Is Europe just as racist as America?

Murder of Alika Ogorchukwu, is it an act of racism?

Black, brown and migrant bodies are in as much danger in Europe as they are in America.

On July 29, a white Italian man beat to death Alika Ogorchukwu, a disabled Nigerian street vendor from Civitanova Marche in Italy, as bystanders looked on and merely recorded the homicide.

On finding out about Ogorchukwu’s demise, I contemplated whether to watch footage of the murder and inevitably run the risk of suffering the anguish that George Floyd’s similarly traumatic demise inflicted on my soul in May 2020.

In the end, to truly bear witness to the immense suffering he had been subjected to in his final moments, to experience a small measure of the pain that he felt, I watched it. The footage left me teary, sick and trembling with fear. Ogorchukwu was like me, after all: a middle-aged African migrant who was trying to build a better future for himself and his family.

According to Italian police, the frenzied attack occurred after Ogorchukwu persistently attempted to sell merchandise to Filippo Claudio Giuseppe Ferlazzo and his girlfriend.

However, the Association Center Services for Migrants in the Marche Region said Ogorchukwu was attacked not for assuming a hard sale approach, but for allegedly addressing Ferlazzo’s girlfriend as “beautiful” (and touching her arm).

Listening to the discussions over the alleged motivation behind the senseless, racist murder, I couldn’t help but think about the “unresolved” 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the United States.

The crude and degrading caricature of a “black brute”, a violent beast that is “crazed with lust” for white women, was critical to 19th and 20th century American “negrophobic” discourse and white supremacist ideologies used to justify racism, and the lynching of Black men. White supremacists have long used made-up “attacks” on white women’s dignities to commit violence against Black men and perpetrate white terror.

Ogorchukwu’s recent murder demonstrates that the very public, incessant and systematically imposed dehumanisation and criminalisation of Black people that led to Emmett Till’s gruesome murder in the US more than half a century ago – and the murder of countless other African Americans in modern-day America – is also claiming lives miles away in Italy.

Indeed, Ogorchukwu, unfortunately, is not the first, and sadly will likely not be the last, among countless African men and women shot, injured and killed in racially motivated attacks in Italy.