A letter heartbreaking, written almost 3 years ago, in which the pain for the racism lived daily on his skin. Are Cherry, 20, of Ethiopian descent, committed suicide on Friday at his home in Nocera Inferiore, in the province of Salerno. He had moved into Italy at the age of 7, adopted by a family from the Campania city where he lived and had played in the youth academies of Inter, Milan e Benevento. A professional career abandoned in 2016 and a life marked by “looks disgusted for the color of mine skin“. He writes it in his own hand, in a long post on Facebook in 2019, in which he tells the discrimination that he had to face. “Seid’s extreme gesture does not derive from episodes of racism”, however, the parents of the young talent wanted to clarify in a statement to Telenuova, firmly excluding any correlation.
Her words – “Wherever I go, wherever I am, I feel on my shoulders like a boulder the weight of the looks skeptics, prejudiced, disgusted and afraid of people ”, he wrote Are three years ago, highlighting how much those looks reminded him that the color of his skin instilled – for example – the doubt that he was a thief in stores or a pickpocket on public transport. In the letter Are he then claimed not to be “an immigrant”, given that his story in Italy it starts with the adoption alone 7 years. Then, he continued, “I remember that all of me they loved. Wherever I was, wherever I went, everyone was addressing me with joy, respect and curiosity. Now it seems that everything has turned upside down ”. A overturning determined by explicit acts of racism: “I was able to find a work that I had to leave because too many people, kind elderly, they refused to do to serve from me and, as if I didn’t already feel a discomfort, they also pointed to me as responsible because many Young people Italians (whites) could not find work ”.
Gestures of discrimination that had led him to an inner turn, to the shame “To be nero, like I’m afraid of being mistaken for a immigrant, as if I had to prove to people, that they didn’t know me, that I was like them, that I was Italian, white ”. Fear they had brought Are to make “bad jokes about blacks and immigrants (…) As if to underline that I was not one of them. But it was fear. The fear of the hatred I saw in people’s eyes towards immigrants ”. At the end of his post, Are he clarified that what he felt and lived on his skin was nothing compared to “the ocean of suffering who is experiencing who prefer to die instead of leading an existence in misery and hell. Those people who risk their lives, and many have already lost it, just to smell, to taste the flavor of what we simply call ‘Vita‘”.
