EDITOR’S NOTE

THE world appears to be engulfed in a cloud of racial hate and intolerance. In our neck of the woods, racist incidents have become the order of the day, with dubious characters who seem hell bent on provoking racist controversy.

In the last 12 months alone, how many cases of needless racism have hit the headlines – and have left many gasping with shock and disbelief? I wonder how long this will go on for, and what can be done to rid our beloved country of this scourge once and for all.

But if you think we are the only ones grappling with this malady – because racism is a disease of the mind – think again. Many places are not being spared.

In Europe, for instance, an incident took place in a plane last Friday that has made headlines. It has gone viral on social media in other parts of the world and has been viewed more than 4.5 million times on Facebook.

A black passenger, now identified as a 77-year-old woman known as Mrs Gayle, was the subject of a racist tirade on a Ryanair flight from Barcelona to Stansted Airport near London. The row apparently broke out after the woman was unable to move out of her aisle seat quickly enough to let a white man sit down in his window seat.

The 3min 20sec video shows a man shouting at an elderly woman to move seats, while her daughter tries to explain to him that her mother is disabled.

He replies: “I don’t care whether she’s f***ing disabled or not – if I tell her to get out she gets out.”

The footage, recorded by fellow passenger David Lawrence, shows the man calling the old woman an “ugly black bastard” and telling her “Don’t talk to me in a f***ing foreign language, you stupid ugly cow” when Mrs Gayle responds in a West Indies accent.

Cabin crew appear to take no action against the abusive man in the video.

Mrs Gayle is apparently an immigrant from Jamaica who arrived in Britain several decades ago – part of the so-called Windrush generation. This term is fairly common in those climes but relatively unknown here. It’s a reference to the ship MV Empire Windrush, which arrived at Tilbury Docks in Essex on June 22, 1948, bringing workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and other islands to fill the labour shortage in post-war Britain.

It’s heartening that British politicians have denounced the behaviour of the airline. The secretary for transport, Chris Grayling, said: “What we saw was totally unacceptable. The fact is that race abuse of that kind is a crime. And if a crime is committed it should be dealt with appropriately.”

Prime Minister Theresa May’s spokesperson has said: “When people are travelling, going about their public life, no one should be subjected to intimidation or any form of abuse.”

The incident harks back to Rosa Parks, the American seamstress who, on December 1, 1955, refused to surrender a bus seat to a white passenger in Alabama. She was arrested for her insolence, and this sparked a bus boycott lasting 381 days. Parks is an icon even in this country, and a library has been named in her honour in Soweto.

The stories of Parks and Gayle are strikingly similar. Parks was charged, while in the Ryanair video, we see that Gayle is moved from her seat, while the verbal abuser is left untouched.

Surely this is no way to treat a woman, let alone a frail, 77-year-old pensioner, living with a disability, and whose only crime is her race and the way she speaks.

Some will say the man on the flight was just simply rude, a bad-mannered, uncivil lout, But it’s this very mentality that allows racism to thrive in our modern societies. Bigotry is provoked by nothing more or less than the colour of somebody’s skin.

Bigotry causes problems, it doesn’t solve them. This has been proved beyond doubt – time and time again.