You might say that I exaggerate, but I can assure you that those words, enclosed in a white square, really impressed me. I still think about it. Not much because they were objectively beautiful<\/strong>, but because I could never imagine I would find them so close to the way you live and think.<\/p>\n The murder of George Floyd was just the latest in a string of bad news which left everybody (and left you) in shock. Without saying a word you went looking for information everywhere<\/strong>. The internet has no secrets for you, which is why within half an hour you recovered all the material on anything related to this murdered man and on who got stained with this homicide. Sat in front of me, you listed with pinpoint accuracy acronyms, news and information, giving me an account of your discoveries and stretching your lips in a wince every time you were forced to name Derek Chauvin.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope he will pay<\/strong> for what he\u2019s done<\/em>\u201d you murmured, right before staring at a point on the horizon. Now and then you turned your gaze to the left. You wanted to realize that your father was still a few steps away from you.<\/p>\n They are not many, luckily. On this you can be sure: for the most part, people are not racist. Most people really want to get to know you and get closer to you driven by the sincere desire to establish a contact. You belong – and I am telling you this with great joy – to a generation that is more open and inclined to the dialogue than the one in which I belong. You and your friends have a freer and more frank way of thinking<\/strong> than the one that characterized me and the people that I met in the past.<\/p>\n It is no coincidence that you were the first to know about my pansexuality and that I had relationships either with men and women. My coming out to the family took place on February 14th, 2020. You have known the truth about me at least one year before them. At first, I was a little afraid of your possible reaction, but as soon as I spilled the beans I realized that it was just a totally unfounded fear<\/strong>.<\/p>\n I shouldn\u2019t have felt uncomfortable with you. The way you see the world is way more open than the one of the people I met in my life. \u201cWe, born from 2000 onward, are thick-skinned! Nothing scares us!<\/strong><\/em>\u201d Instead, I still remain very frightened in front of certain events.<\/p>\n Sometimes, I would like to ask the God that I was taught to adore at catechism what fucking idea he had in mind when he decided to set up this shitty circus. Did you want to make fun of us<\/strong>, eternal Lord? Or perhaps you just wanted to see at what point, we stupid humans, could bring all this to?<\/p>\n You don\u2019t believe in God<\/strong>, you declared yourself as an atheist since you were fourteen, or maybe earlier. \u201cJesus Christ also says it in a Family Guy\u2019s episode: religions are bullshit!<\/em>\u201d You say it laughing, but deep down you can feel a touch of bitterness as for something that could have been but never was.\u00a0\u201cThey preach to us to love and accept everybody but then the Church is always the first that if it could, it would burn all the homosexuals!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Talking with you is an exercise in patience. You have some tough ideas<\/strong>, often in conflict with the common mind. However, they usually go in the right direction and I always feel happy to have heard them. It\u2019s not easy to come to terms with certain issues, it\u2019s not easy to face them calmly or lucidly. But at least you have to try, and you seem to have a lot to teach to us “grown-ups\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cTo avoid injustices we have to force ourselves to collaborate and be united. Alone we are not going anywhere. You don\u2019t just make up a protest once in a while and expect things to change. I am a black person every single day. If we want the world to get better we have to move our ass every day<\/strong>, we can\u2019t wait for another one to die!<\/em>\u201d You say it with a conviction that makes you shiver. Now and then I observe you and I ask myself if it\u2019s going to be you, perhaps, that will change the world with your friends. Then I call myself an idiot and think that you are pushing me to act in person. Fuck Nicki! You don\u2019t realize that he is talking directly to you, do you?!<\/p>\n \u201cYou should know better since you\u2019re gay: the world doesn\u2019t become good to you because the Blue Fairy comes to settle the matter. If you want to be accepted and assert your rights you gotta work hard and fight for yourself and your community! Same for everything you believe in! If we want the world to become a better place we have to wake up while we are still in time<\/strong>, otherwise, everything will go to hell!<\/em>\u201d Then you gave me a pat on my back that almost made me spill my lungs and with a big smile told me that whatever we need to do, you will always be ready to do it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe live only once and we are on this earth for a reason! Let\u2019s try to deserve the oxygen<\/strong> that -because of that asshole- George Floyd was deprived of!<\/em>\u201d When you said it your eyes turned up to the clouds. And then for several minutes, neither of us was able to speak anymore.<\/p>\n Nicole Zaramella Read also:<\/strong> Dear Filippo, There was a phrase among your Instagram stories that impressed me a lot. I don\u2019t recall if it was said by a singer or a stylist. What I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":27209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[565,533,566,569],"tags":[5798,5801,5799,5800,5796,5797,5509],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27921"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27921"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27945,"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27921\/revisions\/27945"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"uomo](\"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/uomo-nero-sguardo-dolce.jpeg\")
You are my brother. I had the luck to have you by my side for seventeen and a half years. I had the honour and privilege to see you grow up. To raise you. We are ten years apart – in some ways I have been a bit of a father and a mother for you. Now the roles have switched. You went from being the little one of the house to the giant who watches the world from the top of his almost 6 feet and a half, judging the existence with the serious and detached gaze of those who have already been through so much.\u00a0Well, to be honest with you, I wish you didn\u2019t see certain things<\/strong>. I could never imagine that such a young boy would come in contact with things that I – a thirty-year-old person – still struggle to understand and endure.<\/p>\n![\"occhio](\"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/occhio-donna-nera-pupilla.jpeg\")
\u201cMultiracial children:<\/em>\u201d this is how the kids, born from the so-called mixed-race couples, call themselves. A while ago, I appropriated that term that I once considered offensive. Now I proudly use it for myself, to describe who we are: me, you, and Mattia, our middle brother. Multiracial children, Italo-Ethiopians, Afro-descendants<\/strong>. Thousands and thousands of adjectives could be used to describe us, however, the substance is always the same and it won\u2019t change. It does not change and never will, just like some people\u2019s attitude and thoughts that will always point at us as junkyard dogs.<\/p>\n![\"bambino](\"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/bambino-nero-sguardo-arrabbiato.jpeg\")
This is not the world I wanted for you. This was not the humanity I would have expected. As I write this lines the world burns in anger<\/strong> and disappointment. Hundreds of people are drowning in a sea that will never satisfy its hunger of flesh. To be honest, sometimes I wish I could close my eyes, my ears, my mind and sleep until this is all gone.<\/p>\n![\"uomo](\"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/uomo-nero-gay-succhia.jpeg\")
You don\u2019t mince your words<\/strong> when you have to report injustices. Unlike me, you have always been confident: if you find something unfair you just say it. We also talked about it when we discussed racism when you agreed with me that it wasn\u2019t just a white people\u2019s issue: \u201cPrejudice and discrimination involve everybody. Just think about our paternal grandmother: she is Ethiopian, but still, she hates to death the Nigerians!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n![\"pugno](\"https:\/\/www.ilgrandecolibri.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/pugno-chiuso-nero-protesta.jpeg\")
Put your face in it. Act. Do something concrete. This is what you want me to do. You have never been a dreamer with your head in the clouds. Unlike me, you know well that things change little by little, piece by piece, run like the wind<\/strong> and go.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>translated by Tiznik
\n<\/strong>\u00a92020 Il Grande Colibr\u00ec
\nimages: elaborations from\u00a0Kon Karampelas<\/a> (CC0) \/ from\u00a0Rod Waddington<\/a> (CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>) \/ from\u00a0Mad African!<\/a> (CC BY-NC 2.0<\/a>) \/ from\u00a0pixnio<\/a> (CC0) \/ from\u00a0Tim Evanson<\/a> (CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>) \/ from\u00a0sstoppo<\/a> (CC0)<\/p>\n
\nSecond Generation Queer \u2013 A Mother, a Sister, a Daughter<\/a>
\nInterview to Mr. Leather: \u201cI Am Gay, Fetishist and Muslim\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"