The Italian shop assistant accused by Oprah Winfrey of showing racial prejudice towards her in a shop in Zurich has hotly denied the charge, but with a curious twist. ‘I am Italian,’ she said in an interview with a Swiss magazine. ‘Why should I discriminate against anybody because of their origin?’ She seemed to be suggesting that no Italian could ever possibly harbour any racial prejudice against anyone. It is a claim that seems especially implausible at the moment when Italy’s first-ever black cabinet minister, the Congolese-born doctor Cecile Kyenge, has been reeling from a number of crude racist attacks.
Kyenge, Italy’s recently appointed Integration Minister, has been pelted with bananas and subjected to death threats. She has also been described by a right-wing senator, Roberto Calderoli, as looking like an orangutan; while another member of Calderoli’s party, the anti-immigration Northern League, has been expelled from it for saying that Kyenge ought to be raped so that she might ‘understand what it felt like to be the victim of such an atrocious crime’ (a crime, it is implied, that is a speciality of Africans).
If nothing else, the coarseness of these comments shows how aloof Italy is from the consensus in most developed countries, even among racist groups, about the need for restraint and good manners in discussing race.
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