colour and creed.

What is clear is that any such process of dialogue and action for change can only begin after the long and challenging process of bringing the national shadow into greater awareness. Which means confronting the daily violence of racism, xenophobia, prejudice and misplaced sense of nationalism that continually threatens the wellbeing of all black lives in Malta.

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