In Italy as elsewhere, the public attitude and debate on racism and the rights of migrants, refugees, minorities are mostly characterized by the lack of the sense of development, processuality and of long duration.

This is the rhetoric of the first time. In the face of serious or extreme racism acts, what prevails in the collective consciousness as well as in media, institutional and political actors, and even among some left-wing intellectuals is the tendency to remove the premonitory signs and antecedents and to underestimate or ignore the propaganda, the policies, the legislative measures that have contributed to create a climate conducive to the most brutal racism.

This has also been the case over the last decade, which has been characterized by peaks of racist violence. Annamaria Rivera reconstructs the role played by extreme right-wing movements in the process of normalization of racism accelerated in the last decade, exemplifies the forms of anti-Jewish, anti-islamism and anti-gypsyism that have been repeated over time and highlights how institutional racism and “tanathopolitics” have characterized the work of the various governments that have followed over time.