Snippets from the Italian Scene
Matters of Race
Back in the early 1970s an Italian friend of mine told me he didn't think much of the United States -- we were a bunch of racists who treated Blacks horribly, and that was something he couldn't accept. Being slow on the uptake, I didn't say much. Not that I'm much quicker now, but with the benefit of hindsight I would have shot back"It's easy for you to talk. Italy's a monoethnic society."And at the time this was true. Italy was inhabited by Italians, and unless you lived near the embassy of an African country or a NATO base with American troops, you didn't see non-whites. My wife, who grew up in Florence, still remembers the first time she saw a Black person in the flesh quite clearly: during a trip to London in 1979.
Fast Forward 20 years: If an Italian town or city has a tourist attraction you're certain to see African (primarily Black though also some North African) street peddlers with all sorts of stuff, from fake Prada bags to souvenir statuettes; walk down the street in a residential neighborhood in any major city and chances are at least one peddler (generally Black) will approach you with socks or lighters or whatever; go to the beach and there's a steady stream of peddlers, primarily African though also Oriental, trudging from umbrella to umbrella with everything from towels to pocketbooks (some fake and some no-name). Walk by a construction site and the people doing the really heavy work will probably be either Black, Arab or Albanian; walk into the back of a restaurant in a city and the people scrubbing the pots or cutting the vegetables will likely be African or Albanian (they're beginning to move from assistant chef to chef too); drive out in the country and the people bent over in the fields will likely be dark skinned.
Italy has become multiethnic with a rush. Though tolerance is the general rule, the process is not painless: Many of the superstars now playing on Italian professional soccer teams are African, and in some stadiums, when an African player of the opposing team touches the ball a torrent of whistles and boos rises up from the stands (this doesn't happen as much with dark-skinned South Americans). "If this happened in Holland the Ref would stop the game," said one of the players of the Dutch team that recently defeated Rome's Lazio in Champion's League. The Italian soccer league has decreed, after considerable prodding, that a team whose fans put up racist banners in the stadium will forfeit the game if they don't come down, but the need for the provision and the reluctance with which it was adopted both speak volumes. As do the howls of protest that greeted the election of Demi Mendez, whose skin is warm mahogany in color (one parent Dominican, the other Italian) as Miss Italy. Her having passport and parent wasn't sufficient -- "She's not representative of Italy," said a whole slew of talk show personalities. One could have argued that she should have competed in the Dominican Republic, since she moved to Italy to compete in the contest, but if the State recognizes her as Italian that's what she is.
Nor are things in the personal sphere necessarily easier: a man was recently arrested for beating up, dousing with turpentine, and setting alight a North African who had fallen for his 28-year-old daughter -- she wasn't interested, but he still spent the evenings at the door of the apartment complex hoping to see her. "What else was I supposed to do?"the father asked the police who arrested him, and though it's quite possible he would have done the same to a white man, one does wonder. And, in the meantime, there's a growing association of the words immigrant and criminal, which is being fanned by some of the political parties (notably Bossi's Lega Nord). While it is true that there are bad apples in the barrel -- much of the prostitution is now run by Albanians who kidnap/buy girls in Eastern Europe, and many of the pushers are North African -- it's also true that these people are at least tolerated by if not used by the Italian crime syndicate. As for the rest of the barrel, the immigrants do things that the Italians frankly do not want to do any more: The dirty, dangerous, or low-paying jobs, the jobs that require night shifts, the jobs one has to be willing to relocate to take advantage of. The days when trainloads of Southerners moved North with cardboard suitcases to take factory jobs (and were treated by the northerners much like immigrants from elsewhere are treated today) are over, and those from afar are taking their place.
Of course skin color isn't all, nor are the tensions one way: A Somali woman who lives in Milan was recently arrested for beating her older daughter, who had no intention of marrying the husband selected for her back in Somalia, and for locking up both her daughters to keep them from going out with their "Christian" school friends during vacation (the younger one managed to escape while the woman was at work).
The friendships of the kids are cause for hope: As so often happens, children who grow up in an integrated, multicultural environment (the schools are doing a good job with this) are much more tolerant than their parents. No matter what Italians may think about it, Italy is now multiracial and there's no turning back. We're all going to have to work at learning to get along.
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