Ayo Kimathi’s astonishing, repulsive speech at the Liberty Theatre a few days ago seems to have had a silver lining. It was so offensive that it has made it difficult to support what he said. His arguments have been exposed as indefensible.

That helps in the debate in the community about this sort of thing because it creates an atmosphere in which the silent majority — people who might normally be afraid to comment for fear of being vilified — feel safe enough to say what’s in their hearts.

That is healthy because, on the subject of race in this country, there are too many no-go areas — topics about which people are afraid to speak to one another at all.

We are not going to solve our racial problems unless we face up to these difficult aspects of the subject.

One of them is why people such as Mr Kimathi keep popping up.

I know that some white people wish black people would just get over slavery and segregation, stop obsessing about it and get on with our lives. Then, they think, we could get to a Bermuda in which people live together in harmony and peace.

What those whites miss is the depth of the anger in black people that slavery engenders.

It is a ghastly chapter in our joint history.

Although it all happened many generations ago, and it is probably true that its direct psychological effects are long gone, we are not done with it — not by a long shot. And no amount of wishing and hoping and keeping quiet about it will make it go away any faster. What some blacks miss is that people such as Mr Kimathi and the organisers of his talk tap into that anger and use it as a for-profit business. They rile us up (and that’s easy enough to do) to make money out of us.

I was not at the Liberty Theatre when he spoke, but I’ll bet that sometime during the evening, he or someone in the audience, perhaps, would have repeated the old saying that it’s not possible for blacks to be racist.

It takes but a moment’s thought to realise that cannot be true.

Of course, black people can be racist, and often are. That speech at the Liberty Theatre was a good example — Mr Kimathi was the naked face of racism, standing right in front of everyone.

Blacks have got so used to the idea that a racist is some red-faced Southern cracker with a noose in one hand and a whip in the other that it takes an effort of will to realise that racism is just a belief.

Racists can look like anyone: a grandmother on her way to church or a banker in a suit on his way to the vault to get money.

Mr Kimathi and his kind would like black people to believe that we cannot be racist because it then gives him permission to say pretty much anything he pleases, and it gives us permission to believe it.

But it is not true.

This Island is our home, and blacks and whites in Bermuda live in a relationship in which we need one another.

It’s a relationship we can build on, that we can make more meaningful if we work at it. Let’s not let fools such as Mr Kimathi spoil it.

• Senator Lynne Woolridge is the chairwoman of the One Bermuda Alliance