For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a powerful essay by Italian-Rwandan author Marilena Delli Umuhoza, translated from the Italian by Monica Martinelli. A moment of casual racism in her daughter’s school play inspires the narrator to reflect on her own memories of bigotry as an African-origin woman growing up in 1990’s and 2000’s Italy. She traces how racial prejudice is passed down through children’s books, advertising, TV shows, and teachers; Black men and women depicted as criminals or sex objects, always, in some way, dirty. These tropes spill into modern immigration debates, where refugees are stripped of dignity, their suffering sensationalized: “And so there they were, those bodies, taking over my entire television screen without any respect for people in their most vulnerable moment: dead, naked, washed up on Italian shores.” Against this erasure, Delli Umuhoza insists on the significance of writing, of inscribing the truth of Black lives into history. Childhood racism leaves deep scars precisely because it is so pure; children, innocent yet perceptive, directly reflect the biases of society. Blending incisive cultural analysis with raw emotion, the essay makes clear why antiracist education must begin early.
A letter from an African-Italian mother
Last week I attended a musical at my daughter’s school. The show they put on was Around the World in Eighty Days, inspired by the movie recounting the adventures of Phileas Fogg.
After visiting European countries like France and Spain, welcomed by songs of joy and rather coquettish dancers, our hero comes to Africa. Welcoming him there is a person whose foolish way of speaking reminds me of the Italian dubbing actors in the film Gone with the Wind, with their mispronounced monosyllables in a typical “African” accent. I dug my nails into the fabric of my seat’s armrest, as I always do when I am nervous.
The journey continues toward the heart of Africa, where Fogg is chased by a group of Africans for unclear reasons (the acoustics were terrible and the representation pretty confusing). I thought to myself, I’m so glad they cut it. I was thinking of a scene that I had reported to the teacher six months earlier, after my daughter had come home in tears and asked me: “Mom, does grandma eat people?”
“Baby,” I replied, “what are you talking about? Of course not.”
“So why do they make us play African cannibals who eat Fogg at school?”
“What do you mean?”
“In the scene where he gets to Africa, we have to say, ‘Mmmm … It smells so tasty! What do you say, shall we cook him?’”
I was speechless.
“Then we have to hunt him down with pitchforks and put him in the cauldron.”
My heart skipped a beat as my mind went back to my school days, in first grade, thirty years earlier. The children on the school bus singing racist songs with the n word at me, me covering my ears and drawing the letters of the alphabet on the fogged-over window.
“Mom, is grandma a cannibal?”
My daughter’s cry, and her shiny eyes, so similar to mine in shape but black like her grandmother’s, brought me back to the here and now.
“No, sweetie, your grandmother doesn’t want anything to do with dairy, even, let alone humans!” She smiled.
That evening I told my daughter that sometimes even teachers can make mistakes.
I reminded her of the beauty of Africa, the marvelous culture and wonderful history of Rwanda, her grandmother’s country, and explained to her that stories like the ones about cannibalism are far from being true, fueled by prejudice against Black people. I told her that black is a beautiful color, with a thousand nuances, all of them mesmerizing—from the darkest ones, like her grandmother’s skin, to the lighter, like mine and hers.
It was not until weeks later, after several email exchanges with the organizer of the musical, mediated by other teachers, who seemed to be willing to help, that I finally managed to resolve the issue. This was not without resistance on her end, and she even refused to meet me in person. The stereotypes embedded in the musical, which she defined as “cultural” and therefore acceptable, were in reality racial stereotypes, explicitly offensive and aimed at humiliating specific categories of people. Beginning with Africa, the journey would continue to China (where Chinese culture was defined as “bizarre,” a quality that children would signal by making a circling motion of their index fingers close to their temples in the typical Italian gesture) and ended in North America (where, instead of words, gestures and grunts such as “how!” were used to describe the encounter with warlike “Indians”).
Still existing in 2023, such narratives about racialized people are but one kind of example of the contemporary legacies of historic colonialism permeating our schools even today. Some time earlier, a teacher had proposed a coloring activity to the children. The goal was to color in the boxes on the assigned printout according to the emotions described above. My daughter had to color the square associated with the emotion of terror black. Black is her favorite color. When she got back home, I explained to her that there is a strong prejudice against this color, which is inherently beautiful, but which has been covered with negative meanings by society and history. Luckily, she understood, and black remained among her favorite colors. But it was not the first time I’d found myself giving her this speech.
One day, out of the blue, a little girl who used to play with her stopped doing so. When my daughter asked her why, she replied, “Because your mom is brown.”
It was in kindergarten, and from that period I remember the worksheets the teacher would hand out in class: the children had to color various characters, including a princess with a crown, a cowboy with a lasso, and an “African” with a loin cloth, a shield, and a spear (the caption below would give him a stereotypical name, something like “Sambo”).
Even teachers with the best intentions may fall into stereotyping at times, like when they come up with the idea of decorating notebooks by doodling little triangular faces with two squinted eyes, a hat also shaped like a triangle, a braid with a bow at the end, all colored yellow, just so as to make it absolutely clear that the character represented is Chinese.
When it comes to racist stereotypes in schoolbooks, we cannot forget the textbook for second graders published by the Raffaello Editorial Group under the title Le avventure di Leo (Leo’s Adventures’), which became one of the most striking cases of its kind in 2020. In one of the very first pages—where children were shown making New Year’s resolutions—the only Black child would say, “Me wants learn Italian good.” As if Black students were unable to speak Italian, those who were actually in the process of learning it only mastering a blatantly caricatured language.
In the same year, another schoolbook was discussed on social media, Rossofuoco (Fire-red), by the publishing house Ardea. This book was an extract from a text from 1996, reprinted by Giunti and recently re-proposed by Ardea for the first three grades of primary school. It narrated the encounter between a White boy and a Black girl. “Are you dirty or are you completely black?” he would ask her. The little girl wouldn’t say a word but would instead somersault and then run away with a smile. As if to say: I don’t know how to talk but there’s no need anyway and I will do somersaults to entertain you and entice you with my flexible body (the smile confirming that no, I won’t be offended if you call me dirty, and you’re so cute). In March 2021, another similar case was reported in a Giunti book, Leggermente Plus (Lightly Plus). While creating a list for himself, a child would describe the things he liked about his Asian classmate Lee (whose spelling is already a blunder, since it should be Li): “She says ‘flied lice, peppeloni’ and also ‘hully up’; she never gets offended when we make fun of her.”
In this case the stereotype of Chinese people confusing their L’s and their R’s is perpetuated. However, the scene hits rock bottom when the act of bullying is made explicit and legitimized through the mocking of the little girl. This is unacceptable, especially in an elementary school.
The importance of talking about race from an early age
According to an American study published by the Children’s Community School of Philadelphia under the title “They’re Not Too Young to Talk About Race” (2018), children start noticing race at a very young age. Race should not be understood in biological terms (humans share a common genetic pool, and talking about races in this sense would mean talking about as many categories as there are individuals), but as a social construct, which takes on an enormous weight and affects every aspect of our lives. In fact, race affects whether we survive birth, where we live, the schools we attend, the friends and partners we have, our careers and income, our health, and even our life expectancies.
According to the Children’s Community School’s study, newborns look equally at faces of all races at birth. At three months, babies focus more on faces whose color matches that of their parents/caregivers. By the time they are two years old, children use race to analyze people’s behavior. At thirty months, they use it to choose their playmates. The first expressions of racial prejudice often emerge between the ages of four and five. By five, Black and Latinx children show no preferences in their playmates; White children, on the other hand, appear to be more strongly biased compared to non-White children. Between the ages of five and six, children already show the same racial preconceptions that adults hold, and have already learned to value one group over another. However, this study shows that explicit conversations about interracial friendships with five- to seven-year-olds can completely dismantle any racial prejudice in as little as a single week.
Sometimes adults think that talking about race will fuel prejudices among children, but the opposite is true. Silence about race reinforces racism, because it leaves children alone with their thinking, having to draw their own conclusions based on what they see or hear, without any adult talking to them about it. Not only that: the silence on race leaves out the experiences of racialized people who experience racism firsthand in multiple forms, from microaggressions to institutional racism. Not to mention how silence has literally rewritten the history of this country, particularly from colonialism to today. This is why teachers and families must not be afraid to address the topic: their role is crucial in encouraging boys and girls of all ages to develop a positive attitude toward the topics of race and pluralism, as well as in providing the tools to enhance diversity and promote greater empathy toward others.
Colonial stereotypes
I am a writer and have written three books inspired by the story of a Black Italian diasporic family (creating the first family saga of its kind), plus several articles on inclusion published by Vanity Fair. The reason I write is to give visibility to people like me: racialized women and men who were born or raised in Italy, but who have never seen themselves represented in a textbook.
I was born in the 1980s and attended Italian school and college until the end of the first decade of the 2000s. As a child, I would read stories with all-White characters at school; if black elements did appear, they were evil witches, their evil helpers, the dark and scary forests, the dens from which poachers and monstrous creatures would be lurking, the people dressed in mourning, and the filth of those characters who didn’t take great care of themselves. Then there was the lullaby about the Black Boogeyman who would snatch you, or the nursery rhyme about black sheep who were considered unlucky, Baa, baa, black sheep, Have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, Three bags full. Not to mention black cats and woe betide those whose paths they crossed.
On television, Black men never played any important roles: always the sidekicks, never the main characters, always the first ones to die in horror films. They almost always played the role of the jester, the servant with the broken accent, the runaway slave or the criminals pinned down by the cops. Black women, on the other hand, the ones I could see myself in, were usually prostitutes, lovers, or caregivers.
Immigration was narrated by the Italian media according to the paradigm of either criminality or hopelessness, enhancing the dehumanization of Black bodies, which thus ended up at the mercy of public, political, and media debate. A real “pillage,” to use an expression that is dear to Ta-Nehisi Coates. And so there they were, those bodies, taking over my entire television screen without any respect for people in their most vulnerable moment: dead, naked, washed up on Italian shores.
It was all this that urged me to write, and I believe it is what urged many other women of African descent too, from Igiaba Scego to Oiza Queens Day Obasuyi: we write to offer a counternarrative and to restore the dignity of those bodies that have long been made invisible and objectified.
It was not easy for me, because I grew up reading schoolbooks written by male, White, and cisgender authors, and for a long time I thought what they thought too. It took decades to deconstruct the White patriarchal thought that was so stuck in my head and to finally begin to think only with my own brain. Before then, I had hated my color, hated myself and would have done anything I could to annihilate myself: I went from using products to straighten my curls to following unhealthy diets to get my curves to wither, since they were responsible for the unwavering White male stare, due to the prejudice according to which Black girl equals easy girl.
Being a woman of African descent in Italy means dealing not only with sexism (like any other woman), but also with systemic racism and the colonial legacy still permeating our culture. The imagination of today’s Italy is populated by stereotypes of colonial origin that tend to hypersexualize and fetishize the Black female body.
Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa was born toward the end of the nineteenth century and was fueled by incessant propaganda to entice the average Italian to fight, making use of racist images and narratives. Cartoonists like Enrico De Seta would depict Abyssinian women as naked, attractive, and available, just as exotic and wild as Africa was, ready to be conquered at once.
In 1908, the Corriere dei Piccoli (Courier of the Little Ones) published “Bilbolbul,” the first comic strip made in Italy, drawn by Attilio Mussino. A clear example of blackface, the comic showed the adventures of a little African boy as the stereotypical, easy-to-tame colonial subject, and contributed to accustoming Italian children to considering themselves as a civilizing “race.” In fact, the magazine showcased many of the stereotypes that fill up the collective consciousness of today’s Italians.
Colonialism was also the period of forced apartheid, of educational age limits imposed on African children, of the illegal use of chemical gases that claimed thousands of lives, of human zoos, and of the practice of madamato. The latter was a widespread practice in the African colonies, born from a working relationship between Italian soldiers and their live-in housekeepers. This relationship would often turn into an affair, which resulted in “unwanted” children. In Eritrea alone, over twenty thousand children born to Italians were consequently labeled as bastards, while many of their mothers ended up marginalized by both their family and society.
Fascism carried along a change, of course: Black female bodies, previously eroticized, now began to be demonized, perceived as a threat to the preservation of the “Italian Aryan race.” The Fascist magazine La difesa della razza (In Defense of Race) made an effort to spread stereotyped images and distorted information to scientifically prove the inferiority of the “Black race.”
In 1937, Benito Mussolini passed the anti-miscegenation laws to avoid race mixing, and in 1940, two years after the Manifesto della razza (Manifesto of Race), he piled on other laws to prevent “hybrids” from inheriting citizenship from their Italian fathers.
Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, those same “hybrids” were often torn from their African mothers to find themselves under the care of White Italian women, considered to be better mothers, and then interned, after the war, in religious institutes where they became the object of dehumanizing studies. In Il meticciato di guerra e altri casi (Racial hybridity during the war and other cases), Luigi Gedda conducted a study on the physical and psychological characteristics of forty-four “war mulattoes” ranging from ten to twelve years of age, with the result that “the neg*o” was deemed to be “different.”
Among former European colonial powers, only Italy did not do any sort of critical analysis of its responsibilities in the post-war period. Instead, it created the myth of Italiani, brava gente, “Italians, the good people,” focusing attention on the civilizing mission of missionaries in Africa. This narrative was accompanied by a story of the Italian resistance movement as a coalition made exclusively of White male partisans, forgetting the contribution of women, of the Roma, Sinti, and Afro-descendant communities. Italy’s influence in the Horn of Africa continued until 1960, the year in which its protectorate in Somalia was declared to be over. This declaration was dictated by the UN, despite Italy being one of the defeated nations and not yet part of the United Nations.
With the war coming to an end, all those who had lived in the colonial years, as well as those who harbored discriminatory biases toward Black people, had no trouble climbing the ladder in the media industry and becoming journalists, advertisers, directors, writers … And when television became available to the public, the steady stream of racial stereotypes got reinforced beyond measure.
These were the years of cultural whitening, unsurprisingly overly present in cleaning and hygiene ads. A case in point was an ad for the laundry detergent Ava, which featured the little black chicklet Calimero. “Would you want me if I were white?” he would ask mother hen. “Of course, baby,” she would reply. Calimero would then be whitened “thanks” to Ava detergent, thus conveying the message that being Black equaled being dirty.
In the same period, Italian cinema produced films such as La ragazza dalla pelle di luna (Sex of Their Bodies, Moon Skin and The Sinner, 1972) and Il corpo (The Body, 1974), exhibiting stark-naked Black women as their protagonists. This was consistent with both colonial exoticization and the eroticization of the Black female body. The exploitation of the latter continued in ads such as that of the soft, licorice-flavored candy Morositas, fronted by a Black model in hot pants. Even Benetton, a fashion brand well known for its watchful eye to diversity and inclusivity, made several faux pas. One of these was a campaign featuring a breastfeeding Black woman, her head severed to divert the focus solely to her bare breasts, nursing a White baby. In Italy the image did not draw any outrage, but in the United States it was received with heavy criticism, leading to its withdrawal. This was also due to the fact that, unlike Italians, Americans practiced a great deal of self-reflection on their responsibilities after slavery. And the image proposed by Benetton recalled too explicitly that of the Black slave nanny systematically exploited and abused. This campaign still exists on the Italian version of the Benetton website, showcased and celebrated as a great advertising success. More precisely, as “the quintessential photo of the season of Fabrica’s revolutionary advertising for United Colors of Benetton throughout the eighties and nineties.”
A symbolic subject stands out over a white background. The product takes a backseat. The viewer is asked to ponder what appears to be racial prejudice. In the end, the picture takes on the taboo of nudity, while tearing down the wall between marketing and society.
Launched for the Fall Winter 1989–90 Campaign, this photograph led to global controversy. The African-American community in the United States protested and obtained its withdrawal from the United States.
Several other images of those years experienced the same fate, winning prizes while being censored all over the world.
The Black female body was then stripped naked to entice viewers to eat a chocolate pudding in an ad for Coppa Malù in which swirls of whipped cream are sprayed directly on the model’s arm as she lies on the ground. The slogan reads: “Wonderful thought.”
With the recent introduction of Black Friday in Italy, the racial stereotypes in advertising campaigns have multiplied. In 2021, a mattress company thought they may as well use a medium shot of a Black man embracing a White woman, both naked, her smile up to her ears: “Smile, Black Friday has arrived. Change your mattress.”
The hypersexualization of the Black male body is also made extremely explicit in the most recent Layla Cosmetics mascara ad, launched on national Italian TV in 2022. In this ad, a White woman applies mascara to her eyelashes while a group of Black male dancers behind her dance completely naked to the beat. To the point of irritation, the chorus repeats in English: “The longer, the better.” It was only thanks to the repeated complaints of collectives such as DEI – Futuro Antirazzista (Diversity Equity Inclusion – Antiracist Future) that the company decided to abandon the campaign and apologize. Once again, it was DEI who, not long before, had started the #CambieRai campaign, a play on the name of the national TV channel “Rai,” and the word cambierai, meaning “you will change,” to urge the network to stop using blackface on the program Tale e Quale Show. The practice of painting one’s face black, blackface dates back to the days of the minstrel show, an explicitly racist form of theater performed by White actors wearing black makeup.
It is no coincidence that the notorious “Jim Crow laws,” introducing and favoring racial segregation in the United States from 1867 to 1964, were named after one of these racist characters, namely Jim Crow. After his official apology, presenter Carlo Conti had a Black person, dressed and made up entirely in white, perform on the show, only to comment: “I hope someone will have something to say about this whiteface.” He clearly demonstrated that, for him, this story was just a bummer. Moreover, the whole episode was a statement on his inability to distinguish between blackface (a practice born to foster racism and, consequently, a key element in promoting the systematic lynching of African-Americans) and whiteface (a type of theatrical performance that was never meant to be offensive or negative).
George Floyd’s death in 2020 marked a spread of racial awareness throughout Italy. Nonetheless, dehumanizing stereotypes toward the Italian racialized community continue to exist and thrive; and when recognized, as in Carlo Conti’s case, they meet with the greatest resistance from precisely those who produce them. The excuse is always the same: “We didn’t mean to.” Too bad racism has nothing to do with intentions, but with a system that privileges a category of people by granting them specific rights, resources, and power that others are denied.
That Whiteness is taken for Italianness itself represents the very beating heart of this privilege.
Translated from the Italian by Monica Martinelli
Marilena Delli Umuhoza is an Italian-Rwandan photographer, filmmaker, and author. Growing up in a highly conservative Northern Italian city with an immigrant mother, she writes about daily experiences of racism in different contexts. She is the author of four novels: Razzismo all’Italiana: Cronache di una spia mezzosangue (Racism Italian Style: Chronicles of a half-blood spy, Aracne Editrice, 2016), Negretta: Baci razzisti (Little Black Girl: Racist Kisses, Red Star Press, 2020), Pizza Mussolini (Red Star Press, 2023) and Lettera di una madre afrodiscendente alla scuola italiana (People, 2023).
Monica Martinelli is completing her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Her scholarly research focuses on an alternative literary canon that voices the experiences of Black and racialized Italian and Italophone authors in the school context. Currently she is in Graduate Literary Translation Certificate Program at the University of Connecticut.
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