Racism in Italy is the discrimination of non-Italian ethnicities throughout Italy's history.
These ideas, albeit already common in relation to the internal affairs of the country, were first directed outwardly when the Kingdom of Italy began invading and colonizing various African countries with the purpose to build a colonial empire between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, although policies regarding "miscegenated" children (meticci) were unclear and confusing.Giulia Barrera, 'Patrilinearity, Race and Identity: The Upbringing of Italo-Eriteans during Italian Colonialism', in R. Ben-Ghiat, M. Fuller (eds.), Italian Colonialism, Palgrave Macmillan, (2005) 2016 . pp. 97-108, pp. 97f. Under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime (1922–1943) were enacted a set of antisemitic laws, as well as laws prohibiting internal migration under certain circumstances,Foot p.42. shortly after the consolidation of the political and military alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In the aftermath of Mussolini's fall from power, the Badoglio government suppressed the Racial Laws in the Kingdom of Italy. They remained enforced and were made more severe in the territories ruled by the Italian Social Republic (1943–1945) until the end of the Second World War.
The post-war migration from southern Italy towards the more industrialized northern regions engendered a degree of diffidence across the Italian social strata. A successive wave of immigration by extracomunitari (non-EU immigrants; the word has strong undertones of rejection)Alexander p.57. from the late 1980s, gave rise to political movements, such as the Lega Nord, hostile to both the so-called terroni (an Italian slur against southern Italians) and clandestini (illegal immigrants: this word also has a strongly negative connotation of secrecy and criminal behavior) from outside of Western Europe and the areas south of the Mediterranean.
In 2011, a report by Human Rights Watch pointed to growing indications of a rise in xenophobia within the Italian society.Melissa Coburn, Race and Narrative in Italian Women's Writing Since Unification, Fairleigh Dickinson, 2013, p. 11.Judith Sunderland, L'intolleranza quotidiana La violenza razzista e xenofoba in Italia, 21 March 12011 A 2017 Pew Research Center survey indicated Italy as the most racist country in western Europe. A 2019 survey by Sgw revealed that 55% of the Italian interviewees justified the perpetration of racist acts. On the occasion of a European Parliament resolution to condemn structural racism and racially motivated violence in 2020, around half of the Italian members voted against it. According to a 2020 YouGov opinion polling, the Italian interviewees claimed that the second most common cause of discrimination practiced in the country lie with racist prejudices. A 2020 Eurispes report revealed that 15.6% of Italians contend that the Holocaust never happened, and that 23.9% of the population adhere to the antisemitic conspiracy theories which claim that Jews control their economy. In April 2020 Nadeesha Uyangoda established the podcast Sulla razza (About Race), which focuses on racism, in particular translating and explaining the vocabulary used in Anglo-American contexts to discuss race. This language gap is something that Uyangoda felt was holding back racial discourse in Italy.
History
Classical period
The term barbarian, derived from Ancient Greek, referred to aggressive, brutal, cruel, and warlike tribes or individuals. In ancient Rome, the Romans adapted and applied the term barbarian to non-Roman tribes such as the Germans, Celts, Iberians, Helvetii, Thracians, Illyrians, and Sarmatians. Later, with the inclusion of new territories, the previously barbarian populations became citizens of Rome. This happened first during the Roman Republic with the Italic tribes annexed and then gradually over the centuries throughout the Mediterranean and part of Northern Europe and forming the Roman Empire. The term barbarian still has a negative and derogatory meaning in contemporary Italy.
Ethnic stereotypes among the Romans included the belief that Asiatic Greeks, Jews, and Syrians were by nature more susceptible to living as slaves. Asia Minor was such an important source of slaves that the typical slave was stereotyped as a Cappadocian or Phrygian. In practice, Jews were "both slaves and slaveholders. They were the slaves of Jews and non-Jews and owned both Jewish and non-Jewish slaves" throughout the Classical period. Other perceived traits against Syrians and other Asiatic people included greed, gluttony, effeminacy, homosexuality, libertinism, and a tendency towards luxurious lifestyles and perverse cults. These qualities directly contrasted with the Roman ideal of robust and strong masculinity. The Romans firmly believed that interaction with these groups would pervert and corrupt their manly nature, while the Syrians would remain unchanged.
When the Vandals, a barbarian tribe, conquered Rome in 455, the term vandalic took on the derogatory meaning it still has today, due to the extreme devastation, massacres and thefts committed in Rome. In Roman Italy there was no concept of racism in the modern sense; there was discrimination between Roman citizens and barbarians, between pagans and christians, between free Roman citizens and slaves, which led to conflicts, wars and massacres.
Middle Ages In medieval Italy, slavery was widespread, but was justified more often on religious rather than racial grounds. Over the course of the early medieval period, however, Steven Epstein states that people "from regions like the Balkans, Sardinia, and across the Alps" were brought over to the peninsula by Italian merchants, who thus "replenished the stock of slaves". Still, almost all the slaves in Genoa belonged to non-European races; the situation was different in Venice and Palermo, where emancipated slaves were considered free citizens in the 13th century.
19th and 20th centuries
Lombroso and scientific racism in Italy
Although there was already a wealth of Italian works engaging in racially motivated research on some groups, such as those pertaining to the "Oriental" character of ethnic Sardinians living under Savoyard rule,The Abruzzese novelist Domenico Ciampoli, while reporting on a royal visit to Sardinia in 1899 for the prestigious newspaper L'Illustrazione Italiana, so writes with regard to the local Sardinian peasantry: «Indeed, together and in each group, something about them reminds one of oriental religions, of remote races, of primitive paintings, and they seem like ritual symbols or allusions.» (L'Illustrazione Italiana, April 30, 1899, 286). The mainland painter Carlo Mazza, commenting on the sketches by the Sardinian artist Filippo Figari, gave vent to his disgust for «those niggers of Sardinia, who are hell bent on making their town hall a glorification of the Sardinian mastrucca and folk dance at any cost... As if their intellectual sphere could not expand beyond their memories of slavery, servitude, and Bedouin display of jubilation.» (Costumi : storia, linguaggio e prospettive del vestire in Sardegna, Ilisso, Nuoro, 2003, p.350). The Sardinian traditional garment, identified as an element of "Sardinian otherness" amongst the Italian circles, popular and educated alike, would be appropriated by the island's bourgeoisie in an effort to stress an identity of their own by way of showing the political and cultural ferments that had been then traversing the island (ibidem). or their supposedly malevolent and "degenerated" nature,Sources describe how the island of Sardinia was continually « esposta agli insulti e ai motteggi dei piemontesi [...] molti dei piemontesi lanciavano di continuo contro i sardi dei tratti satirici, e ne parlavano con disprezzo anche in pubblico, tacciandoli di stolidezza e ignoranza, ormai passata in proverbio [...] dileggiamenti e canzoni, con cui i piemontesi con maggiore ardire e sfrontatezza insultavano alla nazione sarda » (Acta Curiarum Regni Sardiniae, Consiglio Regionale della Sardegna, Cagliari, 2000, 24, II, 119/6, p.1083, 1086Dehumanizing language with regard to the island and the people thereof in Italian literature is considered to have been used starting with Dante Alighieri's De Vulgari Eloquentia, wherein the Sardinians are likened to «apes that imitate humans» (Lib. I, XI, 7) because of the language they used to speak. Moreover, in ancient Italian, the name of the island was also used as a metonymy to indicate a place where to dump dead or infected animals (Battaglia, Salvatore (1961). Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, UTET, Torino, V. XVII, p.578; ). This anthropological view of the island also makes its appearance in many Savoyard works which aimed at dealing with the situation of the island; the philosopher and administrator of the Kingdom of Sardinia Joseph de Maistre, for instance, refers to the Sardinians as a race «unreceptive like no other to all the sentiments, tastes, and talents honouring humankind. The Sardinian is more savage than the savage, for the savage does not know any light whilst the Sardinian hates it. They are in fact lacking in the most desirable attribute of mankind, which is perfectibility.» (Oeuvres complètes, v. IX, pp. 410-411). Cfr. . It would not be until the First World War that the otherwise "primitive nature" of the Sardinian was positively celebrated on the battlefields in terms of their patriotic redemption for the mother country (see, f.e., M. Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1989, pp. 398–404). scientific racism as a proper discipline began to impose itself at the national level only through the works of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, himself a Jew. Lombroso's theory of atavism compared the "white civilization" among the other races with the "primitive" or "savage" societies.
Lombroso would publish his thesis in the wake of the Italian unification, thus providing an explanation for the unrest developing immediately thereafter in the recently annexed portion of the new country; the people inhabiting the formerly Bourbon Kingdom were in fact racially stereotyped, thereby fostering feelings of northern Italian supremacy over the southeners, while being paradoxically integrated in the nation's broad collective imaginary; as the southeners were collectively constructed for the first time as an "anti-nation" within the new country,John Foot, Modern Italy, Rev. ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p.21 they were deemed "atavistic" alongside criminals and prostitutes.Ruth Ben-Ghiat Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945, University of California Press, 2001, p. 262 n.97.
Lombroso's theories connecting physiognomy to criminal behavior explicitly blamed higher homicide rates in Calabria, Sicily, and once again the overseas Savoyard dominion of Sardinia, upon some residual influence of "Negroid" and "Mongoloid" blood amongst their populations. According to Lombroso, facial features such as black hair, slight beard, bigger lips and longer nose were signs of such foreign "contamination" and directly correlated with a natural predisposition to delinquency.