5/22/2023 0 Comments Black out in italy![]() In the narrative about the ongoing protests in the US, once again our media has failed to acknowledge Italians of colour who are fighting for local racial justice. In Italy, systemic racism isn’t rooted in segregation, as it is in the US, but in colonialism and, more recently, immigration. The main difference between Europe and the US is that for a long time Europeans practiced their racism abroad. If anything, I believe that racism is more complex on this side of the Atlantic. The definition of systemic racism is the same in the US as it is anywhere else: it’s the normalisation and legitimisation of a range of behaviours (cultural, historical, institutional) that routinely advantage white people and produce negative outcomes for people of colour. I don’t necessarily agree with that comment. However, they were quick to say that there wasn’t anything like American racism in Italy – according to some journalists, “ Race in America is more complex.” But suddenly all of the Italian media was reporting on America’s endemic racism and police brutality and the killings of African-Americans. I never thought the news would have made it across the Atlantic with such force. While I was working on the book, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. It wasn’t an easy task people don’t want to even say the word racism in Italy, let alone talk about it. “Are you up to write it?” I dedicated the last year to researching, reading and focusing on race and racism (my book comes out next year). I’ve experienced it myself in rooms full of Italian intellectuals where I was the only person of colour when I was asked to comment on the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter terror attacks on a national television channel, but they had no make-up that matched my skin when I went home one night and switched on the TV, and realised there weren’t any characters that looked like me.Ī couple of days after my article came out, my current book editor emailed me. ![]() It wasn’t just a racism you could see, it was a racism you could feel. I think it was the first article ever to describe flat-out racism in Italian society: it wasn’t just people dropping the n-word, assaulting people or saying that migrants should die in the Mediterranean. This article was mainly about my own experience of living, working and talking in rooms full of white people.Īs a journalist, I had been writing about Italians of immigrant parents (so-called ‘second generations’), identity and migration for some time by then, but that piece was a turning point for me. ![]() Here in Italy, non-white people are either Black or coloured. We don’t have an Italian word for brown – well, we do, it’s marrone, but you don’t say a person is marrone. Exactly a year ago, I wrote an article entitled ‘The only Black person in the room’.
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