ANNAMARIA RIVERAOn racism: let’s bring some clarity

 Annamaria Rivera, Comune-Info, 20/1/2022
Translated by Fausto Giudice, Tlaxcala  

As a premise, it should be noted that the term "racism", in the singular, is preferable to "racisms", if we want to grasp the unitary character of the concept, beyond the historical and empirical variations of the phenomenon. Paradoxically, to name such a system, we are forced to use a term whose etymology refers to the belief in the existence of "races", criticized and then abandoned by a large part of the same social and biological sciences that had contributed to its elaboration. "Race" is, in fact, a pseudo-category as unfounded as it is paradoxical, since it is based on the postulate that establishes a deterministic relationship between somatic, physical, genetic characters and psychological, intellectual, cultural, social characters.

In short, racism can be defined as a system of beliefs, representations, norms, speeches, behaviors, practices, political and social acts, aimed at devaluing, stigmatizing, discriminating, inferiorising, subordinating, segregating, persecuting categories of people who have been othered, and this up to massacre and extermination.

I write "othered" because in reality, the "color" or the actual cultural and/or social distance from the us are quite irrelevant in the choice of victims, as the tragic history of anti-Semitism proves. The stigma applied to certain categories of people can disregard any somatic, phenotypic, cultural difference or related to the origin, being the result of a process of social, symbolic, political construction.

  

Fascist group Vox's racist propaganda in Spain against  unaccompanied foreign minors, supposed to get eleven times more from the State than a poor indigenous retiree ("your grandmother")

Suffice it to say that in the variable geometry of Italian racism in recent decades, the role of scapegoats and targets of alarmist campaigns has been attributed, from time to time and among others, to Albanian, "Slavic", Romanian migrants, of whom, until proven otherwise, one cannot say that they are "Negroes", or that they are aliens to European history and culture.

Racism becomes systemic when it is directly or indirectly encouraged or legitimized by institutions, national and supranational, as well as by the media. When "spontaneous" intolerance towards certain groups or minorities, widespread in society, is endorsed and legitimized by institutions, including European ones, and by State apparatuses, as well as by propaganda and part of the information system, it is then that the vicious circle of racism is triggered.

The racism-system is most often supported by symbolic, communicative, linguistic devices, which are able to act on the social, producing and reproducing discrimination and inequality. Above all, it is reproduced, corroborated, legitimized by a complex of laws, norms, procedures and routine practices: what is called institutional racism, which ends up generating not only discrimination, but also stratification of inequalities in terms of access to social, material and symbolic resources (status, citizenship, work, social services, education, knowledge, information...).

In this regard, exemplary is the case of institutional delegitimization, if not criminalization, not only of NGOs that practice search and rescue at sea, but also of anyone, even if individually, making gestures of solidarity towards refugees and migrants. All this not to mention the contribution of Italian institutions to the massacre of refugees and migrants, one of the pillars of which is the Memorandum of Understanding between Libya and Italy, which thus legitimizes not only the massacres in the Mediterranean, but also the horrors carried out by the so-called Libyan Coast Guard and those that are consumed in the “reception centers for migrants”, in reality authentic concentration camps.  

There is no doubt that such an example from above only encourages and legitimizes intolerance and racism "from below". To limit ourselves to Italy, we could mention the numerous episodes of barricades (real or symbolic) against the arrival of asylum seekers, but also the increasing number of so-called spontaneous riots in working-class neighborhoods against the allocation of housing to families of immigrant origin. It is well known: more than ever in times of crisis, but also when social claims and class conflict (as we used to say) no longer have language and forms in which to express themselves, it happens that the economic and social hardship and the sense of abandonment by the institutions feed resentment and the search for a scapegoat.

However, in these cases the formula "war between the poor" could not be more improper and misleading, which, only in appearance non-racist, ends up representing aggressors and aggressed as symmetrical victims; and to make poor people "at war with each other" the only or main actors of the racist scene. In reality, to socialize, manipulate, divert the collective resentment, instigating and sometimes even leading such revolts, are often militants of extreme right-wing groups. In this case, the vicious circle of racism does nothing but produce, if not the strengthening, at any rate the legitimation, however implicit or involuntary it may be, of the neo-fascist right.

The ideological and narrative scheme that hinges on the phrase "war between the poor" is, after all, symmetrical or contiguous to the one that focuses on the key antitheses security/insecurity, decorum/decay. And speaking of the vicious circle of racism, it is not coincidental that such antitheses abound, in particular, in the text of Minniti's law of April 18, 2017, no. 48 ("Urgent provisions on city security").

After all, this law only translates and legitimizes the common perception for which migrants, refugees, Roma, homeless, marginals would be importers of degradation, insecurity, social disorder. Ultimately, it converts in social danger the style and practices of life, often imposed, of those who are considered "outside the norm".

In order to try to break or at least undermine the vicious circle of racism, it would be necessary to build a large anti-racist mass movement, to the level of such an arduous task. Currently we are far from such a perspective.