‘The only Black person in the room’: The truth about racism in Italy

hat makes a person of colour Italian is a question that is approached in two different ways: the racist approach and the anti-racist approach taken by progressives. The unconscious racism often denounced by the latter is – take this opinion with a grain of salt – a minor evil. What is unconscious racism? It’s a question like the one I’m often asked: “Do you ever think of going back to Sri Lanka?”

I am, like many children of immigrants in Italy, a person with a pretty stable life. Sure, I don’t know how my life will be ten years from now, so I can’t completely exclude the possibility that one day I might migrate elsewhere. But it is reasonable to presume that I will always stay in the West. Still, this is a frequent question, one of a series of other questions that Italians of colour are often asked.

“How come you speak Italian so well?” “How do you say ‘dad’ in your language?” “Are your parents cleaners?” The kind of sentences that range from badly expressed compliments to stereotypes and provocations. We perceive them all as micro-aggressions.

But I’m sure the dishwasher who was beaten up after work “because he’s a nigger” doesn’t care that your neighbour told you that you speak Italian very well. The problem for the graduate who can’t teach because he doesn’t have citizenship, despite living in Genoa since he was two years old, is not being asked if he is Italian; the problem is because he is not yet Italian.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/truth-racism-italy-book/

 

Stop Blaming the Russian Soul

In an interesting recent article in the Times Literary Supplement, the Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and poet Oksana Zabuzhko took Western readers to task for not recognizing Russia’s barbarism. Too many people, Zabuzhko argued, believe that the great Russian writers, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, expressed humanistic European values. They have not looked deeply enough into the savage Russian soul.

Zabuzhko believes that Russian literature represents “an ancient culture in which people only breathe under water and have a banal hatred for those who have lungs instead of gills.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be understood only through the prism of “Dostoevskyism,” defined as “an explosion of pure, distilled evil and long suppressed hatred and envy.”

This type of cultural analysis has a rather old-fashioned ring. It used to be common to interpret the Third Reich as a sickness of the German soul: “from Luther to Hitler,” the thesis went, implying that Luther’s anti-Semitism sowed the seeds of Nazism some 350 years before Hitler was born. But few people nowadays take such a crude view of German history.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russian-culture-does-not-explain-ukraine-war-by-ian-buruma-2022-06

 

The Contradictions of Compassion

Almost 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees have fled to Poland since the Russian invasion began, and more than 350,000 have entered Hungary. But in 2015, when then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed 1.1 million asylum seekers – about 40% of whom were Syrian – to enter Germany, Poland and Hungary firmly closed their borders to people escaping the carnage in the Middle East.

These divergent reactions have made some people, mostly “progressives,” very angry. Surely, they argue, using tear gas and water cannons to hold back Arab asylum seekers at the Hungarian border but welcoming Ukrainians with open arms amounts to racial bias, or even “white supremacy.”

All human lives are equally precious. From a moral point of view, there is no difference between a traumatized young man from Aleppo and a desperate mother from Kharkiv. But, for practical and psychological reasons, countries distinguish between refugees on the basis of culture, religion, language, and politics. This is especially true of countries with relatively homogeneous populations, like Poland today.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/different-european-attitudes-to-ukrainian-and-middle-eastern-refugees-by-ian-buruma-2022-04

 

Racism in Europe

THE Poles and Ukrainians wanted to cover up the matter. When war broke out in Ukraine in February, millions of Ukrainians fled to the Polish border. Also in the country were some 100,000 foreign students, the majority of whom were African and Indian. These students had gathered the fees for their courses of study after sacrificing a lot, with their parents selling property, jewellery, taking loans, etc. They were caught in the panic. Many lived in hostels in the cities of Sumy, Kherson and Kyiv. All of them were terrified and did not know how to get home. In Ukraine, they stuck together and travelled in groups, afraid of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that attack non-white foreigners. How to leave safely? Speaking to Al Jazeera, one Nigerian student exclaimed: “I don’t even know right now [how I feel] because I cannot think. I am literally shaking.”For most, it was a terrible journey to the border. According to one media interview, at least one group of students who had managed to get a car were stopped by Ukrainian soldiers and made to get out. Ukrainian women and children were put in the car instead. The students were left to walk to the Polish border. There they joined the thousands of others who were trying to leave Ukraine and get to safety. While a presidential decree forbade Ukrainian men to leave the country, male foreign students were still trying to make it to the border with female students.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1681568

 

Debating Holocaust vs Colonialism

On one side, Achille Mbembe, Dirk Moses, and some others argue that distinguishing the Holocaust from other violent crimes in human history is Eurocentric, and neglects the horror of colonialist crimes. On the other side, Saul Friedlander, Juergen Habermas, and others insist on the unique character of the Holocaust. I think that both sides are, in some sense, right and wrong. One cannot help but repeat here Stalin’s answer to the question of which deviation is worse, leftist or rightist: “They are both worse.”

It is unquestionably true that the wider public in the developed West is not fully aware of the breathtaking horrors of colonialism and its by-products. Just remember the horror of the two Opium Wars fought by the British Empire (and others) against China. Statistics show that, until 1820, China was the strongest economy in the world. From the late 18th century, the British were exporting enormous amounts of opium into China, turning millions of people there into addicts and causing great damage. The Chinese emperor tried to prevent this, prohibiting the import of opium, and the British (together with other Western forces) intervened militarily. The result was catastrophic: soon after, China’s economy shrank by half. But what should interest us is the legitimization of this brutal military intervention; free trade is the basis of civilization, and thus the Chinese prohibition of importing opium was a barbarian threat to civilization… It’s hard to refrain from imagining a similar act today: Mexico and Colombia acting to defend their drug cartels and declaring war on the US for behaving in a non-civilized way by preventing free opium trade.

The colonial list of horrors is long… very long: Belgian Congo, regular famines with millions of dead in British India, the devastation in both Americas. The cruel irony is that, with European modernization, slavery reemerged at the very moment when, in our ideology, the central topic was freedom – the fight against the slavery of women, of workers, of citizens in authoritarian regimes. Slavery was discovered everywhere, in all metaphorical senses, but ignored where it existed in its literal sense.

Colonialism brings out what can only be designated as the catastrophe of modernity: the often terrifying impact of modernization on pre-modern communal life. Recall, for example, the fate of Attawapiskat, a remote Aboriginal community in northern Ontario, which drew the attention of the media in early 2016. A report in the Guardian exemplified the way the Canadian Aboriginal people remain a broken nation, unable to find the minimal stability of a life pattern.

http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2021/10/debating-holocaust-vs-colonialism.html

 

Kneeling on George Floyd’s neck sent a message to everyone who saw it

Evidence presented this week in Derek Chauvin’s trial on charges that he murdered George Floyd showed a national audience how the former Minneapolis police officer saw his alleged victim: as a dangerous, “sizable” Black man who had to be controlled, subdued and forced to submit. The message Chauvin sent with his actions wasn’t intended for Floyd alone, and it’s one Black Americans have heard for centuries.

Chauvin didn’t see Floyd as a citizen suspected of a minor, nonviolent crime or as the gentle “mama’s boy” Floyd’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross, described. To Chauvin and the other officers, Floyd was guilty from the start — guilty of inhabiting an imposing Black male body, a circumstance that has always been a punishable offense in this country. 

As witness Charles McMillian tried to tell Floyd when the officers first put their hands on him: “You can’t win.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kneeling-on-george-floyds-neck-sent-a-message-to-everyone-who-saw-it/2021/04/01/caa65666-9315-11eb-9668-89be11273c09_story.html

 

U.K. and France Need to Reckon With Race

A new division has opened up within what used to be called the “West.” Divesting white supremacism of political legitimacy, the United States has begun a fresh reckoning with its past of slavery and begun to meaningfully acknowledge its demographic diversity.

At the same time, the ruling classes of both France and Britain are loudly recoiling from a similar self-examination, seeking to postpone their own urgently needed reconfigurations of national identity.

Long-simmering anger over racial injustice exploded last year in the U.S. after the murder of George Floyd. While conservatives quickly focused on the violence that accompanied a minority of Black Lives Matter protests, few tried to deny outright the widespread feeling that enough was enough. 

British leaders looked upon the U.S. protests and similar demonstrations on their own shores with distaste and unease. “Dreadful,” the British Home Secretary Priti Patel termed them last week. The Conservative Party, implicated in a calamitous death toll from the pandemic, has taken to culture warfare, rallying public opinion against those bringing down statues of slaveholders in Britain.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-18/u-k-and-france-are-diverging-from-u-s-on-race

 

Trump’s racism may be blatant but the culture he defends encompasses far more than racial division

President Trump is making plain the degree to which the country remains divided by the American Civil War. His threat to veto the $718bn Defence Bill if it renames military bases called after Confederate generals harks back to 1861. His stand highlights the bizarre way that the US military has named its biggest bases, like Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Hood in Texas, after Confederate generals like Braxton Bragg and John Hood who fought a war to destroy the US.

Critics suggest derisively that this tradition of naming military installations after defeated enemies should mean that future bases will include at least one named after Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, and another after AbuBakr al-Baghdadi,the leader of Isis, both killed by US soldiers.

The fury generated by the dispute over the renaming of the bases and the removal of the statues of Confederate commanders underlines the contemporary relevance of the outcome of the civil war. A tweet by Trump gives a clue as to why this should be the case a century and a half after the Confederate surrender. “It was sad,” Trump wrote, “to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-civil-war-racism-black-rights-guns-abortion-evangelical-a9599936.html

 

Let’s Stop Putting the Worst Americans on a Pedestal

So many monuments to racism, slavery, and colonialism have been toppled, removed, or slated for removal in the wake of the George Floyd protests that Wikipedia’s army of volunteer editors is keeping a running tally: Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and a slew of other Confederate generals and notable white supremacists and segregationists; Frank Rizzo, the notoriously racist mayor (“Vote white”) of Philadelphia; even symbolic figures like the Pioneer and Pioneer Mother, formerly of the University of Oregon in Eugene. As I write, word comes that the embarrassing statue of Theodore Roosevelt mounted on a horse and trailed by a Native American man and a black man on foot will be removed from the main entrance of New York’s Museum of Natural History.

Yesterday’s heroes are history’s villains. That nice Pope Francis thought so well of Father Junípero Serra that he canonized him in 2015, despite Native Americans’ objections to Serra’s harsh and coercive missionary work. He’s now the patron saint of California. But protesters in San Francisco and Los Angeles recently tore down his statue. As for Christopher Columbus—​19 statues and counting—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo defended his presence in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. (It “has come to represent and signify appreciation for the Italian American contribution to New York,” he said at a press conference.) But I wouldn’t bet on Chris keeping his pedestal much longer. Maybe Italian Americans could choose another compatriot, someone who brought joy to the world and didn’t massacre and enslave vast numbers of people. Like Verdi or Puccini.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/statues-slavery-confederate/

 

What black America means to Europe

In September 1963, in Llansteffan, Wales, a stained-glass artist named John Petts was listening to the radio when he heard the news that four black girls had been murdered in a bombing while at Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

The news moved Petts, who was white and British, deeply. “Naturally, as a father, I was horrified by the death of the children,” said Petts, in a recording archived by London’s Imperial War Museum. “As a craftsman in a meticulous craft, I was horrified by the smashing of all those [stained-glass] windows. And I thought to myself, my word, what can we do about this?”

Petts decided to employ his skills as an artist in an act of solidarity. “An idea doesn’t exist unless you do something about it,” he said. “Thought has no real living meaning unless it’s followed by action of some kind.”

With the help of the editor of Wales’s leading newspaper, the Western Mail, he launched an appeal for funds to replace the Alabama church’s stained-glass window. “I’m going to ask no one to give more than half a crown,” he told Petts. “We don’t want some rich man as a gesture paying for the whole window. We want it to be given by the people of Wales.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/11/what-black-america-means-to-europe-protests-racism-george-floyd