Musa Balde's death is the result of racist policies and laws based on the dehumanization of others

Musa Balde was 23 years old and born in Guinea:on the night of Saturday 22 May he took his own life in the Repatriation Center (CPR) in Turin, where he had been locked up in medical isolation for some time.Last May 9, in Ventimiglia, he was attacked by three men.They beat him with sticks, kicks and punches outside a shopping centre, accusing him of an attempted theft of a mobile phone.

Musa had been taken to the Bordighera hospital due to the consequences of the beating which had caused him injuries and facial trauma.But Musa was also, or perhaps above all, an undocumented migrant.An expulsion order was pending against him.And by a strange mechanism this status erased his condition as a victim.Once released from the hospital, Balde was decided to be imprisoned - because this is what it is about - by the CPR of Turin, and the boy didn't make it.

Repatriation detention centers are detention facilities where irregular foreign citizens are held waiting to be identified and expelled. This is the latest evolution of a system that began in 1998 with the Turco-Napolitano law, which over time has undergone changes proportionately to the failures of its policies and the length of time its "guests" have been detained.Initially the CPT (Centre of Temporary Retention, as it was called at the time) was supposed to be a transit place where migrants could be held for a maximum of 30 days, but the duration increased over time, even reaching the six months foreseen by the decrees. Salvini's security of 2018.What has not changed is their true function which has actually strengthened over the years:"profit" on detained people and broaden the distinction between those who are considered human beings deserving of rights and those who are a simple object, a package to be moved from one part of the country to another to accrue profits for increasingly longer periods of time.These are places where individuals who have not committed any crime, guilty only of having violated the administrative provision of possession of a residence permit, are deprived of personal freedom, writes Open Migration.As already ascertained by various associations, these places are often the center of violations of human rights, known for poor if not non-existent hygienic conditions and the mistreatment of their residents.The lack of spaces for socializing and for the shared consumption of meals in some of them adds to the precarious situation in which migrants find themselves.But the great absence is assistance in psychological and health terms which leaves these people in a vortex of psychophysical discomfort that leads to exasperation.

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CPR deaths...Musa is not the only one.

On January 5, 2018 it was the turn of a Tunisian migrant 30 years old (yes, this is the only name found about him in our media), a guest of the Lampedusa hotspot who took his own life outside the structure in the Imbriacola district.

Alongside these suicides, several other deaths have accumulated in detention centers over the years.

On January 8, 2020, he dies Vakhtang Enukidze in the Gradisca d'Isonzo facility in the province of Gorizia.The 38-year-old Georgian, who was involved in a fight with other guests, was taken first to hospital, then to prison and finally back to the CPR, where his condition worsened.

“Vakhtang can't find the phone, he doesn't want to go back to his cell, he resists, he is beaten until he can't take it anymore.He is thrown into the cell, in his anger he takes an iron in his hand and hurts his stomach.Afterwards he is taken to the infirmary, no more than twenty minutes, he comes back and goes to sleep, perhaps due to the drugs.They say his body was red with bruises.

[...] The police arrive and ask one of his cellmates to collaborate by passing him an iron.When V.he sees him helping them, he gets angry and the two start arguing, then the police enter and eight of them surround V., start beating him bloody, throwing themselves on him forcefully until he hits his head against the wall.

They block him with their feet, neck and back, handcuff him and take him away.” 

It's there testimony collected by the group No Cpr and no frontiers – FVG.

Vahktang dies that night after being brought back to the center. Based on the autopsy the man died from pulmonary edema and not as a result of the trauma of the beating.

Then there are Fathi Manai, originally from Tunisia, found dead in his bed in 2008 due to pneumonia that was never treated; Faisal Hossai, originally from Bangladesh, died in the "Ospedaletto" of the detention center in 2019, both in Turin.And finally there is Prince Jerry, who, despite not living locked up in one of these centers, remained a victim of these policies.Jerry was a 25 year old Nigerian boy living in Italy as a refugee.Two years ago he decided to take his own life in Tortora, after having been denied the renewal of his residence permit, the only thing that could have allowed him to practice his passion, chemistry, for which he had already obtained a degree in his country of origin.

State deaths.Deaths due to migratory policies and racist laws that make propaganda their strong point.Victims of institutional disinterest and social indifference told with the same amazement with which one would talk about the fall of an asteroid on Earth, but who are part of a very specific project that is nothing surprising or unexpected.

We are not talking about exceptions, but we are talking about a system;a system made possible by the continuous dehumanization of its subjects.

The immigrant in the political-media narrative loses humanity, becomes depersonalized and becomes a "thing", an "entity", but above all "other".

A other which represents a community that must oppose itself to the children of the State and the values ​​of the Republic, in order to best outline an enemy that for this reason he is undeserving of having the same rights as us.

Let's think about the narrative used when talking about crimes committed by immigrants or people of foreign origin.The subject is never one, but their entire ethnicity, placed even before names.

How to forget theepisode of the boy stopped while cooking a cat in front of a station?

Within a few hours the boy became a means of propaganda for the right, slammed in the media as the emblem of all blacks and "African culture", without stopping to reflect on the social or psychological hardships that could have led that person to commit that gesture.

It is a systematic mechanism.

When we hear news from abroad about terrorist attacks committed by people of Arab origin they become a politicized symbol of how the threat of "Islamic fundamentalism" has grown to such an extent that even Europe is no longer safe.On the contrary, neither theterrorist attack of Macerata by Luca Traini, nor the violence of the Years of Lead were enough (rightly) to define Italians as a "race" that bases its political expression on terrorism.

Forced accountability and stereotypes that arise from individuals who represent a statistical exception in their community drive the white narrative of the dangerous other. 

The color black is always plural.It's collective.The act of a person belonging to an ethnic minority stains us all.Black actions are transferable and contagious.Blackness is never individual.The actions of the small percentage of Muslim extremists are somehow tattooed on every single person who practices the Islamic religion, anyone from the Middle East, and even people not associated with the religion.

The white Italian, however, exists only in its singular form.He does not have to navigate a world where the color of his skin predetermines his employment, his education, his relationships with others, his propensity for crime, or even his likelihood of suffering from mental health problems.

We have gradually accepted this system over the years and have strengthened it, some with their own actions - helping to build a meritocratic hierarchy of inclusion - some passively with their own silence.And silence is understood here not only as the act of being silent, but also as an act of silencing and putting one's memory to sleep.

Because that's what it's about.The bodies of Musa, Fathi, Jerry and the many, too many others serve us for our daily indignation, for the media spectacularization of their pain, for the paternalistic narration of their condition and shortly after we forget about them and move on to talking about another, until another body comes knocking on the doors of our conscience to remind us that people still die of all this.

Preview image via "The Mole and the Clock"