‘Colour-evasiveness’ and racism without race: the disablement of asylum-seeking children at the edge of fortress Europe

Abstract

This article explores discriminatory discourses articulated by Italian professionals operating in educational, health and social services for refugees in Rome, in relation to the educational and social inclusion of unaccompanied asylum-seeking and refugee children. It locates such narratives within the historical ‘concealment and invisibilisation of race and racism’ that have characterised Italy particularly since the end of the Second World War, while showing how they legitimate contemporary processes of disablement and over-representation of forced migrant children in the category of Special Educational Needs. A theoretical framework influenced by Dis/ability Critical Race Studies, Italian postcolonial studies, and Judith Butler’s notions of subjectivation and performative politics is used to discuss how a ‘colour-evasive’ racial ideology has seeped into various institutions in Italian society, and importantly into education policies and practices.

Keywords:

• Differential Inclusion
• dis/ability critical race theory
• refugee children
• colour-evasiveness

Notes

1. Available at: http://africasacountry.com/2016/09/anti-racism-without-race-in-italy/. The short essay focuses specifically on the Italian context and does not engage a lot of recent international literature on race (see for example, Bonilla-Silva 2014).

2. Interdisciplinary Research Group on Race and Racisms (InteRGRace), has been conceived and established both as an academic research group and an independent cultural association to advance and foster knowledge on race-privileges, racisms and good practices against all intersecting discriminations and oppressions both in Italy and abroad. The academic research group (hosted at the University of Padua, Italy) intends to produce, exchange and promote at a domestic and international level the scholarly findings achieved through an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational approach to race and racisms (http://www.intergrace.it).

3. As a cultural hegemony, antifascism banned the use of the term ‘race’ within the colloquial and the scientific language, without a real process of investigation and deconstruction of race and figures of race characterising the idea of nation until then (Giuliani 2015).

4. Racism against Italian people living in the Southern parts of the country.

5. This term was particularly used in the post-war period in a derogatory way, often to highlight how the metissage in Italy was not only a public and moral issue, but also political and ideological (see Perilli 2015).

6. Slang term referring to the hypersexualisation of the black man.

7. Referring to the exclusion of mixed race children in East Africa, born from the abusive relations between Italian soldiers and the local population during the colonial empire, or to the exclusion of the Roma population in the Italian territory.

8. Referring to migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

9. The Territorial Commissions for Asylum, or Commissioni Territoriali per il Diritto all’Asilo, which was established regionally by the Italian government with the purpose of hearing the story of each migrant and evaluating the recognition of refugee status, or humanitarian or subsidiary protections.

10. See Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (2016).

11. Cornoldi C. e Colpo G. (1995), Nuove Prove di lettura MT per la Scuola media Inferiore, Firenze,OS e Cornoldi C. e Colpo G.(1998): Prove di Lettura MT per la Scuola Elementare -2, Firenze, OS. This material is in Italian, there are no versions translated into other languages.

12. Italian Middle School Diploma.