Prejudice and Racism
The Council of Europe—an organization that is, in truth, little known—aims to promote human rights and combat racism. Recently, it recommended that Italy conduct a study on racial profiling by law enforcement: police officers, it claims, stop people based on the color of their skin or their presumed national or religious identity, “thus violating European values.” In practice, this is an accusation of racial prejudice against immigrants. Both the government and the heads of the police, along with other national institutions, reacted strongly, rejecting the accusation as false and completely unfounded.
We have no idea whether such an accusation has any basis or not,
but it seems to us that such an approach by law enforcement would actually be
logical and appropriate.
If there is a case of femicide, obviously the first people to be investigated
are those who had a romantic relationship with the victim—who else could it be?
If there are bribes involved, the assumption is that powerful
people—politicians, administrators—received them. Who would offer a bribe to a
pauper?
If there's a case of pickpocketing, obviously the suspicion falls on someone
poor who struggles to earn enough. Who would ever suspect a member of parliament
or even just a bank employee?
Naturally, investigations begin by focusing on the environments
and individuals deemed most likely to have committed that particular type of
crime. It is well known that immigrants make up the poorest and most
disadvantaged segment of the population: therefore, the probability of them
committing petty crimes is higher.
Can we say that the police operate based on prejudice? Certainly—but what must
be recognized is that all human knowledge begins with prejudice.
Enlightenment culture always condemned prejudice a priori, but in
reality, as Hans-Georg Gadamer (a representative of modern hermeneutics) rightly
reveals, in our search for truth we cannot help but start from a
pre-understanding (which we can call prejudice), and by comparing it with
reality, we can either confirm or refute it.
It is certainly not possible for me to approach any issue without already
starting from a cultural context with all its prejudices. For example, I hold
the prejudice that medical treatments cure illnesses and that magical
incantations are useless. How could I not start from this prejudice? How
could I verify every time that medicines are effective and magical arts are not?
On the other hand, in the past people held the opposite prejudice—they believed
more in magic than in medicine.
Similarly, another example: in the past, there was the prejudice
that women could not manage their own property. According to the laws and
customs of the time, the dowry belonged to the wife but was administered by the
husband.
Today we hold the opposite prejudice: we believe that men and women have the
same ability to manage financial matters. We must also consider that if a
prejudice was regarded as valid for a long time (millennia, in the example
above), it likely had some foundation.
We must acknowledge that reality changes: in the past, women were confined to
caring for the household and family, and they were not taught financial
management or anything outside their designated domestic role. At that time, it
indeed seemed true that they were incapable of managing finances.
What is negative about prejudice is its rigidity—when it persists
even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, in the face of objective
reality.
If we moved from incantations to medicine, it's because the development of
medical knowledge led us to observe the effectiveness of the former and the
uselessness of the latter.
If we now believe that women can also manage finances, it's because we no longer
assign them solely to family care, but instead provide them with the same
education as men.
What would be truly negative is to treat our preconceptions as
absolute truths, as the so-called "woke" culture does.
Our minds must remain open—even to considering, for example, that a certain kind
of magic might be more effective than medicine, or that women might be less
capable of managing finances.
Above all, we must consider that when it comes to human beings, preconceptions
have only statistical, not absolute, value.
If I say that men are taller than women, I am referring only to average
height—yet it’s fairly common for a woman to be taller than a man.
Likewise, men may be on average more skilled at managing finances than women,
but that doesn’t mean all men are better than all women.
Let us return to the racial prejudice from which we began.
Racism is a theory according to which an individual’s mental disposition depends
on genetic inheritance: a person is intelligent or not, good or evil, a thief or
honest, because of what they inherit from their parents.
This prejudice, we can now say, has almost disappeared, while the opposite
prejudice now predominates: that everything depends on education and the culture
in which we are born or raised.
We believe that a Congolese infant adopted in Italy will become culturally
Italian—and vice versa.
This does not mean that cultures do not exist.
It is clear that in the Islamic world, our idea of gender equality struggles to
take hold, and perhaps never will.
But we don’t think this is a genetic issue: after all, their conception of
gender relations is one that we ourselves largely shared a few centuries ago.
This does not mean, however, that a Muslim woman cannot be just as
emancipated—perhaps even more so—than an American woman: these are statistical
facts.
Believing that petty crimes like pickpocketing are mostly
committed by the poorest segments of the population is a prejudice generally
accepted by everyone.
It would be racism, however, to believe that non-EU foreigners are thieves
because of genetic reasons rather than due to socioeconomic problems.
Likewise, it would be harmful to cling to such a prejudice even when it proves
unfounded: one cannot consider a person in need—whether Italian or immigrant—a
thief without concrete evidence.