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")
