Exactly a year ago, I wrote an article entitled ‘The only Black person in the room’. Yes, Black. We don’t have an Italian word for brown – well, we do, it’s marrone, but you don’t say a person is marrone. Here in Italy, non-white people are either Black or coloured. This article was mainly about my own experience of living, working and talking in rooms full of white people.
As a journalist, I had been writing about Italians of immigrant parents (so-called ‘second generations’), identity and migration for some time by then, but that piece was a turning point for me. I think it was the first article ever to describe flat-out racism in Italian society: it wasn’t just people dropping the n-word, assaulting people or saying that migrants should die in the Mediterranean. It wasn’t just a racism you could see, it was a racism you could feel.
I’ve experienced it myself in rooms full of Italian intellectuals where I was the only person of colour; when I was asked to comment on the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter terror attacks on a national television channel, but they had no make-up that matched my skin; when I went home one night and switched on the TV, and realised there weren’t any characters that looked like me.
