The existence of human races is a purely abstract conception from a poor interpretation of small physical differences among people, perceived by our senses, and erroneously associated with "psychological" characteristics and interpreted on the basis of secular prejudices. These abstract subdivisions, based on the idea that humans form biologically and distinctly differing inherited groups, are also inventions that have always been used to arbitrarily classify men and women in "better" and "worse". This nonsensical discrimination has thus been adopted against the latter (always the weakest), considering them as scapegoats and the root of all evil in times of crisis.
It is instead, first of all, a network of connected persons. It is true that human beings aggregate into groups of individuals, local communities, ethnic groups, nations, civilizations; but this does not happen because they have the same genes but because they share stories of life, ideals and religions, customs and behaviours, arts and lifestyles, or cultures. Aggregations are never made stable by identical DNAs. On the contrary, they are subject to profound historical changes: they are formed, they are transformed, they are mixed, they are fragmented and dissolved with a speed that is incompatible with the times required by processes of genetic selection.
The analysis of human DNA has demonstrated that the genetic variability in our species, as well as that of our "cousins" chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, is mainly represented by differences between people of the same population, while the differences between populations and different continents are small. The genes of two individuals of the same population are on average only slightly more similar to each other than those of people living in different continents. Precisely because of these small differences between populations, even racist scientists have never been able to define how many races our species is made up of. In fact, they have produced estimates which range from two to two hundred races.
including their false image of a warlike people, victorious, "pure" and "noble", which dwelt in most of Europe, India and Central Asia, and which spoke an ancient language that formed the basis the Indo-European languages. From a historical point of view, it is extremely difficult to identify the Aryans as a people, while the notion of the Indo-European linguistic family derives from a conventional classification. On the contrary, modern archaeological data indicate that Europe was populated in the Paleolithic by a population of African descent from which we all descend, to which other immigrants from the Near East overlapped in the Neolithic. The origin of current Italians dates back to the same African and Middle Eastern immigrants who remain the foundations of modern Europe. It was only due to the subordination of fascist Italy towards Nazi Germany that our people came to be identified as "Aryans".
The Romans themselves built their empire by incorporating people of different origins and giving them the status of Roman cives. The phenomena of cultural and social intermingling, which characterized the entire history of the Italian peninsula, and which involved not only the local populations but also Greeks, Phoenicians, Jews, Africans, Hispanics, the so-called "barbarians", has led to the hybrid that today we call Italian culture. Even though dispersed around the world and separated in an Italy made up of small States, Italians have continued for centuries to identify themselves with this complex and varied culture, which is both humanistic and scientifi
Italy as a nation was united only in 1860 and even now several million Italian people, who in the past emigrated and who live in foreign ghettos and cities, still consider themselves as such. Part of our greatest wealth lies in the fact we have mixed many peoples and have exchanged cultures with them through physical and cultural "crossing". Stating that " the "nobility" of our "Nation" derives from a non-existent “purity of the blood” means reducing our vast and millenary heritage of cultures to the homogeneity of a supposed biological component and to present-day Italians.
Empires have become empires thanks to the coexistence of different peoples and cultures, but they have then suddenly collapsed when they became fragmented. This is what happened and happens in nations with civil wars and when, in order to stem the crisis, minorities were used as scapegoats. Racism is suicidal because it affects not only individuals of different peoples, but also the racists themselves. The tendency towards the indiscriminate hatred which fuels racism spreads contagiously to produce an ever narrowing definition of "normality". It therefore affects those who are "out of line", the "crazy", the "poor in spirit", gays and lesbians, poets, artists, alternative writers, all those who are not homologous to standard human stereotypes, but who, in reality, change humanity continuously helping us all evolve and survive. Any living system remains alive, in fact, only if it is able to change and we human beings change less and less through our genes and more and more through the inventions of our "benevolently disordered" brains.
For the defenders of the Italian race, Africa appears as a fearful threat and the Mediterranean as the sea that both separates and unites. This is why racists claim that there is no "common Mediterranean race". In order to distance the Italian people from potential ”contamination”, racist scientists erect barriers against "Semites" and "Camites". Science has clarified that there is no clear genetic distinction between the Mediterraneans of Europe (Western) on the one hand and the Orientals and Africans on the other. From a palaeontological and genetic point of view, it has been categorically demonstrated that all the peoples of the earth originated in Africa and so all can be included in one “race”.
Jews, like all migrant peoples (nobody is a migrant by free choice but many are by necessity) are scattered around the world and have been part of different cultures while maintaining their identity as a people and religion. This is the case, for example, with the Armenians and Italian immigrants abroad, and the same is now happening with the migrants of today: Africans, Filipinos, Chinese, Arabs of different countries, peoples of Eastern Europe or South America, etc. All these peoples have had the painful need to migrate but, also with a touch of luck in some cases, they have been able to enrich themselves and their hosts by uniting the two cultures without cancelling, when possible, neither one nor the other.
This ideology is therefore completely blind to the fact that many societies recognize that marrying abroad, even with their own enemies, is positive because they know that alliances are much more valuable than barriers. Moreover, in humans, the physical characteristics alter more due to living conditions than to selection and the psychological characteristics of individuals and peoples are not written in their genes. Cultural "mixing" is the fundamental concept behind the constitution of the European Union. A racist Italy that is fragmented into separate "ethnic groups" like the former Yugoslavia would be devastated and devastating now and for the future. The consequences of racism are indeed epochal: they mean a loss of culture and plasticity, they mean murder and suicide, they mean fragmentation and implosion which cannot be controlled because they originate from the indiscriminate rejection of anyone we consider "different from us".
Enrico Alleva, Docente di Etologia, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Roma
Guido Barbujani, Docente di Genetica di popolazioni, Università Ferrara
Marcello Buiatti, Docente di Genetica, Università di Firenze
Laura dalla Ragione, Psichiatra e psicoterapeuta, Perugia
Elena Gagliasso, Docente di Filosofia e Scienze del vivente, Università La Sapienza, Roma
Rita Levi Montalcini, Neurobiologa, Premio Nobel per la Medicina
Massimo Livi Bacci, Docente di demografia, Università di Firenze
Alberto Piazza, Docente di Genetica Umana, Università di Torino
Agostino Pirella, Psichiatra, co-fondatore di Psichiatria democratica, Torino
Francesco Remotti, Docente di Antropologia culturale, Università di Torino
Filippo Tempia, Docente di Fisiologia, Università di Torino
Flavia Zucco, Dirigente di Ricerca, Presidente Associazione Donne e Scienza, Istituto di Medicina molecolare, CNR , Roma