Renee Webb, to her credit, has never been afraid of telling the truth as she sees it.

That has often landed her into trouble, and may well have cost the former Tourism and Telecommunications Minister her Cabinet job along with a fair amount of criticism in this column, but being a truth teller is a lonely path.

Ms Webb’s latest episode of truth telling came ten days ago when she stood up as maverick entertainer and businessman Tony Brannon was getting bombarded with criticism from all sides of the House of Assembly for his decision to blame black Bermudians (“egged on by the Bermuda Industrial Union”) for the decline of tourism.

Race remains one of the most tangled issues with which to deal with in Bermuda. But obviously offensive statements, as Mr. Brannon’s was, now carry with them an equally obvious response.

A long line of black and white politicians stood up to make the expected criticisms. Some may have been genuinely offended. But one got the sense that others, black and white, did so more out of a sense of obligation and a fear that silence would be interpreted as support, than out of any genuine sense of outrage.

Of course, silence in the face of racism and bigotry is as bad as endorsing it, because it allows those who are racist to spread their venom through the community. Where it exists, it needs to be exposed and eradicated.

But ritual denunciations don’t solve the problem. If anything, they perpetuate it.

In the end, it took Ms Webb to really tell the truth, rather than go through the obligatory denunciation before moving on to the next order of business.

She said: “If you look at the comments made by Mr. Tony Brannon, which were unfortunate and incensed people of a particular racial group, but at the same time you have somebody else who made comments against whites and Members didn’t stand up and criticise that. So we come from a place of dishonesty and hypocrisy.

“If it was wrong for Tony Brannon to have made those comments, then it’s wrong for a black Minister to get up on TV or a radio show and make comments with respect to house n******.

“As black people we cannot only attack a white person when he talks about race and then ignore (it) when a black person does the same thing.”

This newspaper reported that Ms Webb told the House she admonishes all forms of discrimination and has a record of doing so.

“We have no problem legally discriminating against people in this country, and we know it,” she said. “People in this country listening to us think we are a bunch of jokers up here because people are dishonest and they can see through it.

“People know what happened. They know that Tony Brannon as a white will get attacked up and down the country, but if a black person does the same thing there will be silence from those same black people that were attacking Tony Brannon.”

It is also clear that in the dialogue — or lack thereof — on race in Bermuda, only a black politician from the Progressive Labour Party could have made that statement. A white politician, or a black United Bermuda Party politician, or the white Editor of The Royal Gazette, would have been accused of trying to divert attention from the real issue — white racism.

And there is a certain irony in the fact that Ms Webb has received praise from white Bermudians, presumably for saying what they fear they cannot.

And yet, that is as criminal a statement on the state of race relations as Mr. Brannon’s comments were. And that is an indictment on this society.