Worth pausing for a moment over what happened with this yesterday. It's now been deleted and standard non-apologetic regret expressed.
Many people yesterday said it was not worth spreading and condemning the image, because that's what they want. I totally get that view. But there is a counter.
It's that we have to stand up to this shit. For too long, racists and xenophobes have been able to push the boundaries because there's a taboo against using those words against people. But in some cases they are warranted. In this case, it was pure xenophobia.
There's no way to maintain the taboos against racism and xenophobia without also spreading the message to comment on it. So this problem isn't going away.
There's no right answer to it. You have to evaluate it on a case by case basis, thinking about who is saying something (prominence, respectability etc) and in what context.
But yesterday, something good came of people standing up to it, rather than letting it fester and normalise a certain kind of language.
