Chronicles of ordinary racism 2011 - Cronache di ordinario razzismo

Introduction
The global economic crisis is producing devastating effects on society; social and
economic disparity between and within nations grows greater every day. More and
more frequently, civil and human rights are predicated on a financial standing, the
decline of the welfare system leaves wide swathes of the population without essential
social services while politicians are unable to provide satisfactory responses. At such a
time, many may consider racism to be an issue of secondary importance.
There are, in fact, many reasons why we must not write off the tales of everyday racism
as minor events or, at the most, as acts and forms of behaviour stemming from the
imbalance that the crisis of the neo‐liberist system creates within nation states. Indeed,
it is precisely this ongoing crisis that, by acting as an unequivocal reminder of the
world’s interconnectedness, should lead us to finally acknowledge that it is impossible
to fight inequality if we remain attached to ‘national’ ideas of rights and citizenship.
However, the policies that target immigrants, non‐EU citizens and the Roma
community are moving, sadly, in the opposite direction. In 2008 and 2009, institutional
racism found its most explicit outlet in the so‐called ‘safety package’. In the two
following years, it gained an ever firmer hold over the decision‐making process of local
administrators, who combined creative decrees in the field of public order and safety
with rulings aimed at limiting social rights for foreign citizens. These are dangerous
decisions that could easily be used in the future to justify inequitable treatment among
Italians themselves.
The breaching of fundamental human rights in Identification and Deportation Centres,
the treatment reserved for Tunisian immigrants in the prison‐vessels set up in order to
“free” Lampedusa, the fact that the press and unaccredited associations are denied
admission to Cie and Cara centres, should alert us to the dangerous regression that the
guarantee of civil rights is falling pray to.
The instances of exploitation in the work place experienced by many immigrants who
work in our fields, in the construction industry and even in the family and domestic
care sector (which has the appearance of a deceptively sheltered environment), reveal a
vast portion of our country’s economy in which a significant percentage of employees
have short term or no contracts. The ease with which a verbal disagreement between a
native and a foreign citizen can spiral out of control tells of social system that is
fractured, divided and selfishly wrapped up in personal interests.
In these pages we deal with all this and other issues, in the knowledge that the
inequalities experienced by migrants and Roma form part of a process of erosion of
rights (or, should we say, of the cultural values from which they stem) that affects us
all.
Between 15 July and 31 August 2009 we studied 861 cases of racism reported by the
media or on the internet; we offer a selection of them, inevitably incomplete, in the
inventory at the end of this volume. It is a long chain of verbal and physical violence,
damaged property and discrimination carried out by individuals, groups and political
or institutional leaders. On the basis of this first work of collection and analysis, we
have singled out some cases that appeared to particularly stand out for the way in
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