The assassination of Alika Ogorchukwu in Civitanova Marche is a nightmare that becomes reality. Perfect racism is the power of a white man who, without any hesitation, brutally ends the life of a Black man, with motor disabilities, in the open public space. In front of dozens of other white eyes, he deprives him of the possibility of standing, appropriating his crutch, then hitting him with his and finally taking advantage with his bare hands of the power that structural racism has given him. In the words of African American geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, it is the power to expose Black lives to premature death.
Behind the narrative that describes him in the throes of the famous “raptus” of murderous violence, an erotic, testosteronic pleasure is hidden instead: the foundation of modern white masculinity. In fact, a few minutes later, the secular specter of the slave era returns to legitimize what happened: the myth of the sexually violent Black. No evidence is needed in front of this accusation, since the time of the Lynch law in the United States of the late nineteenth century, from which the term lynching derives, the public massacre of Black men does not need proof, the myth is enough to claim self-defense.
So Filippo Ferlazzo, as soon as he was arrested, claims to have acted because Ogorchukwu would have molested “his” woman.
Alika Ogorchukwu’s killer is a white supremacist, racist and murderer but that doesn’t make him a bad apple in any way. No person in this country can tell themselves that they are not responsible for the atrocity that happened. Institutions and civil society, all of them, have allowed this to happen.
Ogorchukwu’s killer is the product of the society he lives in, of the power that society has given him. Civitanova Marche, administered by Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, is located in the province of Macerata, another city led by the League, where Luca Traini, a former party militant, left home on February 3, 2018, shooting at all the Black people he met and hitting six. A few kilometers further north, in Fermo, in the province of Ancona, Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi was killed on 6 July 2016. The killer, Amedeo Mancini, who was wearing a CasaPound t-shirt, hit him to death with a bar.
The murder of Alika Ogorchukwu is nothing exceptional in a country where more than 40 racially motivated murders have been committed in the last forty years, not to mention the survivors of supremacist attacks, beatings in prisons, detention centers for repatriation (cpr) or to places such as the Levante barracks in Piacenza. Or even the survivors of inhuman exploitation in the production chains, as in the case of people segregated and tied up in the premises of the Grafica Veneta company, the slave laborers and humiliated in the tomato plantations of southern Italy, the underpaid and subjected non-Italian domestic workers to blackmail of all kinds.
The racist depictions in school books, the texts celebrating colonial invasions, a million sons and daughters of immigrants deprived of citizenship because they do not have pure Italian blood in their veins are no exception.
The murder of Alika Ogorchukwu has nothing exceptional, it is white normality.
And this normality is shown not in Ferlazzo’s violence, but in the dozens of people who watch motionless at the scene, like spectators of a film, especially if they look at it through the camera of their smartphone.
Of course, those images will be fundamental material for the criminal trial against the murderer, but the possibility of tolerating that scene live without feeling part of what happens is the quintessence of the racial device. White never acts alone on the racist society stage. Whether he is physically present, or even just symbolically alive, it is an immense white audience that assists in allowing racism – to allow Ferlazzo – to act.
To use the words of Grada Kilomba in Memories of the plantation. Episodes of daily racism (Capovolte 2021), what happened in Civitanova Marche is not a melee between two people, but a “triangular constellation” with the “white consent” of the audience that attends: it is really a social complicity – the certainty that no one would be intervened – to have allowed Ferlazzo to act.
There is no real contrast between those who act explicitly forms of racism and those who declare they are “not racist (but…)”, because those who do not act, as this tragically demonstrates, actually allows the racial system to perpetrate itself. As the feminist activist Black Angela Davis argues, it is not enough to declare oneself non-racist, it is necessary to actively act against racism, to desert the privilege of passive complicity.
A distressing 2013 episode of the TV series Black Mirror foreshadowed what actually happened. In the series, a Black woman continually relives her lynching inside a dystopian amusement park of executions, the White bear justice park, where visitors can watch and film her torture with her cell phone. The day after the murder of Alika Ogorchukwu, the whole of Italy looks at the images live.
The shocking element of those videos is not the tragic similarity between the last breaths of Alika Ogorchukwu and those of George Floyd, the African American killed by a policeman in Minneapolis. But the fact that around those who filmed the scene there are crowds of people in concentric circles who stop to look at other people who have stood still to watch.
Racialized people have long been aware of this nightmare world, invisible only to those who have the privilege of whiteness.
For every person murdered by this structurally oppressive society, we racialized people and descendants of colonialism and slavery relive a trauma, secular and present, as we take on the powerlessness and weight of a tragedy.
For every murdered person, our serenity is again questioned, because Alika Ogorchukwu is our father like Younes El Boussettahoui our brother and Willy Monteiro Duarte the brother that no one tried to save. This means being daughters, sisters and mothers of immigrants, and also for this reason, as feminists, we ask our feminists allies to always denounce the exploitation of their bodies and male violence against subordinate masculinities, such as racialized ones. Because the matrix of male violence is inherently white.
In the name of Alika Ogorchukwu, who died of white normality on 29 July 2022 in Italy, we invite all mayors and mayors of Italy to declare city mourning for the day of her funeral. With the spirit of those who really need to change the world, not for fashion but for survival.