Oltre la cultural blindness: migrazioni, estraneità ostile, fascismo esotico

Abstract

Cultural blindness can become a problem when it inhibits reflection on the connotations of violence of some migrants. In these cases, in order to preserve the purity of the dogma 'diversity is richness', it ends up concealing the cases where diversity manifests itself as a problem, as violence, as degradation, as 'hostile foreignness'. Although this is a complex operation and only practicable with an individuating and a posteriori approach, understanding the difference between migrants who are motivated by a real desire to integrate into host societies and those who act as 'settlers' in them, with variously predatory intentions, is increasingly necessary. Only in this way, by practising a distinction that allows us to break out of the political polarisation between those who generalise migrants only as a resource and those who generalise them only as a threat, will it be possible to counter the processes of banlieueisation of Europe, the contagion of anti-Western hatred, and the spread of an exotic fascism that goes from migrants to residents, fomenting the latter's retreat towards xenophobic right-wingers.