1.1 Preamble
On July 7, 2016, The Guardian reported:
A Nigerian refugee thought to have fled the terrorist group Boko Haram with his wife has died after being attacked by an “ultra” football fan in a small Italian town.
Emmanuel Chidi Namdi, 36, died of injuries he sustained when a local man, who had reportedly been racially abusing Namdi’s wife, attacked him in the town of Fermo, in central Italy.
Amedeo Mancini, 39, allegedly referred to the 24-year-old woman as a “monkey” and attacked Namdi when he attempted to defend her, according to Italian media reports. Namdi fell into a coma and was pronounced dead on Wednesday.1
Less than a year later, on May 12, 2017, Chidi Namdi’s killer was released from house arrest. Despite his blatant racism and racist violence against Emmanuel and his wife, Amedeo Mancini was allowed to plea bargain for a lesser sentence and deemed rightfully capable of thriving in Italian society. Arguably, Mancini was released due to larger societal consent to racism. And yet, there was no process of reflection on the meaning of the court’s ruling, the deep-rootedness of racism in Italian culture, and the epistemic value of his offences. In the same days,
Cécile Kyenge, a black, Italian member of the European parliament and ex-minister for integration, has welcomed a Milan court’s decision ordering a white supremacist MEP to pay her 50,000 euro ($56,000) for making repeated slurs against her.
Kyenge , Italy’s first black minister, tweeted that the judges’ decision on Thursday showed that “racism is a crime, not just a political opinion.”
“Racial hatred can never be an instrument of political struggle,” she wrote in another message posted to the social media platform.
In a 2013 radio interview, Mario Borghezio, a member of the xenophobic Northern League, made racist remarks about Kyenge’s inclusion in the government of then-Prime Minister Enrico Letta.
“This is a bonga bonga government, they want to change birthright citizenship laws and Kyenge wants to impose her tribal traditions from the Congo,” he told Radio 24.
Borghezio also said Kyenge —a qualified ophthalmologist—“took away a job from an Italian doctor.” He also said, amongst other things, that “Africans are different. They belong to an ethnicity much different from ours. They haven’t produced great genes.”2
Two acts of violence—the deadly beating of Emmanuel Chidi Namdi and the racial slurs directed at Cécile Kyenge—mirror and amplify a constellation of everyday racist practices. Far from being restricted to members of populist and institutional far-right movements and parties, these involve the population at large and take place in schools, on public transports, in the workplace, on streets and in shops, as well as in public services, hospitals, and detention centres. What connects these acts and their corresponding forms of racism, linking events that are either ordinary (daily life) or extraordinary (i.e., involving a former member of the government or a murder), is the ease with which racist words can be spoken, insults can be uttered, and cultural connivance/complicity or political consent to institutional racism can be reinforced.
In both cases, the culprits are male and self-proclaimed white and superior. Their violence stems from the belief that they, and Italian society as a whole, have been offended by the visible presence of a black refugee couple in their city or by an affluent black woman representing Italianness. The bodily presence of Emmanuel and his wife Chinyery in “spaces from which they have been historically or conceptually excluded” is unbearable—a belief expressed without restraint, to the point of delivering death to the “abusers,” the “space invaders” who disrupt the homogeneity of the colour of the nation.3
The ordinary visibility of a body (as in the case of Chidi Namdi , who was out for a night stroll with his wife) is performed through a signification of this same body as dangerous, which is what Mancini’s lawyer maintained: that Chidi Namdi was physically violent, even “affiliated with the Nigerian mafia in Italy”4; that his reaction to Mancini’s offensive words was one of violence; that Mancini was defending himself against a “naturally violent” black man. Like in the 1992 case of Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles police officers, in the analysis provided by Judith Butler:
the visual representation of the black male body being beaten on the street by the policemen and their batons was taken up by that racist interpretative framework to construe King as the agent of violence, one whose agency is phantasmatically implied as the narrative precedent and antecedent to the frames that are shown. Watching King , the white paranoic forms a sequence of narrative intelligibility that consolidates the racist figure of the black man: “he had threatened them, and now he is being justifiably restrained.” “If they cease hitting him, he will release his violence, and now is being justifiably restrained.” King’s palm turned away from his body, held above his own head, is read not as self-protection but as the incipient moments of a physical threat.5
No footage of Chidi Namdi’s beating is available. Our visual image of the event is shaped by newspaper stories, photos, and comments provided by TV news programmes, where eyewitness accounts were edited in such a way that made him appear as the villain—the one who had a stick in his hand (with no trace of his DNA on it, by the way) and hit Mancini in the head.
The burden of hypervisibility then is not only that the hypervisible black body becomes the site of surveillance and scrutiny but also that it is “supersaturated with meaning” […], brought into being through what Yancy […] calls a “white racist narrative.” This narrative, as Yancy contends, constructs an “essence [blackness] that precedes [black African migrants’] existence” […], and they are forced “into a normative space, a historically structured and structuring space through which they are seen and judged guilty a priori.”6
The extraordinary visibility of Kyenge —a woman from a racialised minority who “take[s] up ‘privileged’ positions which have not been ‘reserved’ for [her], for which [she is] not, in short, the somatic norm”7—is performed through a signification that, like in the case of Chidi Namdi , reactivates all the stereotypes in colonial and postcolonial hegemonic discourses on “ethnic/racial diversity” that sustain the “unbearability” of a “monkey representing the Italian people and nation.”8 Opting for visual denial of “ethnic/racial diversity,” television and the press contribute to its invisibilisation—as is the case with the exploited African fruit-pickers in Rosarno and East European construction workers in earthquake-hit L’Aquila. The Italian media do not usually portray life in migrant camps or the farms, nor the daily dealings of borders and other spaces of ordinary life. And even when non-white women and men come into sight, television reporters have no interest in hearing their voices and would sooner chase after the only white person on the scene.
Their invisibilisation does not conflict with the hypervisibilisation of Chidi Namdi /Kyenge : they are distinct aspects of the same discourse, in which invisibilisation/hypervisibilisation of the racialised body and concealment of racism synchronically reinforce white privilege while hiding its mechanisms of operation and reproduction. Race is made invisible when it silently reproduces racialised power relations and is revealed when it is seen as taking “space.” In both cases, more often than not racism is concealed, denied, belittled in its cultural purport and social and political consequences. In the case of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi addressing the then-US President Obama as “handsome and tanned,” racism is turned into a joke, while blackness is despised, thus reinforcing the white normativity that structures the corridors of power.9 Paradoxically, racism is believed to be caused not by power relations but by the existence of racialised subjects. Moreover, rather than in exploitation and marginality, the root cause of subalternity is believed to lie in the behaviour of subalterns. Likewise, mocking language directed at racialised subjects is thought to be prompted by their “diversity,” rather than by the lack of decolonisation and deracialisation of the Italian imaginary and imagined community. This is partly because the myth that the Italian language knows neither racism nor sexism nor homophobia is still unchallenged and unquestioned. Racism is still believed to be caused by the increasing number of migrants (i.e., black bodies) who threaten our imagined white community. Within this frame, the apparently inoffensive mocking of the “alien” presence in a supposedly homogeneous (racialised) space is obviously not a sign of subversion: it re-establishes, instead, the order of things underlying racial hierarchies, heteropatriarchy, and white privilege.
