The 5 interconnected things I’ve learnt about equality from living in the UK

1. Very often, equality is about what you can see: skin colour, gender, or economic status. But the truth is that there are many other hidden factors that can determine how easily you’ll get ahead in life – things you can’t see and can’t fully understand. How much our parents believed in us, how much love we were given, how much support we received from our friends. That is why we should reflect more deeply when we see someone for whom success seemed a foregone conclusion end up failing, and vice versa.

2. There is always an invisible balance. Some of us believe we were born into less favourable circumstances than others. As mentioned earlier, this judgement is based on what is visible. The truth is that many of us are born with both resources and challenges. We are more inclined to see the resources available to others than the challenges life has set for them. Yet a balance does exist, and in many cases it exists for a very specific reason. In some instances, those resources would be of no use to them if there weren’t challenges on the other side of the scales.

3. Your circumstances are by no means an excuse. I won’t make obvious references to famous films like The Pursuit of Happiness. But it’s true. I am the daughter and granddaughter of two working-class men, for whom success in life was by no means a given. Two people who managed to make their way in life, to discover their talent and to put it to good use in the fields they were most passionate about. Thanks to them, I was born into a family with good financial means, though not without my own personal challenges to overcome. Of course, being born into an economically disadvantaged family can make things more difficult in many cases. But as I’ve already said, no one who is born facing challenges in life is born without the resources to overcome them.

4. Discrimination says more about the person doing the discriminating than it does about you. It lies at the heart of psychoanalytic thought: we see the world as we are. Of course, there is violence, war, discrimination and injustice. But we can choose to see the beauty. We can choose to observe the silent trees that grow, rather than that single tree that falls and makes a noise. We can choose to believe that evil has nothing to do with us, and does not affect us.

5. Where there is more wealth, there is more inequality. I have spent my life so far in two countries: Italy and England. We all agree that England is by far a richer country than Italy. Yet I have found that in Italy there is greater equality, less class struggle and more integration. It’s as if the social ladder is broken, but it’s broken for everyone.

The blogger

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)