What to do about racism?
Does it make sense to speak about race in a multicultural and globalised world? Apparently it does, because racism is still present in our society and affects people’s lives every day. Manifestations of racism can be obvious, or they can be more insidious and not easily identified at first.
The main problem when we speak about racism is that there is no single definition of the term itself. But behind all racial discrimination stands the ideology that human beings belong to difference races, ranked as ‘naturally’ superior or inferior to others. Such an ideology was the backbone of Nazi thinking, and we all know that it means nothing good.
Since the Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948, racism can be considered universally condemned, at least in theory, but not even the most developed country in the world is immune from racism in practice. In my home country of Italy, last December two Senegalese street vendors were shot in Florence by a man with extreme rightwing sympathies, who wounded three others before killing himself. The year before, Toyosi Shitta-bey, 15-year-old Nigerian boy brought up in Dublin, was killed while returning home from an outing with friends. In Ireland, as in many others European countries, the majority of racist abuse is verbal, but such violent hate crimes have occurred many times in the last decade.
Racist manifestations can be violent or not, but they continue to exist, despite the fact that racism is supposed to be condemned all over the world by the letter of the law. It is abundantly clear that racism must be eliminated. But how? Is there any solution to prevent racist acts from occurring? Probably not, for unfortunately it is human nature to discriminate, whether intentionally or not, against what is perceived as different, no matter how many laws are against it.
Nevertheless, if legislation was more incisive and adopted more rigorous punishments for racist abuse, people would think twice before shouting insults, or worse, killing other human beings because of the colour of their skin. What should change is not really the law, but people’s mentality. Of course this would take a long time and it cannot happen without raising awareness about this issue.
The main thing to bear in mind is that races do not really exist, because every man and every woman in the world belongs to the same one: the human race. If everyone realised that, maybe then racism would disappear – even if that seems a kind of utopia right now.
Noemi Lavorato is an intern with Metro Éireann.
