<nettime> Text on Italy and racism by Marco Deseriis

[Molly Hankwitz <mollyhankwitz@gmail.com>]

**posted w permission of author**

Someone save us from the banality of the Italian media on the racial issue
in the USA, always presented as a problem " them." As if in Italy
institutional racism does not exist and as if the United States was not
founded on European colonization and the deportation of millions of human
beings from Africa accomplished by us Europeans. As if Christopher Columbus
did not enslave, maimed and initiate the Taino genocide of Hispaniola,
giving the incipit to the great extermination of Native Americans that
would be followed in the following decades and centuries at the hands of
other Europeans.

No, what is happening in the streets and squares of the United States
doesn't concern us. We are not concerned with the removal of Frank Rizzo's
statue, former chief of police and former mayor of racist and homophobic
Philadelphia, from the stairs of city hall. Just as we are not concerned
with the history of the Italian-American community, branded in the
nineteenth century by the Lombrosian theories of the race that southern
Italians wanted -- especially Sicilians and Calabrian -- as genetically
predisposed to crime, discriminated against anti-miscegenation laws
preventing the mix of races, and persecuted by lynching (famous New Orleans
1891) and prejudices of all kinds. She had to fight for almost a century,
the Italian-American community to conquer a place in the sun, i.e. the
right to be fully recognized as white. But the conquest of white passed
through direct, often violent and fierce clashes, precisely with those
African Americans with whom Southern Italians had tried to fraternize.

But of course the great matrix of inclusion / exclusion based on skin color
exists also from us, on home soil. Not only because of our colonial past
that we never dealt with, but also for the existence of a social status
that is by definition color-blind. There is therefore also a left-wing way
to remain indifferent to racism, to say " what happens in Amercia does not
concern me." In this version of the self-absolutory narrative we Italians
and Europeans would be " lucky " to have a public education system that
does not discriminates (as if there are no huge differences in the
education system between North and South, urban centres and suburbs,
countryside and cities), public health (also regionalised and with huge
disparities in treatment, as highlighted by the Covid), and above all
access to the job market. Have you ever seen an Italian newspaper or
television really give the word and dignity to those who break their backs
in the fields to collect tomatoes and vegetables for 3 euros per hour,
working in semi-slave conditions? And why should they see that non-native
journalists are practically nonexistent?

No, Italy, luckily it's not America. It is not: it is enough to look at the
composition of the police forces, the teaching bodies of school and
universities, municipal, regional and ministerial employees to realize that
minorities do not actually have access to public employment. And how could
they see that there is no legal path to citizenship that is not based on
blood bond? Why would a degree in public law born in the Middle East,
Africa or Asia aspire to a place in the Italian public administration? Why
on earth would a chair in history of Middle East or in Arabic language and
literature go to a woman or man born in the Middle East? Never be that we
could understand who I am / who we are through a point of view that is not
already given.

And so we continue to comfort ourselves with the stories of a Saviano that
tells us the "despair of these riots" (when they are manifestations of an
unheard force and power) or with the usual trite analysis and retrite
analysis on social inequality between rich neighborhoods and neighborhoods
poor, on Trump's inadequate, about American s' unexpected passion for
weapons, fires and looting that make America look like a separate world.
And there's no doubt that this caledoiscope of fire images, of great
passions and conflicts is hypnotizing and fascinating -- especially when
it's not to look in the mirror.

—-
Marco Deseriis is an Assistant Professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore,
Florence Italy and a “friend” on Facebook.
-- 
molly hankwitz



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