During a recent family trip to Italy, I was struck by the pervasive racial dynamics that govern global tourism, a phenomenon Sri Lankan writer Indi Samarajiva aptly describes as “the unbearable whiteness of tourism.” Our voyage moved from southern France through Monaco before landing in the Italian coastal city of Genoa. Italy is one of the European countries where racial profiling and stereotyping tend to be prevalent due to the large number of Africans and others who enter the country illegally each year.
Not that racism is a new phenomenon that illegal migrants have triggered, Italy is Benito Mussolini’s birth country. Mussolini’s regime launched an unprovoked attack on Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935, causing a significant international uproar as it tested the ‘civilised’ international community’s willingness to recognise an ethnically Black nation on par with predominantly white states. This recognition was historically denied to countries like Haiti, Turkey and China. Nonetheless, the Italian invasion laid bare the entrenched racial hierarchies that have long characterised interactions between so-called ‘civilised nations’and ‘others’.
The current climate of illegal immigration has reignited both overt and latent fascist sentiments towards Africans, Arabs and other non-white groups throughout Europe. This trend is not confined to Italy but spans the entire European Union, where anti-migrant rhetoric has become increasingly normalised. Such attitudes are particularly ironic given Europe’s historical role in perpetuating the ‘underdevelopment’ of African nations, with policies like the European Neighbourhood Policy reinforcing these dynamics under the pretext of managing migration flows.
This article examines historical texts to uncover the racial bigotry embedded in past policies and their impact on Italians over time. It also explores how these policies inadvertently foster unnecessary competition among those at the bottom of the global racial hierarchy, aiming to situate global tourism within global whiteness as an antithesis of global anti-blackness.
• Mainstream economics view on tourism and entrenchment of whiteness
Many countries in the Global South streamline their public policies, particularly migration, fiscus and general regulation, to accommodate foreign tourists (primarily white Europeans, Americans and other Westerners) and all the problems they create. Also, locals are primed to accept this “colonialism with tips” without questioning because it supposedly brings foreign currency and boosts local development.
Governments in developing countries bend backwards to make travel easy for white tourists but fail to do the same for each other’s citizens. However, the Global North has slowly and gradually closed the net on the movement of Africans over time. Ireland’s decision to impose visa restrictions on nationals of Botswana and South Africa is not taking place without context. It is part of a growing trend informed by the anti-migration sentiment in Europe and the US. Developed countries coordinate their policies to exclude and indoctrinate their citizens to see a dark-skinned foreigner as a “problem”.
Neo-liberal viewpoints have generally overlooked the concerns of locals in the Western Cape and other regions about the negative impacts of tourism, particularly on their daily lives. The booming Airbnb industry contributes to racialised gentrification in Cape Town, a trend that parties like the DA tend to ignore in their pursuit of US dollars. However, these attitudes may shift following Barcelona’s recent crackdown on Airbnb due to its impact on short-term rentals, which restrict local housing supply and drive up prices. Barcelona and other European cities plan to ban tourist apartment rentals to reduce housing costs.
Samarajiva contends that despite being termed the hospitality industry, tourism frequently fails to embody genuine hospitality. True hospitality is characterised by mutual acceptance—one is welcome in another’s space and welcoming them in one’s own. However, tourism often falls short of this standard. While white individuals are generally accepted around the world, people of colour frequently face scrutiny and must justify their presence.
Visiting tourist spots like the beach in Genoa can also feel alienating, with stares that convey a mix of anti-migrant and anti-Black sentiment. Racism in Italy intertwines the image of inflatable boats carrying migrants across the Mediterranean to Europe. This experience offers a glimpse into the cold reception migrants face in places that are intent on preserving notions of white purity, Christian bigotry, and a ‘civilised’ status.
• Forgetful Italy’s amnesia as ‘other’ in a white world
The concept of race as we understand it today is a relatively recent social construct, primarily developed in the context of European colonialism and the enslavement of Africans. While Italians, particularly those from Southern Italy (Sicilians), faced discrimination and prejudice within Europe, this was often based on socioeconomic status and their dark skin.
Consequently, they were generally considered ‘uncivilised’ and racially inferior people, too obviously African to be part of Europe. In recent times, controversial former Italian PMSilvio Berlusconi once demanded that southern Italians return to Africa. Notably, this information has been removed from internet searches to save the face of impeccable Europeanness.
Italy’s social meltdown, which was framed as a war on drug lords in Sicily and southern cities, was directly linked to the socioeconomic status of Southerners and their ‘race’. The criminal syndicate known as the Mafia played a defining role in the Sicilian economy and politics since its inception in the mid-19th century. It was proffered as one of the prime reasons why Sicily has lagged behind the rest of Italy in economic and social development. Unfortunately, this aligns with the Western logic of treating victims of their violence with contempt and disdain.
A 2018 study by academics Giuseppe De Feo, Giacomo De Luca, and Daron Acemoglu reached a long conclusion by apportioning blame on Italians. However, the truth is that southern Italy’s socioeconomic problems did not begin with the mafia but predated this organisation, as evidenced by the mass exodus of southern Italians to the Americas in search of a better life.
This development meant that darker-skinned southern Italians “endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic.” In the early days of the US and Argentina, they were regarded as part of ‘whiteness of a different colour’. Since race is a social construct with soft edges, the status of Italians has generally changed from being associated with blacks into being recognised as eminent members of whiteness.
• Rogue dark-skinned Italian immigrants in racist United States
The New York Times writes, “The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialised pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.” Much like other formerly discriminated groups, such as the Irish and Basques, their attitudes towards blacks have also hardened in the anti-black world.
Historian and author of Are Italians White? Jennifer Guglielmo writes that early Italian migrants to the US were met with a barrage of books, magazines, and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” The media portrayed them as “swarthy,” “kinky-haired” members of a criminal race, and the streets echoed with derogatory terms suchas “white nigger” and “guinea” (a term originally used against enslaved Africans and their descendants).
The story that is least told concerns how Italians were also subjected to the violence of marauding and lynching mobs in the southern states like Black Americans. The lynchings of Italians occurred during a period when Southern newspapers had adopted the gruesome practice of publicising the numerous lynchings of African Americans in advance to draw large crowds. These papers justified the violence by depicting the victims as ‘brutes’, ‘fiends’, ‘ravishers’, ‘born criminals’ or ‘troublesome Negroes’.
In the main, Italian Americans largely descend from Southern Italians, who typically have olive skin and darker hair compared to Central and Northern Italians. Conversely, in Brazil—home to the largest Italian-descendant population outside of Italy—mostItalian immigrants came from the northeastern region of Veneto. This led to them being colloquially referred to as polacos in Portuguese, a term generally used for anyone white, though it literally means “Poles”. Today, Brazil has the largest number of people of Italian descent outside Italy, followed by Argentina.
• ‘Wrong’ Europeans docked on the Argentinian coast
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Argentina’s liberal elite implemented an immigration and colonisation policy designed to address the country’s underpopulation by ‘improving’its racial composition, boosting its economy and integrating into the competitive global market. Juan Bautista Alberdi’sslogan: gobernar es poblar (to govern is to populate), highlighted the political and economic motivations behind the push for Europeanising Argentina.
As such, immigration was seen as the cure-all for progress, with selectivity being crucial. Alberdi argued that by promoting the immigration of Europeans, preferably from Nordic “races”, it would be possible to “implant” a desired affinity for “English liberty, French culture, North American and European values.” Article 25 of the Argentine Constitution of 1853 states, “The Federal Government will promote European immigration.”However, large numbers of ‘wrong’ Europeans, especially southern Italians and Spaniards, scuppered this policy.
While the sheer numbers suggested that the pro-European immigration plan had succeeded, most immigrants were manual labourers fleeing economically depressed areas in Europe rather than the ‘Nordic’ ideal envisioned by Argentine intellectuals. These Italians were perceived as having no significant improvement over the existing population due to their “low cultural level.” The elite viewed this as a betrayal: immigration had led to an influx of street vendors, and the country had been Europeanized, but without meeting the elite’s conception of ‘civilisation’.
Over time, Italians have become an integral part of a dubious Argentine slogan that claims, “Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, Peruvians from the Incas – but Argentinians descend from the ships,” thereby denying the country’s mixed heritage. Researchers Alí Delgado and Patricia Gomes challenge this Eurocentric assertion, arguing that Argentina’s mythical self-image as a white nation needs to be dismantled. They assert that “Argentina needs to understand that it is both very racist and very Afro,” noting that nearly half as many enslaved people arrived in the Río de la Plata region as in the US.
Parting shot: Tourism promotes violence all over the world
The conceptualisation of Europeanisation as “violence” stresseshow racialised modernities in the Global South have been shaped by the imposition of European cultural norms and values, resulting in the marginalisation and oppression of indigenous and non-European communities. However, this violence also impacted and continues to impact other sub-Europeans while simultaneously influencing “claims to proper whiteness” as a marker of Europeanness.
Tourism serves as a vehicle for the continuation of Europeanisation’s violent legacy and violates ‘others’ who do not fit its parameters. Africans and other dark-skinned peoples of the world are excluded from the much-vaunted globalisation and its benefits, which are exclusively reserved for the eminent race. European governments are behind these entrenched attitudes and othering.
Siya yi banga le economy!
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Jaywalking Series © – Siyabonga Hadebe
The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jambo Africa Online or Brandhill Africa, the publisher of this news portal.