Race, culture and colonial legacy in today’s Italian citizenship struggles
Italians consider themselves “brava gente” who don’t discriminate, but a colonial legacy of racism is woven into their citizenship laws
By Candice Whitney
For years, Marwa Mahmoud felt alienated from her peers. The Director of Intercultural Education at Mondinsieme in Reggio Emilia was born in Egypt but came to Italy as a child with her parents. All throughout her childhood and adolescence, she felt Italian, but she knew that was neither perceived nor legally recognized as Italian like her classmates.
Today, more than 800,000 new generation Italians share a similar experience. They are children of immigrants who came from outside the European Union, and even if they are born and educated in Italy — and speak and write fluent Italian — they are not eligible to apply for citizenship until their 18th birthday. At that point they must begin an arduous and uncertain application process laid out in the Italian citizenship Act of 1992.
The entire process leaves youth who are culturally Italian in a legal and social purgatory, feeling isolated in their own country. In fact, these children face more challenges gaining citizenship than descendants of Italians living outside of Italy — who may have no connection to the country except their ancestors.
Italians consider themselves brava gente, or good people, a group of folks who do not discriminate. Many Italians would rather be colorblind and live in the complacency of collective forgotten memory of the country’s colonial past, thereby negating this period’s legacy in shaping perceptions, conversations and lived experiences of race and racism.
But Italy’s citizenship laws and practices stem directly from historically racist policies during the Italian unification and fascist colonization period.
Today, groups of young people such as G2Rete, QuestaèRoma and Italiani Senza Cittadinanza are trying to change the conversation, and advocating modification of the citizenship laws to reflect a more modern understanding of citizenship and belonging.
In particular, Italiani Senza Cittadinanza — or “Italians Without Citizenship” — is a group of new generation Italians that is leading the fight. The group organizes political and communications campaigns aimed at removing the silence about not having citizenship because of your parents’ nationality and debunking the notion that citizenship must correlate with ascribed racial criteria and blood descent, instead of cultural belonging. They recently put a proposal before the Italian Senate that would change Italy’s citizenship laws to consider shared culture instead of just bloodline.
They also created the hashtag campaign #cartolinecittadine — #citizenshippostcards — to use images and storytelling to show that they are Italian based on common experiences such as going to through the Italian school system and growing up in the country. These #citizenshippostcards are also meant to address the isolation of living without citizenship in the country you call home.
Who is a citizen under Italian law
Citizenship laws worldwide can be broadly classified as based on either jus sanguinis, which is Latin for “right of blood,” or jus soli, or “right of soil.” In countries that follow jus sanguinis, citizenship is not determined by place of birth or by cultural belonging, but by having parents who are citizens of the state. Jus soli grants citizenship to anyone born in a particular state or territory.
Many states in North and South America follow jus soli, while those in Europe, Africa and Asia are primarily jus sanguinis. Some states also incorporate a modified version of jus soli that grants some rights based on territorial presence but is not absolute.
Italy’s current citizenship law, Law No. 91/1992, follows this trend by imposing much harsher citizenship requirements on immigrants living in Italy than on people of Italian descent living in other parts of the world, who can gain citizenship without ever setting foot in the country or learning a word of Italian.
Youth born to immigrants can only apply for citizenship once they turn 18, and only if they can demonstrate they have “legally resided in the same city without interruption” for at least 10 years.
In an inverview with Sky News, student and activist Xavier Palma described the hardship this imposes on new generation Italians. Palma wanted to study in Switzerland through the European academic exchange program Erasmus, but would have needed to apply for a new stay permit in Switzerland. This would have revoked his Italian permit and interrupted the 10-year residency requirement, making it impossible to gain citizenship. Like many students, Palma had to choose between citizenship and his education.
In the meantime, Italy’s new generation youth share common experiences of people expecting them to prove their “Italianness.” Often these interactions are not intentionally hostile but are based on prejudices, such as questioning the fluency of their Italian language skills as they may not “look” Italian.
And since Italian citizenship depends so heavily on whether a person’s ancestors were Italian nationals, historically racist citizenship policies have an immediate and unavoidable consequence for today’s immigrant youth seeking citizenship.
Historical role of race in Italian identity
Throughout much of the 20th century, race and self-racialization in Italy served as political strategies to achieve various ends. Whatever the political motive, the outcome has always been to grant power to oneself to justify demeaning others. The mixing of races in Italy was either viewed as a problem, such as mixed-race children, or a resolution, such as institutionalizing racial unity. This resolution allowed Italy to view and present itself as a powerful civilization, compared to the Northern European stereotype of Italy as a darker, Southern European degenerate.
The 1909 Codice civile per la colonia Eritrea (Colonial Civil Code for the Colony of Eritrea) forbade marriages between Eritrean men and Italian women. Still, unofficial relations between Italians and Eritreans often resulted in mixed-race children. Often condemned and abandoned, children of mixed relations were frequently perceived as monsters, a contamination to racial progress.
Meanwhile, theorists and eugenists from the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Giuseppe Sergi and Cesare Lombroso, debated which racial populations comprised the Italian people. Taking some of their ideas into consideration, in the 1920s Prime Minister Benito Mussolini established a new racial identity for Italians that recalled the geographic location and the spiritual history of Rome: the “Roman Mediterranean” race. (Although later in the fascist colonial period, he began to embrace a more Nordic-Aryan concept of race, as demonstrated in the citizenship laws.)
Mussolini’s uniform racial identity became a political strategy for the nation to align itself with other Western colonizers, particularly the French, British and the Germans, and to demonstrate that the nation was as “white” and powerful as its competitors. This was necessary in part to erase negative stereotypes about southern Italians, who typically have darker skin than their northern counterparts. The uniform identity removed the notion of darkness, or blackness from within the nation’s borders, presenting it as a quality that was accessible but tamable across the Mediterranean and in the Horn of Africa.
In 1933, a new regulation justified by the Civil Code stated children of mixed-relations could be granted citizenship based on their racial features, according to how “Italian” and “Aryan” they looked. These regulations legalized a certain look — certain racial features that merited citizenship — even though populations from throughout Europe, Africa, Russia and Asia passed through the Italian peninsula at various points throughout its history.
To become internationally known as a “nicer” and more civil imperial power, compared to the French and British, Italy also granted a specific type of citizenship to Muslims in its colony of Libya.
By the end of the 1930s, however, these laws had been eradicated, and a new fascist Civil Code declared that only Italians of the Aryan race would be granted citizenship. Starting in 1938, Jews were isolated in ghettos, denied Italian citizenship rights and deported.
Unfortunately, Italian students do not learn about this history in school.
They mostly remember the colonial period as Italy’s “place in the sun,” as a way to absolve the country of its violent racial history — analogous to the idea of the “sun never setting on the British Empire.” Italians are also quick to point out that it was the Germans — not the Italians — that created concentration camps, thereby largely absolving themselves of blame for the Holocaust. Italian cultural memory consciously forgets the deportation of Jews, and the concentration camps within their colonies.
The influence of race and racism from the 1909 Colonial Civil Code for the Colony of Eritrea to the Act of 1992 demonstrate the correlation between Italian citizenship laws and imaginaries of racial features that Italians are expected to have. Refusing to acknowledge this history makes it easier to ignore a person’s color and deny that the fascist colonial period has had any political and social legacy.
Recent efforts to overcome this racist legacy
As for today’s citizenship laws, the role of race and its legacy in colonial citizenship laws demonstrate how racial qualities — and the commitment to upholding an “Italian” racial identity — determine who is and isn’t considered Italian. From dark Southern Europeans to Roman Mediterraneans to the Aryan ideal, racial ideas of “Who is Italian?” have shaped today’s current debate and political activism.
Attempts to bring jus soli to Italy have resulted in new conversations about race, often resulting in complacency surrounding supposed colorblindness.
In 2013, four members of the Partito Democratico (PD) political party —Cecile Kyenge, Khalid Chaouki, Roberto Speranza and Pier Luigi Bersani— proposed a new law titled “Disposizioni in Tema di Acquisto della Cittadinanza Italiana,” or Regulations on Acquiring Italian Citizenship. Kyenge was the Minister of Integration and Italy’s first black woman minister at the time.
Criticized as a “watered down” jus soli bill, the law aimed to grant citizenship to children born in Italy if they could prove they had resided legally in the country for up to 5 years, or that they had completed at least one year of primary, secondary or vocational school upon moving to Italy before their 10th birthday.
During discussion of the bill, journalists such as Lucia Annunziata interrogated Kyenge about her personal history and her religious beliefs to deduce how “Italian” she was. The PD has rarely come to Kyenge’s defense, leaving her to respond personally to insults such as being called a prostitute and a monkey, and having bananas thrown at her. Despite these attacks, Kyenge has identified herself as black and defended Italy as not being racist, because it allowed a black woman to become a minister in the first place.
Kyenge’s statements demonstrate how the country’s lack of acknowledgement of its history of race and its role in colonializing East Africa infiltrates contemporary experiences of racialization. Those who face discrimination are forced to claim a racial category, whereas those who commit discriminatory acts or belong to the group in power have the privilege of not identifying with any racial category and can ignore how they benefit from other people’s pain.
This became evident when in 2015, the Lega Nord, Italy’s extremist right-wing political party that campaigns for the protection of Italy from “clandestine” migrants, blocked the proposed jus soli changes to the Law of 1992.
Today, Italiani Senza Cittadinanza is the most visible political activist group directly challenging the Italian government and the nation, aiming to legalize a form of jus culturae that would base citizenship not solely on the categories of birthplace or on descent, but also on shared culture. The Senate considered the bill on June 15 and is expected to issue a decision between June 25 and June 30. The bill has been under attack from the beginning, with the Lega Nord opposing it, the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) vowing to protect Italy from “foreign forces,” and the right-wing press saying the bill would result in “Afritaly” (Afritalia).
These confrontations require the country to recognize and address the role of race in its national history, in order to take steps forward.
The population of new generation Italians in is expected to rise from 9.75 to 20.27% by 2029, according to the Association of Italian Cities. Conversations regarding race, racism and colorblindness are, by necessity, slowly becoming less taboo. The country’s colonial history and post-colonial effects cannot be forgotten or negated from collective memory simply because Italy was not Nazi Germany or imperialist Great Britain.
To pressure the Senate to release its decision by the end of June, activists are planning to rally at the Pantheon in Rome on June 25 in support of the bill. There will be solidarity demonstrations in other major Italian cities as well.
Until then, online petitions and hashtag campaigns such as #cartolinecittadine remind folks that Italians without citizenship need it now, and encourage discussion and reflection as to how race and racialization shape collective understandings of political belonging.
Candice Whitney is a Fulbright researcher in Italy whose work focuses on how the historical and political processes that shape Italy’s contemporary relationship with African countries impact the promotion of products and business relations amongst African women entrepreneurs in Italy. She holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in Anthropology and Italian.
Camilla Hawthorne contributed to this report.
