Zadie Smith: "In the US, the police kill poor people, both black and white, quite regularly."

He rose to fame in 2000 with

, a multi-award-winning novel received as the cornerstone of a new style of writing.

Since then

is considered one of the most brilliant British writers, with a work in which she alternates novels and essays.

Confinement caught him in New York, where for years he has taught creative writing.

His new book is the fruit of those days when the United States was rocked by the pandemic, as well as by protests over the murder of George Floyd.

It is entitled

(Salamandra) and consists of six short but precious essays in which he reflects on the United States, the profession of writing, the role of artists,

.

He says that writing is a way of keeping what happens under control.

Did it work for you during confinement?

Writing certainly helped me organize my days and cope with time.

During the confinement there was the compulsion to do something, whatever.

Doesn't writing really seem much different to you than gardening, bread and biscuits, or sewing?

He even claims that those activities can be more creative.

I really don't see much of a difference between those activities and writing.

I have lived quite a bit in America, where they place a lot of emphasis on writing and creativity as magical forces.

And, at the same time, they are very contemptuous with tasks that seem very creative to me, such as domestic tasks, crafts ...

I do not make great distinctions, anyone who does something for me belongs to the community of those who do.

Define writing as a form of resistance.

Against what?

Resistance against meaninglessness;

writing is a way of insisting on making sense of things.

The world is a place without much meaning, it is there and we are the ones who try to make sense of it.

and therefore it is everything.

In his book, he emphasizes that the coronavirus is not a democratic virus at all ... It is not a very original statement, at this point it is perfectly clear that it is not democratic.

But the distinction this virus makes is not so much racial as it is economic.

It distinguishes between the people who can stay at home and those who cannot, it distinguishes between the different types of work ... Can this pandemic make Americans aware of the enormous social differences that still exist in that country?

You are wrong to think that they do not see these differences, of course they do, they see them daily.

it is not a problem of lack of awareness.

In fact, in 'Contemplaciones' he argues that in most New York schools there is still racial segregation ... It is that it is so: the desegregation of schools has never happened.

Foreigners sometimes have a distorted image of the United States, but Americans know very well what their schools are like, what their neighborhoods are like.

Alert against a new epidemic: that of contempt, that of racism.

Are there many white Americans infected with this virus?

I would not put it in those fatalistic or existential terms, especially since in the United States too there are many white Americans who suffer total contempt: poor whites.

that has different ways of expressing itself, and one of them is racial.

There was enormous contempt when a policeman pinned George Floyd to the ground and stabbed his knee in the neck until he was suffocated to death, right?

Yes. But it is something systemic, in the United States the police kill poor people quite regularly, both black and white.

It is about money and power, about people deprived of their citizen rights.

Have the protests after Floyd's death been compounded by the desperation this pandemic has brought to many of the poorest communities?

I was not there during the protests, but I have seen that the majority of the protesters were young and that they were completely interracial protests.

I think this generation of activists has understood that this is not a question of a community, but an issue that affects the entire United States and that has to do with the power of the police,

and the contempt for its citizens. citizens.

Perhaps those protests are the vaccine against the virus of contempt?

It is not about making metaphors.

The only thing that can change things is a change in legislation, and in order to have that change in legislation, you have to vote for a party that is committed to passing these types of laws.

The language of poetry is useless when it comes to coping with systemic changes.

It is no mystery:

But, first of all, we need to change the government.

And that is not very complicated: if the same people who have come out to protest are going to vote, there may be.

But in his book he emphasizes that contempt is not a question of Democrats or Republicans, that in both parties there are those who despise those who are in a more disadvantaged situation ... I think it is a mistake to think about these issues from a personal point of view , as if they were sins, as if being anti-racist means that you have achieved purity of the soul.

I'm not interested in people's individual morals, the least bit.

What interests me is that there are structures that allow people to behave less badly than they do.

What they secretly feel inside their hearts seems irrelevant to me.

But if there were schools in which the children of the two communities studied together, we would have an equitable structure.

If there were a health system that served both communities equitably, it would be important.

He says he doesn't like the term "hate crimes."

In the end, everything recreates the hierarchies.

If you asked me, for example, what I think of cultural appropriation, what I would be saying is that I am always in the position of those from whom things are stolen, while

, that I cannot appropriate nothing of the whites, which is impossible.

Those conversations, even if well-meaning, always create the same hierarchies over and over again.

Something similar happens with the term hate crime: I do not like the idea that only certain people in particular can be the subject of hatred and other people are impervious to hatred and therefore can only be active subjects of those crimes.

That constantly establishes that I am not in the center, but on the sidelines.

And I don't see myself like that.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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