Being Italian: the peculiar journey of blackness

ABSTRACT

Generations of African and Black Italians are extending the boundaries of what it means to be Italian, in the face of denial, diversion, and an insistence on whiteness as the measure of inclusion, and humanity. Drawing on Allan Pred’s work on racist geographies of the everyday and taken-for-granted in Sweden, I advance the concepts of B/black spaces and relational places to approach to the study of identity, belonging, and place in Black Europe, with a focus on Italy. Black and African Italians from diverse origins and generations are asserting their belonging in Italy. Pred’s work on every day situated practices, power relations, taken-for-granted knowledge, and silences, is useful to contemporary scholarship in Black geographies, antiracist and decolonial scholarship. Pred’s holistic studies of modernity and the impacts of global political and economic transformations in lived experiences demonstrate the centrality of racism to national societies and cultures. His work is valuable to scholars of modern Western colonial systems of knowledge production and power, advancing insights and encouraging new directions based on abundant, ordinary yet silenced everyday realities and experiences. This paper expands on Pred’s work through an analysis of Blackness, place and belonging in Italy, offering an approach to the study of African Diaspora in Europe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I adopted the term, recognized Italian in my first book, An Alliance of Women: Immigration and Race in Italy, in order to describe the ‘white’ Italians, i.e., people seen and recognized as Italian, by contrast with people socially classified as outsiders to the Italian social order. For example, people who learned Italian in mission schools in Somalia and or Ethiopia and or who have lived and studied in Italian schools in Italy and who may have formal citizenship, are oftenn assumed to be Italian in a phone conversation, but rejected as ‘real Italian,’ not recognized in personal encounters. This absence of recognition of African Italians as Italian is pervasive, and damaging to all. The appearance of whiteness is increasingly taken-for-granted as a defining feature of Italian Being, in a country that reckons membership by Jus Sanguinis, or blood. This recurs, even though Italian immigrants in the United States were in the 19th century often characterized as black, and or as with what David Roediger describes as having an in-between status between white and black (see Roediger 2005; also see Guglielmo 2004). I also derived the moniker of recognized Italians from Frantz Fanon’s writing on recognition and anti-blackness in Black Skins, White Masks.

2 Torino held its first Black History Month programming in February 2022.

3 Presentation at Hamilton College, 7 October 2022, ‘Afrophobia: Racism toward Black Africans in Italy.'

4 Most of these actions have been supportive rather than wholly alliance based.

5 There is a tendency among scholars and some activists to argue that Italy is unlike other European countries and the United States, in that it is not really a nation where white identity has functioned to build unity across regional and local differences. Italians, it is frequently argued, are not racist, they are ‘ignorant' because provincial. And or, they are not anti-black, because they have had just as much hostility regarding Albanians, for example, as towards people of African origins. Another common argument is that Southern Italians are themselves brown skinned, thus prejudiice, if it exists, is internal and local. There is also a popular, taken-for-granted idea s that because Italians are highly localist, distinguishing themselves from each other by place, they are xenophobic and not anti-black or truly racist.

6 The notion of white innocence is addressed throughout James Baldwin’s writing. Innocence in the Italian context is often conflated with ‘ignorance,’ or the belief that Italians are not racist, but rather, ignorant. White innocence refers to white denial of racial assumptions, perceptions, and expressions. It also refers to the suppression of colonial histories , including the social construction of a system of social ranking on the basis of inheritable traits that has informed so much of modernn Western philosophy and science.

7 Racialization suggests a diminished personhood (see Charles Mills, and James Baldwin).

8 See also Denise Ferreira Da Silva and Charles Mills (Mills 1997, 1998; Ferreira da Silva 2007). These thinkers, together with Allan Pred, Donald Carter, France Winddance Twine and many Black and African Italian interlocutors helped with my abiding preoccupation with understanding anti-black structures, Black lived experiences, and identities (Carter 2010).

9 This is what Frantz Fanon described as being ‘overdetermined from without.' See Black Skins, White Masks.

10 For a compelling rendering of this argument in the U.S. context, see Heather McGee’s, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. 2021. New York: Random House.

11 Italy famously lost the battle of Adwa to Ethiopian forces in 1996.

12 The MSI, Movimento Sociale Italiano was what remained of the Mussolini’s fascist party after 1946. It was later rebranded as the Alleanza Nazionale (AN). It is now called the Fratelli d’Italia, and is a far-right political party. The Lega Nord is now called the Lega. In a coalition, the Lega, Fratelli d’Italia, and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia won the majority of votes in the September 2022 elections. They are now the leading vision in the Italian parliament, and Fratelli d’Italia’s Giorgia Meloni is Italy’s first woman Prime Minister.

13 See the Vice news film co-ordinated by Kwanza Dos Santos, ‘Black Lives Matter: A Global Reckoning Italy.'

14 There were of course exceptions to this pattern, for instance in the ‘travel' writing of Mary Kingsley, some missionaries, and anthropologists.

15 As Kossi Komla-Ebri has said, Africans are not ‘poor,' they are impoverished.

16 In spring 2022 the Italian debated a proposed law on citizenship named, ‘Ius Scholae’ that would give citizenship to people who have attended Italian schools for 5 consecutive years and who by most unbiased accounts and measures are culturally Italian. The Italian right proposed 728 amendments in order to kill this bill. Then the center-left government collapsed, and at the end of September 2022 far right candidate and coalition won national elections.