RACISM YESTERDAY VS TODAY.

According to  the dictionary, the definition of racism is : “Ideology, which on the basis of an alleged superiority of one’s own race over others, rejects any mixture with other peoples, justifying discrimination and persecution against members of other races (nations, ethnic groups , social groups). Any attitude or manifestation of intolerance based on social prejudices. ” These  theories were born in the Middle Ages when the Christian sovereigns wanted to seize the assets of the Jewish bankers and developed in the 16th century, when Spain and Portugal employed African slaves in their colonies. But it was only in the nineteenth century that  they assumed a political importance when the myth of the Aryan race began to be spread by Hitler. Since then  a new term was coined, namely, xenophobia which means: hatred, aversion to foreigners . In the twentieth century  several people fought to defend black people‘s rights and social equality, as for example, Nelson Mandela the South African politician and activist, president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, who fought against apartheid  or  Martin Luther King, Protestant pastor, US politician and activist, leader of the civil rights movement for African Americans. Nowadays racism seems to be less common than in the previous years, but, unfortunately, there are other kinds of discrimination like homophobia,   aversion against gay people. A  prison police officer in Bari,for example, exasperated by homophobic teasing by colleagues, committed suicide some years ago, but a few days ago, precisely on March 12th, 2021, Europe became LGBTQI: the EU Parliament approved a resolution declaring the countries of the European Union a zone of freedom, which marks the firm denunciation of all forms of violence and discrimination, based on people’s sex or sexual orientation, a signal that things are changing but it is necessary  to know the past  to stop the episodes that can be bad examples for future generations