Ruth Wishart: Casual prejudice now has room to flourish

Cast an eye and behold the vista of what can happen to a major democracy if racism, bigotry and casual prejudice are allowed to flourish.

This week came the news that the administration was attempting to deport anyone, without recourse to the courts, should they have stayed in “the land of the free” for less than two years without the necessary documentation. What’s ‘necessary’ now to be determined by a solitary immigration officer.

Last week, the sickening rally where the President attacked four new young Congresswomen whipping up the crowd at one of his Nuremberg-not-so-very-lite gatherings. All four US citizens; all four, not at all incidentally, women of colour.

Factor in the student, mixed race son of New York mayor Bill de Blasio writing movingly about being given the stark warning relayed to all young men of colour that they must be super polite to police officers, lest they become another horrible statistic. Another death to add to the burgeoning numbers of young black men shot by one of those hired to preserve the law of the land.

Factor in the utterly disgusting sight of children kept in cages, separated from desperate parents attempting to settle in the USA, whilst the latter are detained elsewhere.

Listen to the deafening silence of Republican senators who know all of the above to be a sickening repudiation of the best traditions of America, but continue to defend the indefensible whilst their failure to stand up for decency makes them ever more complicit.

Now, come back across the Atlantic, to a world where the Labour Party has so alienated its Jewish members that many of them have given up their membership in sheer disgust at the mealy-mouthed responses to blatant anti-Semitism in the ranks of a party they once thought their natural home.

To a world where Baroness Warsi, once chair of the Conservative Party, cannot persuade her colleagues to recognise and call out the Islamophobia still rampant in their ranks.

The emergence as leader of a man who talked of Burkha wearing women as “Letter boxes” hardly helped.

Neither, in the cause of good race relations, did his references to “piccaninnies”.

He may not have referred, as Trump did, to African countries being sh******s, but his contemptuous dismissal of other ethnicities, other customs, and other cultures was surely evidence of not so subtle racism.

As the saying goes, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men (and women) to do nothing.

We have our own bigotry here, not least sectarianism. If you see it, call it out; stamp it out.