Letters to the Editor: Widespread indifference to racism is dangerous
Rhasidat Adeleke spoke of being left 'in a dark place' by racist abuse. Picture: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile
I hesitated before writing this. Not because I am unsure of what I believe, but because I briefly wondered whether putting these words on paper might complicate my chances of ever entering the United States again.
I also had a fleeting vision of myself as the over-earnest employee in the film , sending a late-night memo fuelled by conscience, only to wake up unemployed and wondering what exactly I thought would happen.
Fear has a way of making us rehearse consequences before we speak.
And then I realised something more troubling — this quiet calculation, this instinct to stay safe, agreeable, and silent is exactly how we got here.
There are moments when silence stops being passive and starts becoming a teacher.
Moments when what we choose not to say instructs others, especially our children, about what is acceptable, excusable, or normal.
We are living through such a moment.
Recently, a sitting president of the United States shared a video on social media depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as primates in a jungle.
This was not satire, not harmless provocation, and not trivial.
It was an act of dehumanisation, one with a long, violent history and the most unsettling response to it has been how quickly many looked away.
What does it do to a society when this is met with shrugs?
What does it teach when cruelty is dismissed as humour, when racism is minimised as “just a meme put up by mistake by a junior staffer”, when moral outrage is mocked as inconvenience?
Somewhere today, children are watching adults scroll past this without comment. They are learning what matters, and whose humanity does not.
Let us be honest with ourselves. Comparing people of colour to animals is one of the oldest tools of racism.
It was used to justify slavery, to excuse lynching, to normalise segregation, and to soothe consciences during apartheid.
Every genocide, whether recently or in history, begins the same way by persuading ordinary people that certain bodies are less than fully human.
We know this. We have always known this. That is precisely why indifference is so dangerous.
When leaders dismiss concern about such imagery as “fake outrage”, they are not defending free speech.
They are conditioning us slowly, deliberately, to accept more contempt, more cruelty, more degradation, until it no longer shocks us at all.
And every time we remain silent, that conditioning succeeds.
For people of faith, this moment carries an even heavier weight.
Scripture could not be clearer that every human being bears the image of God, not just symbolically, but truly, in their bodies, faces, and lives.
To reduce any person to an animal is not comedy, it is theological vandalism.
It defaces the image of God and then demands applause.
You cannot proclaim love, justice, and dignity on Sunday, then say nothing when those same values are mocked on Monday, especially when the mockery comes from positions of power cloaked in moral language.
We see the consequences of this culture of dismissal closer to home too.
In Ireland, despite our pride in diversity, racism continues to wound real lives.
Recently, our exceptional athlete Rhasidat Adeleke spoke of being left “in a dark place” by racist abuse.
Despite representing Ireland with excellence, humility, and grace, she was reminded that for some, her achievements are still not enough to earn basic respect.
Why should she or anyone be expected to endure this?
Racism is not merely offensive speech or poor manners. It is a theft of dignity.
It inflicts psychological, spiritual, and generational harm. It is both a personal sin and a structural injustice, prejudice reinforced by power.
It spreads when it is tolerated, mutating like a virus wherever fear, ignorance, or convenience go unchallenged.
True leadership does not inflame this sickness. It interrupts it.
Leadership is not always loud or aggressive.
Sometimes it is as simple and as costly as refusing to accept the silence of a room, a workplace, a church, or a community.
Sometimes it looks like being the first to say “this is wrong”, and accepting whatever discomfort follows.
Someone always has to go first.
Education matters. Citizen education matters. Faith matters if it is lived rather than merely claimed.
So does the courage to speak plainly, without hedging or excuses, and to say that racism is wrong, that dehumanisation is evil, and that no political allegiance or social comfort can justify it.
The society we inhabit is shaped by human choices. That means it can be reshaped by human choices too.
What we have is broken; we can, with God’s help, heal.
What we have normalised, we can unlearn. What is now does not have to be what remains.
But not if we keep choosing silence.
It is time to recover our capacity to be disturbed. To teach our children that character matters more than convenience.
To live in a way that makes it unmistakably clear that every human being’s dignity is non-negotiable. Racism has no place here. Not anywhere.
End it now.
In response to the letter from John Tierney of the Association of Hunt Saboteurs regarding sika deer and them being included on the EU invasive species list; both anti-hunting and hunters have common ground on this issue — ‘Threat to sika deer in the countryside’ (Irish Examiner, Letters, January 6).
Even the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) has said it is unnecessary to mass cull sika or fallow deer in Ireland.
Deer might be a problem in hotspots in various counties around Ireland and can be dealt with a Section 42 licence issued by the NPWS to specifically cull a number of deer out of season if they are a problem for farmers following an investigation by the NPWS.
Recently the deer hunting season was expanded at the behest of Irish farmers.
The deer hunting organisations disagreed with this as it was damaging to the deers’ own life cycles.
Contrary to much popular and wrong belief, we hunters are not intent on shooting everything and anything at any old time of the year.
Seasons are there for a reason, to allow the animals and birds to give birth and raise their young.
As a note to Mr Tierney, we never had Muntjac here in Ireland. Nor did we hunters release them. Muntjac are prolific breeders, they can give birth three times a year, and if they were here in Ireland we would have a strong and increasing population of them.
As if the world’s security is not in an already precarious state, we are now having to contend with a new world order without nuclear arms control as the ‘New Start’ treaty has just expired.
While Russia and the US have 90% of nuclear weapons, seven other countries possess these destructive weapons, the least of which is capable of destroying at least 10 Hiroshimas.
China is leading the new nuclear arms race trying to catch up with Russia and the US.
It seems that the people have forgotten the danger posed to the world’s population and environment by the renewal of this race.
We need another Frank Aiken to revive the passion of the 1960s campaigners to ban these weapons, epitomised by the anthem of Barry McGuire’s classic anti-nuclear song, .
