Of Sebastiano Caputo

Source: The dissident intellectual
Italy is Mediterranean, hospital, genuine. E’ a non-model of integration inherent to our history that should not be intellectualized by the new clerics of anti-sovereignism.
A stunt by some kids in the Turin night club that targeted several women including Daisy Osuake, Italian athlete of African origin, it has turned into the tip of the iceberg of an alleged racial hatred that is devouring the country. For now the Carabinieri are excluding the xenophobic motive and yet the political recovery is already underway to hit the yellow-green government, considered an accomplice and instigator of this artificial reconstruction of the facts.
Racism that translates into concrete actions exists, but it is in the heads and deeds of the pischables, which are very few in Italy, and they certainly do not represent the deep soul of our people. Real racism doesn't belong to us. By history, culture, geography. We Italians are Mediterranean, simple people, hospitable, our way, towards all foreigners, that we have never loved nor despised, but respected on the basis of common decency, those unwritten rules of coexistence that characterized a land of passage, an extraordinary crossroads of peoples, clans and tribes. That news story on Isola Capo Rizzuto which saw Calabrian swimmers rescued 56 migrants on the beach, perfectly expresses the spirit described above. Moreover, also at the basis of the electoral growth of the League and the Movement 5 Stars there is no immigration emergency (or even the "ethnic replacement" feared by some) but the fear of further impoverishment of the middle class, the so-called losers of globalization.
Yet the political agenda pursues migratory flows together with the problem of unemployment (real priority of the country). That's the risk, as they did in the United States, in France and England, to delegate the issue of integration to intellectuals - who are all very white, after all, and it is no coincidence that none of them are children of immigrants - and therefore to the associations, to newspapers and institutions, instead of leaving the road to self-manage and self-regulate. Italian style.
Because it is the culture of anti-racism in the absence of racism that has created the ghettos in these countries in recent decades, the suburbs, gli slums monoethnic, delineating urban and non-urban boundaries, of potential social conflict, than as a counterpart, in the other barricade, it is fueled by a narrative about the danger of invasion in the absence of invasion. Italy is a place of arrival but in most cases - and the numbers say it - it is almost never a place of settlement. Yet it risks becoming so if Europe continues to pass the buck and omit the dirty play of some NGOs. Instead of chasing failed Western models (Anglo-Saxon communitarianism, the French assimilative model, the US meeting pot, ecc.) and incite the new arrivals against the Italians (and in the future Italians will consider the new arrivals as bodies foreign to society) it would be necessary to tell the so-called "regular immigrants" about Italy in its most intimate nature: Mediterranean, hospital, genuine. This is the strength of our integration system which in no way should be intellectualized by those who make anti-racism an ideological tool to unite the anti-sovereign front and at the same time point the finger at "the average Italian" on whom they have imposed massive immigration without this bringing them real economic benefits (beyond the solidarity advertisement flaunted by the "protected zones" in perfect neo-colonial style).